4 Stages of Competence and its Marketing and Business implications

Knowing these 4 stages of competence will make you and your teams get better at whatever you do.

First, I will show you the four competencies and then I will show you examples from the marketing perspective.

To put it simply, below are four stages of competence.

1. Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance)
2. Conscious incompetence (Awareness)
3. Conscious competence (Learning)
4. Unconscious competence (Mastery)

Most beginners, novice and starters are at the stage of unconscious incompetence. When you are starting your career, most people don’t exactly know which way they are going. Most people (some even in late 40s) are at this stage, especially if you often change your field of work. If you are doing marketing for 5 years, then try to get into web development, then 99.9% of the people will be at the 1st stage of competence despite being putting their heart and soul in their craft. They will be rookie, but some rookies know they are beginners and that helps them to go towards unconscious competence.

There’s a saying that you might agree with.

It says:

The less you know, the more you think you know; the more you know, the less you think you know.

This saying literally shows 4 stages of competence. When you know too much but still think you don’t know enough, that mostly means that you are at the epitome of expertise. Plato and Socrates have said things along the same lines about learning.

Let’s give you some marketing examples:

1. Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance)
   1. Google Ads expert thinks that it’s all about creating new campaigns and redirect them towards landing page. All day everyday, this person just repeats this same thing.
2. Conscious incompetence (Awareness)
   1. Google Ads expert realizes he hasn’t done conversion tracking and DKI so he realizes there are many other things. This can be called Acceptance also.
3. Conscious competence (Learning)
   1. Now Google Ads Expert Accepts and starts Learning.
4. Unconscious competence (Mastery)
   1. This is the stage where Google Ads Expert have checked all the items on checklist. Now this Google Ads expert always looks for new information like features, new industry upgrades and innovations that can keep that expert to the level of master.

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