While we bring an increasing range of frameworks and technologies to measuring what people can do, we increasingly lose sight of the capabilities we are trying to grow in them, and our systems haven’t noticed. I have spent a large proportion of my working life developing measurement tools and evaluating reform initiatives in different aspects of the education system. The question I’m typically asked to assess is whether the project met its objectives – was there improvement i

Three posts this week have approached the same underlying question from different angles. The first looked at universities making bold public commitments to graduate AI-fluent professionals and asked who is actually verifying those claims. The second looked at organisations investing heavily in AI training, measuring completion rates, and calling it competency assessment and asked whether a HR platform tracking module completion has anything meaningful to say about profession

Last week. A large UK organisation. 10,000-plus workforce. They want a skills inventory and a program to close the AI fluency gap. We walk them through what rigorous assessment actually looks like. What it measures. Why it matters. And then the response - the one we hear constantly right now: "But surely our HR platform can do this? It checks who's done what course, identifies the gap, gives them a list of courses to complete. It's not exactly complicated, is it?" That's the

If competence is a spectrum, why do we work with systems that still treat it like a checkbox? Migration assessment bodies know this challenge better than most. This article extends on Dr. Peter Beven (FAITD) thoughts on “The university skilling challenge” and unpacks how we can build fair, consistent recognition systems that reflect reality. Professional competence isn’t a checkbox. It’s a Spectrum. Why the competence gap is widening – and what it means for migration assessme