Placing a person on the levels

The method lives or dies on honest assessment — and the levels are built to make honesty achievable. They're defined by observable behaviour: not "how good is this person?" but "what happens when they do the work?"

The tells, level by level:

Beginner — the work gets done, but with help or documentation along the way, not just at the edges. Fresh from a course or a book.

Confident — most tasks delivered independently, reaching for docs only on the less common parts. The work gets done, by them, routinely.

Expert — almost everything handled without help; lookups only for obscure cases. The strongest single tell: they can teach it. Someone who can walk a colleague from beginner to confident in a skill is an expert in it.

(And the standing footnote: even experts look things up. Skills evolve; needing materials at any level is normal and expected. For small no-level skills, none of this applies — they're a plain yes/no.)

The scale is fixed; the sources vary

Because the tells are behavioural, anyone who has seen the work can read them — which is what lets the same scale accept assessments from many sources:

• Manager assessment — the default in most professional environments; managers see delivery month after month, which is exactly what the tells describe.
• Self-assessment — the natural default for personal use, and a valuable input everywhere; nobody knows better how often help was needed along the way.
• Peers and 360 feedback — colleagues who work alongside someone often have the clearest view of all, especially for skills a manager rarely observes directly.
• Credentials and certifications — solid evidence for beginner (the basics are demonstrably known) and useful signals beyond; they certify knowledge, so pair them with delivery for the higher levels.
• Teaching-back — the built-in test that needs no interpretation: teach it, and expert is demonstrated, not claimed.

Which sources carry the decision is a cultural and organisational choice — the method doesn't mandate a mix. What it insists on is only this: every source answers the same behavioural question against the same scale. That's what keeps a level meaning one thing no matter who assessed it — and it's why disagreement between sources is useful rather than awkward: it's a small, concrete conversation about one skill, settled by looking at the work.