The Empty Three Competency Assessment

Empty three competency assessment

Introduction to the “Empty Three” competency assessment

The Empty Three is a concept for use in the assessment of competency

The Empty Three

When assessing candidates or members of staff against a standard or competency framework, it is usual for there to be four levels or sets of descriptions. These can often be described as:

No evidence
Some evidence
Meets requirements
Exceeds requirements

Origins of the Empty Three

The concept of the “Empty Three” was developed by a team of people working on a set of professional standards for TrainerBase.

Like most systems we had developed a competency assessment framework with four levels, scoring 0-3.

While writing the definitions of these factors we encountered challenges, not at the lower levels but at those that scored 3 points – 2 points was “meets the standard”.

In essence the belief was that there should be no definition statement for the highest ‘grade’. The person assessing should define their own on a case by case basis. This means that to score a person at the highest level means more than just a score. It requires the individual assessing to quantify that result in a meaningful way.

Those involved were:
Atkins, Girling, Mayes, Rouse & Morrison.

No one individual can be credited with the whole concept but is is agreed that the concept was agreed on at a meeting attempting to finalise the wording for each of the levels.

also see our article on empty four assessment