Have you ever spent your free time trying to usher a small village of farmers into a space-faring people? It sounds like you’ve played Civilization. If you have spent the last twenty-five years doing something else with your time, Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy games which is famous for a number of things, one of them being its complex technology trees.

The game works more or less like real life. In order to use an advanced technology, you need first make the discoveries that this new technology is built on. So before building a ship, you need to master mathematics and astronomy. In other words, discovering new technologies opens the doors to the further advancement of your civilization.

Civilization isn’t the only place where you can see skills improve in a series of logical steps. Software developers, whether they realize it or not, experience a similar skill progression as they develop in their career. It is no surprise then that the intersection of the Venn Diagram of software developers and Civilization Players is pretty large. This brings us to competency mapping which is based on the same premise: progress built on a comprehensive series of logical steps (as seen in Civilization). Read More