Task-related competencies: knowledge, skills, and abilities of the helping professionals

ABSTRACT The role of competencies in lifelong education is of great interest across helping professions. However, no known empirical research has focused on exploring the relationship between competencies and job tasks within the context of helping professions. This study sought to establish the competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills, and abilities) that the helping professionals use to perform their jobs. This research utilised an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. In the qualitative phase, focus group interviews were carried out with subject-matter experts to explore the tasks and competencies of helping professionals. Then, building on the findings, an inventory of the tasks and competencies of helping professionals was formed. In the quantitative phase, 819 helping professionals were asked to rate each of the items in this inventory. The results of the exploratory factor analyses yielded a multidimensional structure for both the competencies and tasks. Next, multiple linear regression analyses revealed that different categories of competencies were associated with different task domains. The findings can contribute to a better understanding of lifelong learning within helping professions.

Competencies are at the heart of our understanding of individuals' career development.While previous approaches posited that entry-level competencies are sufficient to survive in the work environment (Dugger, 2016), the competencies needed to carry out any job have been continuously changing due to fluidity in the global labour market (Djankov & Saliola, 2019;Singh, 2008;World Bank Report, 2019).Put differently, the competencies of professionals might be at risk of becoming more outdated with the passage of time (Dubin, 1972).Accordingly, it is incumbent on individuals to update their competencies (Amundson, 2005;Dugger, 2016;van Esbroeck, 2008) to carve out a niche for themselves within this constantly changing context.Aligning with this need, lifelong learning for competencies has been placed at the centre of most recent policy papers (Webb et al., 2022).
Helping professions (i.e.psychology, counselling, social work, and sociologists) are no exception to such fluidity and the need for change.Given that there is an increasing demand for helping services in recent years due to major global events and forces (Marsella, 1998;Marsella & Pedersen, 2004), the characteristics of helping professionals (HPs) have gradually changed (Grady & Dombo, 2016).Indeed, extensive research has shown that the competencies of HPs were at risk of becoming obsolete in time (Wise, 2010).By keeping up with the current knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) pertinent to the tasks, HPs might avoid being obsolete (Dubin, 1972;Parsons & Zhang, 2014;Wise, 2010).Therefore, it is critical to understand the relationship between competencies and tasks.carried out in developed countries and much less is known about the competencies of HPs in developing countries, including Türkiye.Therefore, based on this knowledge gap, the purpose of this study was to provide empirical evidence on in what ways the competencies of HPs related to their tasks in Türkiye.The specific research questions for this study were as follows: (1) What competencies (knowledge, skills, and abilities) do healthcare professionals (HPs) possess and what job tasks do they fulfil in Turkey?(2) What connections exist between HPs' competencies and the tasks they perform in Türkiye?

Method
The objectives of the research were to (1) identify the competencies and job tasks of HPs, and (2) examine the relationship between them.To do this, a cross-sectional study was carried out between August 2018 and February 2019.In line with the recommendations of Spector and Pindek (2016), this study adopted a two-step exploratory sequential mixed methods design (see Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018 for a detailed discussion).Below, these two phases were described in detail.

Phase I: identification of the competencies and tasks of HPs
The aim of the first phase was to (1) determine the tasks carried out by HPs and the competencies held by HPs, and (2) construct an instrument to measure these competencies and tasks.To this end, we first scrutinised the legal regulations and job descriptions regarding HPs in Türkiye and carried out a literature review on the competencies of HPs.Based on these reviews, we then created a pool of items that entailed the competencies (i.e.knowledge, skills, and abilities) and the tasks of HPs.Next, a total of eight focus group interviews (i.e.7-10 individuals per group) were held to ensure that these items were valid to measure the competencies and tasks.In the first three focus group interviews, we elaborated on which tasks were carried out by HPs.In doing so, we asked questions (e.g.'What does a typical helping professional do?'; 'Which tasks are the most essential for the helping professionals?') to the administrators and human resource specialists who work in a large psychosocial helping centre in Türkiye.In the latter five focus group interviews, we inquired about the knowledge, skills, and abilities which HPs retained.To do so, we posed questions (e.g.'What skills do you require in doing this task?'; and 'What knowledge do you require to perform this task?') to the HPs who had at least five years of professional experience.Three themes emerged from focus group interviews: intervention competencies, complementary competencies, and administrative competencies.
Having performed the focus group interviews, we finalised the items in accordance with the findings of the focus group interviews and constructed a self-report inventory (The Competencies Inventory of Helping Professionals -CIHP) to assess the competencies and tasks of HPs.The CHIP consisted of three primary components: (1) knowledge (competency), (2) skills and abilities (competency), and (3) job tasks.The construction phase of the CHIP was illustrated in Figure 1.

Phase II: examining the structure of and the relationship between competencies and tasks
The second phase of the study set out to determine (1) the structure of the competencies and tasks of the HPs, and (2) the association between the competencies and tasks through a quantitative design.To do this, we employed the CIHP to 819 HPs (i.e.psychologists, counsellors, social workers, and sociologists) who work in a large public institute in Türkiye. Figure 2 illustrated the main outcomes and the procedural steps undertaken during the second phase.

Measures
Demographic Information Form.We employed a demographic information form to collect data on the participants' sex, years of experience, age, and occupation.
The Competencies Inventory of Helping Professionals (CIHP).We utilised the CIHP to measure participants' competencies (i.e.knowledge, skills, and abilities) and tasks.The CIHP comprised three main components: (1) knowledge (competency), (2) skills and abilities (competency), and (3) tasks.Responses to the items in this inventory were based on a scale ranging from 1 ('least competent') to 4 ('highly competent').The reliability statistics of the components of the CIHP were provided in the result section.

Statistical analyses
First, we conducted three exploratory factor analyses (EFA) to examine the structure of knowledge, skills, abilities, and task components of the CIHP.Second, we evaluated the internal consistency scores of the subscales of each component.Last, to assess the associations between competencies and tasks, we performed two multiple linear regression analyses for the relationship between (1) knowledge and task components, and (2) skills and abilities, and task components.
Before conducting statistical analyses, the data were first controlled for the presence of missing and outlier values.Then, we tested the assumptions of EFA and multiple linear regression for any violations, including linearity, homoscedasticity, independence of error terms, multicollinearity, and normality (Ho, 2014;Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013).None of the above mentioned assumptions were found to be violated.We utilised the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 24.0) through all the statistical analyses.

The structures of the competencies and tasks
We conducted separate exploratory factor analyses for both knowledge, skills and abilities, and tasks.With a cut-off value of .30(Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013), the results of the exploratory factor analysis for the knowledge component indicated a seven-dimensional structure:  Then, we examined the internal consistency scores of the subdimensions to provide evidence of reliability.As Cronbach's alpha scores ranged between .80 and .93,we can claim that the scores of the subdimensions were reliable for this study.The name of the subdimensions and other related statistics (e.g.Cronbach's alpha values) were presented in Table 3.

Relationship between the competencies and tasks
Having identified the dimensions of the competencies and tasks, we examined the associations between competencies and tasks.We aimed to find out which competencies were linked with the tasks, therefore, we positioned the components of the tasks as dependent variables.We first examined the relationship between the components of knowledge (i.e.seven sub-dimensions) and the components of tasks (i.e.five sub-dimensions).We conducted separate multiple regression analyses for each component of tasks as the dependent variable.
The findings of the regression analyses revealed that all the knowledge subdimensions were significantly associated with developmental support tasks.Additionally, the strongest predictor of developmental support tasks was the knowledge of guidance and referral (β = .43,t = 14.04, p < .05).Second, five out of seven knowledge subdimensions were found significantly related to assessment and reporting tasks.In addition, the strongest predictor of assessment and reporting tasks was the knowledge of trauma (β = .41,t = 12.88, p < .05).Third, three out of seven knowledge subdimensions were found significantly associated with psychosocial support and developmental support tasks.Additionally, the strongest predictor of psychosocial support and professional development tasks was the knowledge of providing services (β = .61,t = 20.13,p < .05).Fourth, five out of seven knowledge subdimensions were found significantly linked with initial admission and intervention tasks.In addition, the strongest predictor of initial admission and intervention tasks was the knowledge of trauma (β = .38,t = 12.58, p < .05).Lastly, four out of seven knowledge subdimensions were found significantly associated with trauma and crisis tasks.In addition, the strongest predictor of trauma and crisis tasks was the knowledge of trauma (β = .38,t = 12.58, p < .05).
We then examined the association between the components of skills and abilities (i.e. 10 subdimensions) and the components of tasks (i.e.five sub-dimensions).We carried out separate multiple regression analyses for each component of tasks as the dependent variable.The findings of the regression analyses yielded that the strongest predictor of developmental support tasks was the skills and knowledge for working with children (β = .40,t = 16.61,p < .05).The strongest predictor of assessment and reporting tasks was skills and abilities for psychosocial support (β = .61,t = 17.93, p < .05).The strongest predictor of psychosocial support and professional development tasks was skills and abilities for administration and leadership (β = .61,t = 17.93, p < .05).The strongest predictor of initial admission and intervention tasks was skills and knowledge for psychosocial support (β = .47,t = 13.87,p < .05).Lastly, the strongest predictor of trauma and crisis tasks was the skills and abilities for trauma (β = .46,t = 14.59, p < .05).The significant correlates of task subdimensions were provided in Table 4 and Figure 2. All the regression results were also illustrated in Supplementary Material 1.

Discussion
With their own set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, the helping professionals stand out from other professions.These competencies give HPs a solid foundation on which to deliver high-quality service to those who require it.Nonetheless, little empirical evidence exists to shed light on how each competency relates to the tasks HPs execute.Therefore, the purpose of the current study was twofold.First, it set out to determine the structures of tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities of HPs.Second, it sought to predict in what ways the competencies were related to the tasks.The results of the current research were thoroughly discussed below.

Discussion of the structures of competencies and tasks
In general, there are certain parallels between the categories in earlier studies and the HPs' tasks and competencies in the current study.Having said that, the present study also generated several new types of tasks and competencies.We examined how our findings and the existing classifications diverged and converged in the paragraphs below.First, the majority of knowledge subdimensions generally indicated some relationship to the taxonomies of earlier studies.For instance, the knowledge of guidance and referral was comparable to career counselling, assessment, and consultation services (Leahy et al., 2003), vocational guidance (Menne, 1975), consultation and interprofessional collaboration (Kaslow, 2004), consultation (Molinari et al., 2003) and the professional knowledge (Hudson, 1997).The knowledge of providing services overlapped somewhat with the ethical and legal issues (Thielsen & Leahy, 2001), the ethics (Kaslow, 2004) the evaluation and assessment (Thielsen & Leahy, 2001), and the case and caseload management (Leahy et al., 2003).The knowledge of human behaviour partially overlapped with individual counselling (Leahy et al., 2003), and behavioural sciences (Menne, 1975).Lastly, the knowledge of administration and the knowledge of corporate communication appeared to be somewhat similar to procedural knowledge (Hudson, 1997).Despite these parallels, the knowledge of trauma and the knowledge of medical care formed new knowledge categories.
Second, for the skill and ability domains, a similar picture was also obtained.The skills and abilities for psychosocial support were comparable to the intervention techniques and methods (Thielsen & Leahy, 2001), the counselling comprehension (Menne, 1975), and the intervention (Kaslow, 2004;McDaniel et al., 2014;Nash et al., 2013).The skills and abilities for communication were similar to listening and communicating (Menne, 1975), communication (Molinari et al., 2003), and systems, teamwork, and communication (Nash et al., 2013).The skills and abilities for administration and leadership shared considerable parallels with leadership/administration (McDaniel et al., 2014), and management and administration (Nash et al., 2013).The skills and abilities for psychoeducation partially overlapped with tutoring techniques (Menne, 1975) and teaching (McDaniel et al., 2014).Lastly, the skills and abilities for diagnosis were similar to evaluation and assessment (Thielsen & Leahy, 2001), assessment (Kaslow, 2004), psychological assessment (Krishnamurthy et al., 2004), and diagnostic issues (Molinari et al., 2003).Contrary to these similarities, the skills and abilities for working with disadvantaged individuals, working with children, activity, and trauma emerged as new categories.
Lastly, the subdomains of tasks were found to somewhat parallel the sparse literature on HPs' task categories.The developmental support tasks partially overlapped with providing vocational counselling and consultation (Leahy et al., 2003).The assessment and reporting tasks were comparable to conducting assessments (Leahy et al., 2003).The psychosocial support and professional development tasks were similar to conducting counselling interventions (Leahy et al., 2003) and professional development (Kaslow, 2004).Lastly, the initial admission and intervention tasks showed similarities with managing cases (Leahy et al., 2003).Despite the similarities, the trauma and crisis tasks emerged as a new category.
Overall, the competencies and tasks can be broadly classified into three main categories: (1) institutional (e.g.administration and leadership, and corporate communication); (2) psychosocial support/intervention (e.g.trauma and crisis, working with disadvantaged individuals); (3) complementary (e.g.learning and teaching, and communication).These three overarching structures were also frequently emphasised in our focus group interviews.This distinction draws our attention to the fact that HPs do not solely engage in psychosocial support activities, but also spend time on organisational tasks.

Discussion of the relationships between the competencies and tasks
Very little was found in the literature on the relationship between competencies and tasks within the context of HPs.The results of this research presented a detailed portrait of the association between competencies and tasks.First, perhaps, the most important finding was that the skills and abilities for psychosocial support were linked with all the task domains.These results mirror those of the previous studies that pointed out the importance of psychosocial support for a wide range of issues, including school outcomes (Zulu et al., 2020), cancer (Newton et al., 2021), illness and longevity (Smith et al., 2021), and COVID-19 pandemic (Hyun et al., 2020;Kunzler et al., 2021).Second, similarly, the skills and abilities for working with children and the skills and abilities for working with disadvantaged individuals were found to be associated with all the task categories.These results are likely to be related to the needs of these individuals.Previous scholarship unequivocally put forward that children and disadvantaged individuals are vulnerable in terms of psychological wellbeing (Henderson & Thompson, 2016;Raphael et al., 2006).Accordingly, this vulnerability behoves HPs to equip themselves with distinct skills and abilities to provide effective services (see Molinari et al., 2003;Rae & Fournier, 1999;Remley & Herlihy, 2016).
Third, the knowledge of trauma and the skills and abilities for trauma were found to be associated with the majority of the task domains.These results seem to be consistent with other research indicating that a myriad of knowledge, skills, and abilities are warranted to deal with trauma-related problems (Goodman, 2015;Kira et al., 2015;Layne et al., 2014;Powers & Duys, 2020;Steel et al., 2002).Furthermore, we might speculate that trauma-related issues are deeply embedded in the work of HPs due to the rise of traumatic events (cf.Black & Flynn, 2021;Duffey & Haberstroh, 2020).
Fourth, the knowledge of providing services, the skills, and abilities for communication, the skills and abilities for learning, and the skills and abilities were found to be related to most of the task groups.A possible explanation for these relationships might be that these competencies might be complementary to the intervention competencies.For example, without communication skills and abilities, it might not be possible for HPs to contact people in need of help (Cormier et al., 2013).Similarly, activities (Jones et al., 2003;Schaefer, 2011), and effective learning and teaching (Bennett-Levy, 2006) methods might make it easier to provide psychosocial support.
Last but not least, it was identified that competencies regarding institutional functioning (i.e.administration, administration and leadership, and corporate communication) were connected with most of the task categorisations.This finding might reflect the role of institutional competencies in the work life of HPs.It is evident from previous research (Cornelissen, 2020; Goodman, 2006) that corporate communication has a vital role in the success of organisations.In a similar way, administration and leadership might significantly improve the outcomes of institutions.Moreover, within the field of helping, the leadership role of HPs has been growingly emphasised in recent years (e.g.Harrichand et al., 2021;Peters & Vereen, 2020;Prasath et al., 2021).The findings of the current study corroborated this emphasis.We found that administration and leadership were related to the domain of psychosocial support and professional development, and initial admission and intervention.
In a nutshell, the most obvious finding to emerge from this research is that three broad competency and task categories were related to the working lives of HPs in Türkiye: (1) intervention, (2) complementary, and (3) institutional.Therefore, in general, it seems that in addition to getting involved in the intervention, HPs also take part in institutional activities and activities that are complimentary to the intervention, which demand a different set of competencies other than the intervention-specific competencies.These results support the idea that HPs might benefit from lifelong education on the ground that higher education does not adequately equip HPs with institutional and complementary competencies.From a different view, our findings indicated that each task categorisation might be associated with a distinct set of knowledge, skills, and abilities.Therefore, HPs might pay attention to improving and updating their competencies for different task groups throughout their working lives.Similarly, psychosocial support organisations might screen their HPs to determine a training need based on the categories emerging from our research.Then, they might design in-training programmes to upskill their employee so that they can deliver more efficient psychosocial support.

Conclusion
This study set out to gain a better understanding of the task-related competencies of HPs.To the best of our knowledge, this research has been one of the first attempts to thoroughly investigate the association between the competencies and tasks of HPs in a working adult sample.Consequently, it shed new light on the lifelong education of HPs.However, the findings and implications of the current study are subject to a number of limitations.First, this study is cross-sectional and it is not possible to generalise its results.Future studies might utilise a longitudinal design in which the competencies of HPs can be tracked over a long-term period.Second, the current data came from an age-heterogeneous sample.Future research might benefit from age-homogenous samples.For instance, it might be insightful to explore the differences between new entrants and experienced HPs.Last, the sample consisted of diverse HP groups (i.e.counsellors, psychologists, sociologists, and social workers).While sociologists are not typically categorised as helping professionals in the field of psychosocial support, it is important to note that in Turkish public institutions, sociologists are employed to provide psychosocial assistance to individuals and families.Hence, in our study, we have included sociologists as helping professionals, recognising their role in this context.Future studies might attempt to focus on a specific group of psychosocial support professionals rather than a mixed group.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Phase I -construction of competencies inventory of helping professions.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Phase II -exploration of competencies and tasks & examining the relationship between competencies and tasks.

Table 1 .
Taxonomies of competencies within the studies of MHPs.

Table 2 .
Description of demographic variables.

Table 3 .
Descriptive statistics of competency and task domains.

Table 4 .
Task related competencies of psychosocial helping professionals.