Redefining Competency Based Education

Competence for Life

Nina Jones Morel, Bruce Griffiths

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781631578991
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631579004
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Redefining Competency-Based Education provides an expanded definition of career competence, based on actual employer hiring and promotion requirements, which enhances university curricula to better prepare students for work and life.

Readers will learn how private sector competency models have evolved to define criteria for hiring, promoting, and training talent. The authors contrast these models with classic university practices to document a historic academic preference for technical preparation over the so-called soft skills valued by employers. This book outlines techniques for measuring and developing soft skills that provide significant advantage in career success, and shares examples of universities that have successfully implemented these concepts.

CHAPTER 1

Defining Competence for Life

Humans do things, and they typically do them well or not-so-well. Most of the motivation for things we do is to survive or to thrive. We work, we eat, we create shelter, we love, we fight, we make art, we rear children, we form communities, we worship, and we celebrate. In each of these things we do in life, we have roles. Our roles are economic, civic, familial, and personal. We are parents, children, spouses, citizens, chiefs, artists, doctors, lawyers, bricklayers, plumbers—sometimes many of these things at once. For each of these roles that we perform, there are specific knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes that are necessary to perform the tasks assigned to those roles. These are competencies. This has not changed over millennia. What has changed is the complexity surrounding each of these basic human occupations and the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes required to be competent in them.

In the world of human resources (HR), a differentiation is typically made between general competencies (often called soft skills) and technical competencies. This differentiation is not always clear, because some technical competencies of the past, like using a computer and basic software, have become so ubiquitous that they are now considered general baseline competencies, even though they are not soft skills. Within the general competencies, however, there is a group of skills and attitudes that are becoming more and more important. They are called by various names—soft skills, 21st-century skills, non-cognitive skills, cross-cutting skills—skills that the authors consider competencies for life.

Competencies for life (soft skills) prepare one for roles in all aspects of life, not just the workplace. But more importantly, they are useful over the span of a long career, no matter the context, and become even more important as workers advance from frontline to leadership roles.

In the not-so-distant past, a person could personally perform every role in the production of a product or the delivery of a service. A ...

Table of contents

• cover
• halftitle
• Title
• copyright
• Abstract
• Contents
• ForeWord
• Ack
• Introduction
• 01_Chapter 01
• 02_Chapter 02
• 03_Chapter 03
• 04_Chapter 04
• 05_Chapter 05
• 06_Notes
• 07_References
• 08_Bios
• 09_Index
• 10_Adpage