Competency language tends to treat knowledge, skills, and abilities as three parallel categories. That framing is useful for writing job descriptions and nearly useless for diagnosing why a capable, well-trained person cannot perform.
It is more accurate to treat capability as a flow with identifiable transitions. Information becomes knowledge when it is organized and retrievable. Knowledge becomes skill through structured practice. Skill becomes judgment through varied conditions and honest feedback. Judgment becomes performance only if the environment permits it.
The value of that framing is diagnostic. Each transition fails for its own reasons and responds to its own class of intervention. A population stalled between information and knowledge needs structure and access. A population stalled between knowledge and skill needs practice. A population stalled between judgment and performance needs the organization to change, and no amount of instructional design will substitute.
One correction worth naming: the progression is directional but re-enterable. Experienced performers regress when conditions change — a new system, a new context, a new set of constraints. That is not a deficiency, it is the model working as expected.