Competency frameworks have proved to be a powerful tool for curriculum development and assessment across many subject domains, and the field of computational biology is no exception. Efforts from the ISCB to develop and successively refine a set of competencies for bioinformatics education and various associated mapping tools have provided a framework for bringing competency-based design principles broadly to education and training of a wide range of professionals in need of some level of mastery of the principles and practice of computational biology. This document seeks to provide some basic guidance for education and training professionals in the field in how to use this framework effectively. It includes a basic background on competency-based education and the history of the ISCB competency framework specifically, leading up to the Version 3 framework considered here. It then follows with some basic principles of applying competency-based education and an illustration of how they apply to different tasks in curriculum development. Appendices and various linked documents provide further elaboration and helpful guidance on the ISCB competencies specifically and some ways in which versions of them have been used already to develop diverse forms of bioinformatics education and training experience. Our target readerships are trainers and educators working in computational biology or more broadly in the molecular life sciences, medicine, and other disciplines that use biomolecular data, including those working in academia, industry and the public sector.

These guidelines are available as a google doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hgBEq-C8HvmxxQ2grYiqNXt-agM1LWzW673j6uQHHmI/edit#heading=h.1x0y3vxuz6a7