What term? someone who shows knowledge and skill but proves incomopetent when given authority.

There is a term for someone who exhibits competence in a certain area or field, and when given tasks utilizing their knowledge they prove incompetent. Real world examples are individuals who are promoted in the workplace only to prove that they are incapable of doing the job.

I have spent two hours caressing Google, to no avail.

Any help?

The Peter Principle is the idea that people get promoted to their level of incompetency. So as long as a person seems competent they’ll keep getting promoted until they reach the level they cannot perform at.

As TriPolar writes, the Peter Principle involves promotion and incompetence. Indeed it is defined as such. However the principle is that each person is actually competent at what they do until the last promotion, where they get promoted out to a position where they are no longer able to cope, or that requires skills they never had. It is competence, and an ability to perform that lead to the promotion to a new job that they can’t do - because it involves skills or abilities they don’t have. The Peter Principle eventually says that we are all doomed because the entire world is filled with people who cannot do the job they are employed to do. (There is a clear fallacy in this. The book was intended to be partially satirical. It is written in the style of a scholarly research paper. It was possibly inspired by Ceil Northcote Parkinson’s much superior efforts.)

If you are just looking for people who seem to be qualified as competent, but who cannot actually perform, you are probably only going to find insults - academic - or one I have heard from China - a stuffed duck - someone who has learnt parrot fashion and passed the exams, but who is useless.

An empty suit?

A paper (job title)?

Charl(latan)s in Charge?

Politicians?

Inexperienced. Green. Junior. Entry-level. By these terms I’m assuming his knowledge and skill were acquired through formal training/study and not through actual practice.

I have seen this happen - a competent, hard-working, good worker, who gets a promotion and can’t handle the responsibility of the new position. It’s the opposite of a green person. Can be quite sad to watch.

Book-smart? In grad school I saw people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering who were borderline useless in a laboratory setting. They got straight A’s in undergrad solving textbook problems in engineering fundamentals when presented with them as such, but if you asked them to design or analyze an experimental apparatus, they had no idea how to even begin framing the problem they were supposed to solve.

Peter Principe was what I was looking for. I had heard if before but for the life of me could not remember the phrase.

Thanks all for the input.

May I add, “Hoe Handle”

Another example would be, Take General Ambrose Burnside.
In a position under another incompetent superior he had all the right answers and strategies, but when all the weight of command was on his shoulders, well he wasn’t the the Peter he was thought to be.
I got this when reading a biography of the General, very depressing reading!

I will go with the “Sobel Effect”

Yeah I am watching too much Band of Brothers :smack:

Yeah, I was wondering if that was what the OP was going for. Some people are great at dealing with things at the theoretical level, but not so good in applying that knowledge. But I think something more like described in the OP happens a lot when people move into management positions. They may have been very good at doing the job, but aren’t necessarily good at being in charge of others who have to do the job.

Do you mean “technically good, but no management skills” (which is the usual issue with people unable to deal with promotion), or “theoretically qualified but actually technically incompetent” (as, say, is often the case with computer technicians)?

Academic.

Public Servant

There are a lot of certifications in IT that you can get by passing a multiple choice exam. In my case, I actually got an IT cert after having studied the material in a formal class with hands-on experience, but I bet some people can just Read The Book and pass the exam and show up for the job with a lot of trivia memorized but without meaningful skills or even having touched the stuff they are supposedly certified on. IT certs have a mixed reputation. Many HR people love them because they serve as a quick way to filter resumes, and many hardcore IT gurus loathe them because they feel that being able to pass a two hour multiple choice test is basically meaningless with respect to your actual abilities.

In my case, I ended up professionally in an area not directly related to the cert, but I feel that the hands-on experience I got in class helped me in general. I remember a lot of the material and could probably take the exam again and pass. If I had just used a study guide to prepare for the exam, I would probably remember very little of it after five years and be pretty much incompetent.

Some exam-based certifications require that you also show work experience, class time, or both as a prerequisite. The ASE (Automotive Service Excellence) certification for auto mechanics is like this. They will let you take the test having never set foot inside an auto shop or mechanic school, but you won’t receive your actual certification until you have two years of work experience as a mechanic. You might be able to land a job with the exam behind you, but you’d better be able to actually hold down the job for a while and not get fired for incompetence.

Bush league?

Right, because doing the given job is one set of skills and managing people is a completely different set of skills. I am very, very good at print production. I am terrible at managing other people. I’ve had a lot of training and experience in print production. I’ve had zero training and very little experience with management. I was promoted to manager once and had the good sense to (eventually) step back down to production slave because it was clear to me that either my management skills sucked or I simply hated management because I wasn’t doing the work I enjoyed anymore.

There’s the term “Book Smart” for people who know all the answers but are incapable of translating that into real world results.