Comparing with competitors

In many professional articles, you are told to compare the results an analysis you did with your competitors. We all ignore this advice, because it's impossible. Like they are going to show you their results or you are going to show them yours.

I ran across some practical advice in Workforce.com's April 19th eNewsletter. Dr. John Sullivan was speaking about developing job competencies. He states

". . . compare your job-family competencies with those of your direct competitors for final modifications. If they have completed a competency project, you would most likely find them on their corporate jobs Web site, buried within the job descriptions for mission-critical jobs."

I never thought of it that way before. Instead of looking at your competitors' direct finding, you figure out how and where they will use them (which is exactly where you would use your findings). If there is an externally-facing component of the competitors' analysis, it might be possible to extrapolate their findings - or at least pick up a couple of things you hadn't considered.