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Use your CV as a tool to illustrate your competencies and you'll really impress the recruiters.

Over 70% of UK organisations now have competency systems in place, sometimes covering just the key roles in the organisation but often embracing every job.

Broadly speaking, competencies are skills or characteristic actions used by individuals to enable them to cope successfully with a variety of situations both within and outside of work. In a nutshell, they define the skills and behaviours that are directly related to superior performance in a given role.

Alongside all the organisations that have competency systems, most professions have come up with their own set of competency standards. And not just the obvious professions like personnel, accountancy, etc. In 1999, for example, the British Standards Institution published a professional standard for nightclub bouncers.

Although the headings change from company to company and from profession to profession, the following are some of the most commonly found competency elements:

If you work or have worked in an environment that uses a competency system, you'll know that they're regularly used to support recruitment and performance monitoring, as well as training and development activity.

These days most job advertisements explicitly identify the competencies that the successful candidate will need to have. Just to take a couple of examples from the appointments section of a weekend paper, one advertisement for a Managing Director refers to the need for, amongst other things, a high level of skill in the following: team building, change management, results orientation and a 'hands on' mentality. Another job calls for someone with integrity, robustness, analytical skills and a gift for leadership.

Anybody wishing to apply for either of those jobs would need to be able to demonstrate a proven capability in these competency areas. A Personal Qualities section in your CV that simply mirrors these skill areas isn't enough. To say that you have highly developed team-building skills, for example, doesn't mean that recruiters will automatically swoon at the very thought of you coming along to interview. No, they will expect to see a piece of evidence to back up your assertion. If you can show specifically how you demonstrated team-building qualities, then you might be in with a sniff. Perhaps you might go for something along the following lines:

Instigated a series of 'Working in Harmony' workshops at a time when cross team working was virtually non-existent and morale generally low. Won the company's Team of the Year award, and the latest employee survey revealed a significant hike in morale levels.

With application forms, the challenge to provide evidence of various competencies is often made explicitly. Forms are often designed to include a series of headings like Decision Making, Leadership and Problem Solving. The applicant then has to give concrete examples of a time when they had to display effective decisionmaking skills, and so on.

Giving examples can be more difficult than you might imagine. How easy would you find it, say, to come up with an account of a time when you had to display a high level of integrity? It's not how most of us naturally file our organisational experience. Instead, we move from task to task, rarely pausing long enough to capture behavioural evidence from our work life. This becomes a real problem when we want to change jobs and we're asked to come up with lots of evidence and examples.

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