Consultation overview
Industry Task and Finish Group on management of competence in organisations consultation on draft guidance: Managing Competence in the Built Environment: A Guide
Consultation overview
The Industry Task and Finish Group on the management of competence for organisations (ITFG) invites feedback from across the built environment Industry on its guidance document, Managing Competence in the Built Environment: a guide.
Its draft guidance seeks to support industry in the development of competence management processes across the built environment (BE). It is a consensus document that follows the principles in the recently published Industry Competence Committee (ICC) consultation document. While the ICC principles document is pitched at a higher level of ‘what’ is expected of organisations in this area, the ITFG document follows these principles and may help organisations understand in detail ‘how’ to put in place policies, procedures, and processes to meet the ICC principles.
The ITFG held its Inaugural meeting on 10th June 2025. It was pulled together after encouragement by Dame Judith Hackitt for professional bodies to do more and was focused on bringing together agreement from professional bodies across the built environment. The invitation for collaboration was extended to broader actors across the BE to ensure that the output to be delivered meets the wide-ranging needs of organisations of all sizes and purposes. More information about the terms of reference and who is contributing in the ITFG can be found here.
Why is it important for organisations to manage competences?
Competent individuals may have all the right skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, but if their organisations don’t let them do the right thing- because they don’t have enough people to meet all duties and obligations, or they ask them to carry out tasks beyond their competence, or ask them to do something that is unethical, etc., then the benefit of individual competence is compromised. While many will be familiar with the broad concept of organisational capability, both the ICC and the ITFG work is focusing on what good looks like when organisations are managing individual competence effectively – which means having the right culture, processes and resources in place to do just that- enabling individuals to be competent on an ongoing basis.
Purpose of the guidance document
This guidance document is aimed at organisations of all sizes that carry out any design or any building work (in all buildings) or manage buildings, and particularly those that manage Higher Risk Buildings (HRBs).
It builds on the high-level principles of the ICC’s guidance document – Setting Expectations for Competence Management – seeking to provide a supporting resource that is a non-statutory, consensus based working document to support industry readiness and bridge the gap between high-level principles informed by the ICC work and practical implementation.
Purpose of consultation
The ITFG wants to make sure that the guidance meets its purpose as a supporting resource to organisations of all sizes and is a useful tool to support organisations so they can manage competence effectively.
Following the consultation, the ITFG will continue to engage with the ICC to put out a complementary resource which provide practical help and tools to industry to manage competence in their organisations.
The consultation closes on Monday 10th November, 12 noon. The survey takes on average 8 minutes to fill out.
Links
Click here to start survey
GDPR
The Survey is supported by APS as one of the organisations supporting the development of this guidance. Please visit the APS privacy policy here. The survey is anonymous - we are not collecting sensitive/personal data for this survey.