International Perspectives on Competence Development

Developing Skills and Capabilities

Knud Illeris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136616617
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

In today's complex and ever-changing world it has become obvious that even highly developed knowledge and skills are no longer sufficient to meet new challenges, situations and problems facing individuals, organisations and nations. This raises an enormous and potentially confusing issue for educators and trainers: how is it possible to generate and assess abilities to deal with challenges and problems unknown – or not even in existence – at the time when the learning takes place?

The book builds on the experiences and insights of its expert contributors, all of whom have worked with, studied and analysed competences and how they are developed. Their collected work presents

• Comprehensive explanation and analysis of the concept and nature of competence.
• Specific contexts of competence development, e.g. in the public sector or small business.
• Competence development as a national strategy for building an up-to-date education and training system.

With chapters from around the world, including the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, this book illustrates in an engaging and convincing manner the importance and innovative nature of the concept of competences, resulting in a varied, differentiated and empathetic guide to the topic. It will appeal to educators, both in academic and management circles, as well as students and administrators of education.

Part I

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The issue of competence
development

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Chapter 1

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Competence development in
the USA

Limiting expectations or unleashing
global capacities

Karen E. Watkins and Maria Cseh

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Since the publication of Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in 1956, educators have been captured by the idea of defining the essential skills and knowledge of an educated individual. In the workplace, this has taken different forms over time — from a focus on competency profiling to performance analysis and design, to an emphasis on developing expertise and competency certification. As many corporations in Europe and Asia embrace qualifications frameworks as means to identify competence and certify skills, the USA continues to evolve new variations on these original concepts of competence, including a focus in the workplace on professional competence certification. In this chapter, we identify some workplace approaches and explore theories of competence, particularly those that are more holistic, organizational, or global capacities.

Why focus on competence development now?
A global talent gap

As organizations face rapid changes that bring a need for ever-increasing skills and a shrinking supply of talented employees, they look to competency profiling to help them select and develop the strongest candidates. For example, at Danske Bank, competency profiles are developed for all employees (Competency Development 2008). The competency profile lists the specific professional and personal competencies that an employee needs to meet job requirements. The organization believes that these profiles will enable it to evaluate current skills and target competency development opportunities.

Human resource management specialists identify gaps in the leadership pipeline, particularly at the middle management level (Gurchiek 2007), rather than the retirement of key workers as the source of the most prevalent talent gap. There is increasing concern that, especially at leadership levels, there are fewer and fewer individuals who possess the complex array of skills needed to manage global businesses.

A recent national report, Rising above the Gathering Storm (by the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century (National Academy of Sciences 2005), stated that

The enormous and growing supply of labor in the developing world is but one side of a global demographic transformation. The other side is the aging populations of developed nations. The working-age population is already shrinking in Italy and Japan, and it will begin to decline in the USA, the UK, and Canada by the 2020s. More than 70 million USA baby boomers will retire by 2020, but only 40 million new workers will enter the workforce. Europe is expected to face the greatest period of depopulation since the Black Death, shrinking to 7 pct. of world population by 2050 (from nearly 25 pct. just after World War II). East Asia (including China) is experiencing the most rapid aging in the world. At the same time, India’s working-age population is projected to grow by 335 million people by 2030—almost equivalent to the entire workforce of Europe and the United States of America today. These extreme global imbalances suggest that immigration will continue to increase. (p. 212)

The report suggests that employers will seek talent from a global pool.

The report also presents a letter from the leadership of the National Science Foundation to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that puts the case even more bluntly stating that,

Civilization is on the brink of a new industrial order. The big winners in the increasingly fierce global scramble for supremacy will not be those who simply make commodities faster and cheaper than the competition. They will be those who develop talent, techniques and tools so advanced that there is no competition. (p. 1–3)

Thus, understanding the global labor market is crucial for the United States’ strategic approaches to nurturing, attracting, and retaining its talent pool.

A bill was introduced to the USA Senate in May 2005, entitled Collaborative Opportunities to Mobilize and Promote Education, Technology, and Enterprise Act of 2005. Designed to address the skills gap in a knowledge economy, it provides for partnerships to provide science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and incentives to spur research and development. The bill demonstrates concern that the USA is losing its competitive edge in a knowledge economy and the need to target funding to support new talent development in critical shortage areas. The America COMPETES bill passed in 2007 (American Society for Training and Development 2007).

Others argue that talent will come from hidden talent pools of people with existing talent not currently being utilized such as the underemployed, from people who delay retirement, outsourcing, off-shoring, and retraining programmes (Grantham & Ware 2005). A recent report by Deloitte Research (2007) describes a talent paradox as survival of the skilled — managers skilled in ensuring coordination among a globally dispersed workforce, managing a global workforce with varied demographic profiles, skill sets, expectations, who understand the impact of changing demographics and skill sets in different locations and can plan accordingly (p. 2). This report focuses on the availability of talent in Generation Y that has been elusive at present since corporations do not know how to attract these workers. The authors focus on the need to connect — to provide employees with tools and assistance to build networks to improve individual and organizational performance and to improve the quality of their interactions with others. Organizational environments that allow work-life flexibility are more effective with this generation.

Whether the talent gap is a lack of middle managers, key technical workers, globally astute leaders; whether the solution is to increase funding for pre-collegiate and retraining in STEM disciplines, finding and attracting underutilized and younger new entrants to key roles; the need for developing competence—especially new competences—is at the heart of the proposed solutions offered for the growing talent gap. The durability of this concept in the field of training and development may relate to these evolving profiles of competence in a changing workplace. On the other hand, the evolving scope of the concept may be the source of its sustained viability. In the section that follows, we show the evolution of our understanding of competency development in the workplace.

Differing definitions—increasing scope

From a focus on minute behaviors to patterns of behavior, to global mindsets, the history of competence development is one of an expanding scope. Reviewing definitions of competence over time, we see the evolution of foci and scope in our understanding of competence at the individual level.

Early definitions of competence focused on adequacy to function effectively in the world: “As used here, competence will refer to an organism’s capacity to interact effectively with its environment” (White, 1959: 297). Working with David McClelland at Harvard to define behavioral competencies for individuals in key job roles, Klemp (1981) defined competence as

any attribute of a person that underlies effective performance; a job competency is simply an attribute related to doing a job effectively. People carry with them a wide assortment of knowledge, abilities, interests, traits, and motives, but unless these attributes relate demonstrably to doing a job well, they are not job competencies. (p. 55)

A similar direction was found in the training and development field. McLagan (1982) conducted numerous studies of the competencies of trainers. She wrote,

many models developed for the training and development field do not distinguish between competencies and tasks. Although there is overlap, it is desirable to differentiate competencies (characteristics of people) from job tasks (tasks of jobs). We define jobs and roles in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but we describe (and develop) people in terms of competencies. (p. 20)

Elkin (1990) defined individual competencies similarly, but added a focus on transfer of these skills across job contexts,

the Training Services Agency defines competency as “ability to perform the activities within an occupation”, and so by implication includes job tasks. They continue: “competence is a wide concept which embodies the ability to transfer skills and knowledge to new situations within the occupational area. It encompasses organization, and planning of work, innovations and coping with non-routine activities. It includes those qualities of personal effectiveness that are required in the workplace to deal with co-workers, managers and customers.” (p. 22).

In contrast, competence in Herling’s (in Swanson & Holton 2001) view refers to minimal or nominally proficient performance. Earlier definitions of competence referred to competence as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that, collectively, define an individual’s capabilities. Bloom (1956) categorized educational objectives as cognitive, affective, and psychomotor in the hope that educators would design more holistic educational approaches, drawing on all of these domains. It’s unfortunate that his ideas were used to develop exhaustive laundry lists of micro behaviors to guide instruction—and the idea of more synthetic or holistic approaches to education did not materialize.

Over time, broader conceptions of competence emerged.

A competency is defined as a capability or ability. It is a set of related but different sets of behavior organized around an underlying construct, which we call the “intent.” The behaviors are alternate manifestations of the intent, as appropriate in various situations or times. … A theory of performance is the basis for the concept of competency. The theory used in this approach is a basic contingency theory. Maximum performance is believed to occur when the person’s capability or talent is consistent with the needs of the job demands and the organizational environment.

(Boyatzis 1982: 6)

In this view, competence includes not only behaviors but also intent and the idea of capacity—or the ability to deploy one’s skills to meet job demands and environmental press.

Competencies are patterns of behavior in Rodriguez et al. (2002) who note that “OPM defines a competency as a measurable pattern of knowledge, skill, abilities, behaviors, and other characteristics that an individual needs to perform work roles or occupational functions successfully” (p. 310). Henderson et al. (1995) studied assessment center data and noted that competencies needed to be understood as behavioral repertoires or patterns of behaviors and competency profiling consists of identifying the broad patterns of behavior that are core to an individual in a particular job role.

These broad patterns of behavior are important to a concept of competence development. Consider a set of competencies for learning to drive. Some of those identified would probably focus on starting the car, steering, braking, speed limits, road conditions, etc. Yet, these micro skills are not enough. Learned separately, they do not add up to driving. If an individual is excellent at braking, but very poor at steering, he/she will not be a good driver. It is the ability to do all of these things well, in a smoothly integrated fashion, and at the appropriate time that constitutes driving ability. A focus on micro skills ignores the need for development of the whole—and of the judgment needed to know when to deploy skills.

Sandberg (2000), writing from an interpretive approach, defines competence as “competence is not seen as consisting of two separate entities; instead, worker and work form one entity through the lived experience of work. Competence is thus seen as constituted by the meaning the work takes on for the worker in his or her experience of it” (p. 11). Herling (in Swanson & Holton 2001) offers operational definitions of competence and expertise to illustrate why competence is no longer enough in an era of rapid, global change. The elements of expertise are knowledge, experience, and problem-solving. Drawing on research comparing the skills of novices vs. experts, advocates for the concept of expertise argue that experience is an accumulated repertoire of ways to apply knowledge and skills to solving complex organizational problems. Therefore, expertise is defined as “displayed behavior within a specialized domain and/or related domain in the form of consistently demonstrated actions of an individual that are both optimally efficient and effective in their results” (Swanson & Holton 2001: 241). To achieve this state, individuals have to have a set of competencies, experiences that hone those competencies, and judgment that enables them to choose wisely how to proceed in difficult situations.

Impact of the changing nature of work on competence development

Work is also changing in interesting ways for facilitators of workplace learning. Increasingly, we are part of work groups, working at times collectively and at times on modules that must eventually come together to be a seamless product. Even more interesting, in a global, virtual context, people want learning that is just in time, and just enough. They want to learn through designs that can be controlled and enhanced by the learner.

Baldwin and Clark (2005) argue for a design architecture that is option-rich and modular. For example, open source coding—where communities of user designers create highly effective products that defy and compete against traditional closed source coding—illustrates a fundamental shift in our thinking about innovation and about who controls the products of our inventions. It is the modularity of the design architecture that permits innovation and collaborative knowledge creation.

These toolkit designs change who can access and use the structural information that underlies much professional work. Novices have access to the same tools as those used by engineers, architects, researchers, financial analysts, even physicians. How many of you have wondered about something, and had someone immediately say “Just a minute—let me Google it.”

Creating training and knowledge management programmes that “learn” from users adding examples and prototypes, that branch into multiple training options depending on learner interests and needs, and that can be broken down into discrete units or modules related to steps in a task requires significant skill on the part of designers of workplace learning. On the other hand, they create learning opportunities for the whole organization that can grow with the talent requirements of the organization. These new learning approaches lead us away from a focus on individual competence development to a focus on organizational systems and organization competencies.

Developing core organizational competences

As scholars have tried to clarify what will address organizational capacity development, it has become clear that we need more than broad patterns of competence in individuals. Organizations have core competencies that also can be defined and developed. Garavan and McGuire (2001) say that the starting point of this perspective is that individual competencies are a core, often defining resource of organizations. From a talent development perspective, acquiring and developing individuals with critical talents enriches the core capacities of the organization. On the other hand, one could argue that the capacity to develop and deploy the talents of its members is a core capacity of organizations. The work of Watkins and Marsick (1993, 1997) on developing a learning culture is focused on developing this core competency.

“Clearly the best way for companies to win the talent wars is to turn themselves into learning organizations. The trouble is that few of them know how to do this” (The Economist 2006: 20).

Watkins and Marsick’s (1993, 1997) work focuses on creating a learning culture, one in which continuous learning is a fundamental strategy of the business. Organizations structured to promote continuous learning have a culture that: values and provides resources and tools for continuous learning opportunities for individuals; ensures opportunities for dialogue and inquiry including capturing suggestions for change and improvement; emphasizes team learning and collaboration to promote cross-unit learning; empowers people to enact a collective vision; creates systems to capture and share this learning; makes systemic connections between the organization and its environment, scanning the environment to learn and anticipate future needs; and provides leadership for learning through managers who know how to facilitate talent development of their employees and who model continuously learning themselves (Watkins & Marsick 2003).

Core competencies are the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies. … it is also about the organization of work and the delivery of value. … Core competence is communication, involvement, and a deep commitment to working across organizational boundaries. It involves many levels of people and all functions. … Unlike physical assets, which do deteriorate over time, competencies are enhance...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 The issue of competence development
• Part 2 The concept of competence
• Part 3 Competence development in different contexts
• Part 4 Competence development as a national strategy
• References
• Index