Eight sub-competencies
Pondara measures capability along eight action-grounded dimensions. Every engagement contributes evidence to the dimensions a scenario exercises — never to all eight equally — and the learner’s profile is the running aggregate of those contributions.
The eight dimensions
| # | Name (EN) | Name (DE) | Name (ES) | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Domain knowledge | Fachwissen | Conocimiento del campo | Declarative knowledge of facts, concepts, standards, and procedures specific to the field. |
| 2 | Procedural skill | Verfahrenskompetenz | Habilidad procedimental | Practised execution of techniques and procedures — the doing, not the knowing. |
| 3 | Situational awareness | Situationswahrnehmung | Conciencia situacional | Reading the context: noticing what matters, what changed, what is missing or unsaid. |
| 4 | Decision-making | Entscheidungskompetenz | Toma de decisiones | Choosing among alternatives under uncertainty, time pressure, or competing values. |
| 5 | Communication | Kommunikationskompetenz | Comunicación | Calibrated verbal and non-verbal interaction with the relevant interlocutor. |
| 6 | Self-regulation | Selbstregulation | Autorregulación | Managing attention, emotion, and energy under stress and across time. |
| 7 | Reflection | Reflexionskompetenz | Reflexión | Metacognition: extracting lessons from action, articulating reasoning, identifying one’s own gaps. |
| 8 | Collaboration | Kollaborationskompetenz | Colaboración | Coordinating with peers, supervisors, and AI assistants in shared workflows. |
How they map to existing models
The eight cover the three foundational disciplines named in the whitepaper:
- Cognitive science — dimensions 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 (knowledge representation, procedural memory, situated cognition, decision theory, metacognition).
- Memory research — dimensions 1 (declarative / long-lasting), 2 (procedural memory), 7 (metamemory).
- Personality psychology — dimensions 5, 6, 8 (communication style, self-regulation as a Big-Five-derived construct, prosocial coordination).
They map to the KMK Handlungskompetenz taxonomy without an orphan:
| KMK macro | Covered by |
|---|---|
| Fachkompetenz (technical) | 1, 2 |
| Methodenkompetenz (method) | 3, 4, 7 |
| Sozialkompetenz (social) | 5, 8 |
| Selbstkompetenz (self) | 6, 7 |
Reflection (7) deliberately spans Methoden- and Selbstkompetenz — it is the bridge that makes situated learning work.
Dreyfus bands
Internally each dimension is a number 0–100. For display we use the Dreyfus skill-acquisition bands, which are the lingua franca of skill-level talk in nursing, aviation, and trades — Pondara’s most likely early customer fields.
| Band | Range |
|---|---|
| Novice | 0–20 |
| Advanced beginner | 21–40 |
| Competent | 41–60 |
| Proficient | 61–80 |
| Expert | 81–100 |
Bands appear in copy; the underlying number is shown on hover for learners and trainers who want it.
Weights
Each scenario authored by a field expert declares:
- a required vector — which dimensions the scenario exercises and at what target level, and
- an evidence weight — how strongly an engagement in this scenario contributes to each dimension’s evidence.
A customer-conversation scenario weights Communication, Situational Awareness, and Decision-Making heavily and Domain Knowledge lightly. A technical-inspection scenario inverts those. Forcing equal weights would dilute evidence; the matrix is part of the scenario, not a platform constant.
Target vector
Each scenario declares a target level per dimension it exercises. Your radar overlays your current level against this target so you can see at a glance which dimensions still need more practice. The target vector is not a pass/fail line — it is the shape of competent performance for this scenario in this field.
Why eight, not six or twelve
- Six collapses Communication into Collaboration or Reflection into Self-Regulation; both cost interpretability.
- Twelve over-fits to specific fields and breaks portability — Pondara is multi-field by design.
- Eight is the smallest mutually-exclusive partition that covers the KMK macros and the three foundational disciplines, and it is the number Mike specified in the whitepaper.