If you want to feel secure, do what you already know how to do. If you want to be a true professional and continue to grow... Go to the cutting edge of your competency, which means a temporary loss of security. So whenever you don't quite know what you're doing, know you're growing.
— Madeline Hunter
Fulfilling Professional Competence quotations
The Commission has five commissioners from each side, plus three alternates, so all together sixteen members, people who are independent from the two governments, who have a lot of integrity, professional competence, and who have credibility in their respective countries.

Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.

We're the only dance in town. We don't compete with any professional teams for the entertainment dollar.
I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
Attempts are found in domains of human performance, such as sports, games, artistic domains, professional domains like medicine and the law, and so on. These feature distinctive aims, and corresponding competences. Archery, with its distinctive arrows and targets, divides into subdomains. Thus, competitive archery differs importantly from archery hunting.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
No letters after your name are ever going to be a total guarantee of competence any more than they are a guarantee against fraud. Improving competence involves continuing professional development ... That is the really crucial thing, not just passing an examination.
Our all-volunteer force continues to prove itself with a great level of professionalism, personal commitment and a technical competence that is quite remarkable.

Look, again, I'm competing against professional politicians, senators, top of the line. I know Ben Carson is still in, and he's a terrific guy and a talented guy. And so I'm competing against a lot of very good people.
With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.
The ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust is the key professional and personal competency of our time.

I've been a professional for I think 13, 14 years.
It's not easy hitting balls every day and staying really motivated throughout the whole period. It's normal [that] you're going to have ups and downs. But I found my way again. And I love the sport. I love competing. I love battling. I love being out there and playing in front of crowds. This is what I've been doing since I was a child. There's nothing else that I want to do.
Determination is number one! You have to be trained physically.
You have to have a good mental attitude - wanting it and enjoying the thrill of going fast. There is a certain level of aggression with competing at professional racing level but you have to control it as it is a high reaction, fast sport.
Politics in Bolivia must combine social consciousness with professional competency. In my administration, intellectuals from the upper class can be cabinet ministers or ambassadors, as can members of Indian ethnic groups.

David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon.
Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.
The so-called scientific basis of the climate problem is within my professional competence as a meteorologist. It is my professional opinion that there is no evidence at all for catastrophic global warming. It is likely that global temperatures will rise a little, much as IPCC predicts, but there is a growing body of evidence that the errant behavior of the Sun may cause some cooling in the foreseeable future.
As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.