SKEB in Practice: Skills, Knowledge, Experience, Behaviours

The question usually arrives attached to something else. A principal contractor's pre-start pack asks you to confirm the competence of every operative and supervisor on the works, with supporting evidence. Or it arrives after the fact, when a client's building safety consultant asks who installed the fire-stopping around the service penetrations on level six on a date in March, and what qualified each of them to do it. Either way it lands on the desk of whoever runs compliance, or on the managing director's, and the first instinct is to open the training matrix.

What's Actually Being Asked

SKEB stands for skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours. It is the four-part definition of individual competence that the industry's Competence Steering Group settled on in its Setting the Bar work after Grenfell, and it is now the wording in the regulations. Part 2A of the Building Regulations 2010, inserted by the 2023 amendment regulations and in force since 1 October 2023, requires that anyone carrying out design or building work in England has the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours necessary to do it, and that organisations have the organisational capability: the management policies, procedures, systems and resources to do the work properly and to make sure the individuals under their control are competent, or supervised while they train. It applies to all building work the regulations cover, not only to higher-risk buildings.

Two further duties turn that definition into something you can be asked about. Anyone who appoints a designer or contractor must take all reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the people they appoint are competent. On higher-risk building work those steps have to be recorded in writing, and the record ends up with the client: the client keeps its own record for the principal designer and principal contractor appointments, and anyone else making an appointment gives their record to the client, who keeps it. And anyone appointed must not take the work on unless they are competent for it. Neither duty names a particular card, course or scheme. The regulations name the four components, say what the necessary behaviours include, and leave the judgement to the people making and accepting appointments. The industry frameworks that sit alongside them describe what competence looks like for particular roles: BS 8670-1, which replaced BSI Flex 8670 in 2024, sets out the core criteria, and PAS 8671, 8672 and 8673 cover principal designers, principal contractors and building safety management in residential buildings. They do not fill in your evidence for you.

The practical consequence is that the question is never whether a person is competent in the abstract. It is whether this person was competent to do this operation, on this system, on this day, and the answer is expected to be a record rather than a recollection.

The Evidence That Answers It

Each of the four components leaves a different kind of record, and a credible answer draws on all four, plus the record that joins them to the work.

Skills

• Trade qualifications for the operation in question, with the level, the awarding body and the date obtained.
• System and product training from the manufacturer or system owner, where the operation depends on it: the course, the system covered, the date, and whether it was practical or classroom only.
• Practical assessment records: a supervised task observed and signed off, with the assessor named.
• Cards, held as an index rather than as the proof. A CSCS card shows that someone holds a recognised qualification, or approved professional membership, for their occupation and has met the health, safety and environment test requirement. It does not record that they were assessed as competent for a specific operation on a specific system.

Knowledge

• Training records that say what was taught, not just the course title: the content, the date, who delivered it, and any test result.
• Briefings and inductions: the method statement and risk assessment briefings the person attended and signed, with the version briefed.
• Toolbox talks by topic and date, with attendance.
• Continuing professional development for supervisors and managers, logged with the subject and the hours.

Experience

• A dated work history on comparable work: the project, the system, the role held and for how long.
• The records of work actually done: inspection and test plan sign-offs, daily records and photographs that carry the person's name against a location and a date. These are often the strongest evidence of experience, because they were made for another purpose.
• References and prior assessments from previous employers or supervisors, dated.

Behaviours

• Supervisor observations recorded on the day, including the ones that found something wrong and what was done about it.
• Near-miss and stop-work reports raised by the person, which show they recognise risk and act on it.
• Non-conformance and corrective action records the person was involved in, and how they responded.
• The quality of their own records. A person whose daily records and sign-offs are complete, dated and legible has left evidence of behaviour without anyone designing a form for it.

The join

Behind all of it sits a record that tends not to be kept deliberately: who was allocated to which task, at which location, on which day. Without it, the four components describe a person in general. With it, they describe the person who built that part of the building.

Organisational capability is evidenced separately, by the system that produces all of the above: a written competence process that says what you accept as evidence for each role, who assesses it, how often it is reviewed, and how someone's scope is checked before they are put to work. Third-party installer certification schemes, where one exists for your trade, mainly evidence the organisation rather than the individual, and sit in this layer.

Why the Spreadsheet Version Fails

Many firms hold this as a training matrix: names down the side, courses across the top, expiry dates in the cells, certificates in a shared folder, and card photos in a WhatsApp group. It is honest work and it answers one question well: has this person done that course. It does not answer the question that gets asked. The matrix knows nothing about what the person was doing on a given day, so it cannot say who installed the fire-stopping on level six. It records knowledge and some skills, and almost nothing of experience or behaviours, because those were never cells. It is usually maintained by one person, in one file, and the gap between a course expiring and the cell turning red depends on when that person last opened it. The folder of certificates is named by course, so finding the evidence for one individual means opening twenty files. And the reason a supervisor judged someone competent on a particular system lives in the supervisor's head, which leaves with them.

Keeping It Provable

The alternative is to stop treating competence as a status and start treating it as a record that is built as the work happens, anchored to the building. Each person has a scope: the operations and systems they have been assessed as competent to carry out, who made that assessment, on what evidence, and when it falls due for review. Each day's allocation of people to tasks checks that scope before the work starts, not after, and the allocation itself is recorded against the location. Each inspection sign-off, daily record and photograph then carries a person who was, at that moment, within scope. Observations, near-miss reports and corrective actions attach to the same person as they are raised.

Done that way, the question about level six is answered by going to level six on the date and reading back: these people, this scope, this evidence, this assessor. Nobody reconstructs a matrix, and nobody has to remember how the job was run. The record also does something the matrix never could: it shows competence on the day the work was done, which is the only day that matters to the building.

The Monday Checklist

1. Pick one safety-critical operation on a live job and one date. From records alone, name who did it and what qualified each of them under all four headings. Write down what you could not find.
2. For each critical role, write one page stating what you accept as evidence of skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, and who is allowed to make the assessment.
3. Separate "holds a card or certificate" from "assessed as competent for this operation on this system" in your records, and make sure the second always names an assessor and a date.
4. Put a review date on every competence decision. An entry with no author and no date is an opinion, not a record.
5. Connect allocation to scope: whoever assigns people to tasks each day should be checking against the scope before the shift, and the assignment should be kept.
6. Start capturing behaviours as dated records: supervisor observations, near-miss reports, stop-work calls and how they were closed out.
7. When you appoint a subcontractor or an individual, record the steps you took to satisfy yourself they were competent. On higher-risk building work the regulations require that record in writing and require you to give it to the client, who keeps it; everywhere else it is how you show the steps were taken.

Where BrieXO Fits

The BrieXO bundle built for this kind of record is FIELD, and it is live today. Its competence app, XO Comp, holds role frameworks, a scope per person, evidence reviews with an accountable decision, training plans, CPD and verification links, and it passes eligibility signals to the site tools, so a person can be checked against their scope as labour time is captured rather than reconstructed at handover. Those records sit alongside the daily site records, inspection sign-offs and photo evidence for the location they describe, on the spatial spine every BrieXO tenant runs on. It does not decide whether someone is competent: that remains a judgement for your assessors, made against your own frameworks. It supports, and does not certify, compliance. It supports your competence duties; it doesn't discharge them. The detail is on the XO Comp page.

Related reading:Building Safety Act dutyholders and who signs what, golden-thread duties by trade, and what a BSR information request looks like.

George Sfica is a senior design manager at a specialist façade contractor, with 23 years in manufacturing and construction, eleven of them in façades and external envelopes, spanning fabrication, installation and design management, an MSc in Façade Engineering and an IFE Level 2 Certificate in Passive Fire Protection. He is the founder of BrieXO.