Competency framework

A document that says, grade by grade and department by department, what a person at that level can be left alone with. Not a syllabus and not a list of what someone knows. A description of unsupervised capability, written by practitioners, which is why it survives contact with a set.

Its value in this course is reach rather than teaching. Screen Guilds Ireland built one covering every crew grade across eleven departments and described it to the Irish parliament as the first of its kind for the industry anywhere. It required no legislation, no state money and nobody’s permission. Screen Ireland then folded it into the skills conditions attached to the national tax credit, which turned a voluntary guild standard into a de facto condition of state funding. The guild wrote the standard first and the state adopted it second, and that order is the whole finding.

For an organiser with no budget it is the highest-yield free artefact available, and the reason it stays unwritten in most industries is that it is slow, specific and unglamorous compared with lobbying.

Source: Screen Guilds Ireland’s framework, reported to the Oireachtas and subsequently adopted into the Section 481 skills process. Documented in point 6 of the cross-case synthesis in the Film industry playbooks, Case 1 (Ireland), and carried into Part 5, point 2, of the Hope research map. The quoted description is the guild’s own.

First used in: 4.5 · What a community can do