18 The revisions were released to the NACE membership in late spring 2020 to seek public comment on the revisions, receiving 291 responses, generating 892 individual comments. NACE’s Research Department compiled and coded the data to provide the task force with a comprehensive report on themes. It is important to note that the George Floyd murder occurred during this time, and it became clear to all that these competencies have an important role to play in social justice, which should be reflected not only in the language but in the behaviors and actions therein. With the extensive member data and important societal events, the task force petitioned the Board to extend the competency review time. The Board concurred and extended the task force for a second year. Many task force members carried over while some members dropped off and others joined the task force. The second task force began its work by reading the NACE Research Department’s report and discussing the prevalent themes. The task force conducted additional research and made multiple revisions. In accordance with NACE’s Commitments to the Black Community and Anti-Racism, the task force endeavored to infuse anti-racist behaviors and those that are consistent with being equitable and inclusive into each competency. The task force Leadership Team consulted with the Knowledge-Based Director on the NACE Board for further assistance. The NACE Research Department also provided lists of corresponding behaviors from peer-reviewed research. Factor analysis #2 To support the task force’s work, the NACE Research Department conducted another factor analysis based on subsequent data collected by Skill Survey to determine a set of behaviors that serve as indicators of each competency. Again, the team discovered that the correlations between the competencies were extremely high, leading again to a warning of a non-positive definite (NPD) matrix. When checking the eigen values, they were smaller and closer to zero than for the first factor analysis, so the revisions made after the first factor analysis were helpful. Conducting a sensitivity analysis of sorts, the NACE Research Department modeled each competency and their associated behaviors separately; loadings and model fit were similarly strong. The NACE Research Department thus took the perspective that model fit and loadings were good, but the factors or competencies were still too highly correlated and producing the NPD warning (Wothke, 1993). With no other likely explanation, the NACE Research Department and task force had to accept that the competencies were highly correlated, as they are in real-life. Moreover, as of now, the behaviors are not being used within a specific instrument; they are being provided to the public as examples of empirically-supported behaviors for these competencies. As such, the NACE Research Department felt comfortable with the results, considering the NPD warning.
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