Maximizing Your Reading Power: Acquiring Competency Based Reading Skills

Competency based reading skills are indispensible if we are to perform according to the high standards of our profession or our academic pursuits. Whether we are employees on a mission to work our way up in the company or students who plan to be in the top ten of our academic pursuit, competency based reading skills are a necessity for moving forward with confidence.

Training

Competency based reading skills can be acquired through various educational avenues such as apprenticeship, on the job experience, training and development, as well as self-improvement programs. Training usually involves the use of visual and audio techniques along with the printed materials of your profession or area of study. The employee or student needs to know the vocabulary, word-sentence relationships, text types, structure, and content. Understanding Section headings, diagrams, and photo captions are indeed necessary in measuring reading competency.

Types

Mastering competency based reading skills involves recognizing and applying the different type’s competencies.

Prose competency-you must be able to recognize and understand written prose in order to research, interpret, and use instructions.

Document competency-you should have a good understanding of how to read and analyze documents such as maps, guidelines, menus, schedules, and brochures.

Quantitative competency-you must know how to read, understand, and compute quantitative data that is required on the job or in your major. No matter what profession you are studying mastering the above competencies is a must for excellence in  most professions.

Mastery

When you have acquired the necessary competency based reading skills to master the high standards of your profession, you are absolutely ready to excel. This means that if you are an accountant you possess a good knowledge of what it takes to be one of the best accountants. Your performance proves you worth time and time again. If you are a student majoring in chemistry, you will be able to identify and understand the formulas, theories, and diagrams to establish yourself as an excellent student of chemistry. You may even have the potential to stumble upon a great scientific discovery.

Advice

You must mentally desire to excel in competency based reading skills in order to perform adequately in your profession. Don’t expect anyone to push you forward. It all comes down to attitude.  You should be motivated and committed to being the best you can be.

Advantage

In these bad economic times we must take advantage of every opportunity.  Without competency based reading skills, many of us will always remain a few steps from the unemployment line. For this reason, we should seek to improve our reading skills to the utmost. A competent reader will more than likely have a better chance for success in his or her profession than those who don’