Have We Given Up? Or is It Merely an Indicator of the Work That Remains to Be Done?: A Discussion About the Competencies of a Performance Improvement Professional

The field devoted to the study of performance, human performance technology (HPT), is characterized by its derived nature (Foshay & Moller, 1992) and its continuous expansion (Guerra-Lopez, 2012; Kaufman & Bernardez, 2012). Due to the rather banal characteristic of performance, the literature is replete with various definitions, and thus the field finds itself lacking a universal definition (Dean, 1995; Farrington, 2012; Westgaard, 1997). The interplay of these characteristics has also influenced what performance improvement professionals should know.