This booklet, which has been designed for a diverse audience, including work team members, supervisors/managers, trade union members, employers, trainers, teachers/lecturers, human resource managers, and students/trainees, presents basic information about the purpose, content, and quality of competency standards for vocational education within the framework of South Australia's vocational education and training system. Discussed first are fundamental ideas underlying the concepts of competency and competency-based training. South Australia's national framework for competency standards is examined. The remaining four sections explain the following: who is involved in developing competency standards, how they are developed, what they look like, what types of standards are developed, and how they can be judged. Appended are the following: a list of abbreviations, Australian Standard Framework descriptors, guidelines for becoming a competency standards body, a list of 45 competency standards bodies endorsed by the National Training Board (NTB), a 13-item annotated bibliography of publications about data gathering techniques, a list of the NTB-endorsed competency standards as of October 1994, and a 27-item annotated bibliography of useful references concerning competency standards. (MN)