Download the PCM

 

The TENCompetence project is developing a Personal Competence Manager (PCM), and will pilot this in authentic contexts. In this briefing we clarify the TENCompetence vision of a PCM.

 

What is a competence?

The concept of competence has many different definitions and has many facets. In the TENCompetence project our view of competences is as follows:

1. A competence is a disposition of an actor

2. A competence can be attributed to individuals, teams and organisations

3. A competence is situational

4. A competence is a latent attribute

5. A competence is identified and defined in a community of practice

Let's look at these aspects one by one.

 

Competence as a disposition

In the TENCompetence project, a competence is seen as a necessary ability of an actor to act effectively and efficiently to cope with certain problems, events or tasks in a situation (an occupation, a hobby, a market, a sport, etc.). Handling any given situation requires a number of different competences. This set of necessary competences is called the competence profile for the situation. People act in many different situations during their lives. For instance this week you may have repaired a fence, planted some trees in the garden, worked as a sales person at a company during work time and played a song at the piano at wedding party. Each of these situations requires a different set of competences to deal with the events in the situation. This means that throughout their life everyone is developing and maintaining different competence profiles at various proficiency levels for each of the situations in which they are active.

Cheetham and Chivers (2005)¹ make a distinction between different classes of competences, and we have adopted this in the project:

1. cognitive competence (knowledge)

2. functional competence (skills or competencies)

3. personal competence (e.g. intelligence, flexibility)

4. ethical competence (attitudes)

5. trans-/metacompetences (e.g. communication skills)

Competence as an attribute of individuals, teams and organisations

A competence can be attributed to an individual person, but also to a team or to an organisation (e.g. the ability of an organisation to cope with new market demands effectively and efficiently).

 

Competence as a situational concept

A competence is highly situational in nature, a construct which is attributed to the relationship between an individual, team or organisation, and the events in their environment. Many situations are also social in character with many different persons, interacting with each other with different goals and behaviours. For instance in a shop people adopt a variety of roles: a customer, a shop assistant and a shop manager, each with specific goals and competence profiles. The interactions between these roles and the goods which are bought and sold are highly complex in nature. In defining a competence, we are typically defining the typical problems or tasks which a role has to cope with. For instance: a proficient shop assistant must be able to: answer questions of the customers about the goods, be able to make customers enthusiastic in buying some of the goods, be able to communicate with the customers, etc. Some of these competences are highly specific and others are transferable to more general situations.

 

Competence as a latent attribute

Another aspect of competence is that it is a latent characteristic of an actor: it is not directly visible nor measurable. Only the concrete activities (performances) of an actor are visible. From these performances we infer the latent characteristics. Note that the competence that is inferred from the performances includes also future activities that the actor has never demonstrated. For instance when we ask an architect to design a house for us, we know that s/he has never designed a house according to our specific requirements: the result is a unique solution. At the same time, we are quite sure that s/he is able to cope with our situation. This inference of competence has been made on various grounds: we have looked at other houses s/he has designed and the general educational background of the architect. Added to this are the impressions gathered in discussions with the architect before awarding them the project.

 

Competence are defined in communities of practice

The specific labels we give to competences are determined in a community of practice, i.e. all the participants who are regular actors in that particular situation. This has many implications, e.g. the competence profiles for the same profession may vary from community to community even though the required behaviours are exactly the same. For instance, the competence profiles for dentists in Bulgaria may be completely different from the ones defined in Holland or the UK, even if the tasks, instruments and patients are largely identical. Another consequence of this stance is that we should not try to identify global competence profiles for professions (other than some minimal set of indicators), but rather we need to map the profiles of the different communities onto each other. Lastly it follows that there is a need to setup observatories in the different communities where the competences of the community can be discussed, changed, renewed, etc. according to the changing every day requirements.

 

Why managing competences is complex and challenging

Competences are managed at many different levels in formal definitions, profiles, needs and development plans.

• a person

• a job

• an organisation

• a profession

• a sector

• a state

The descriptions of these competences may be complex and extensive, and a person who wants to make sense of the overall picture at any given level of granularity is confronted with a demanding task. This is task is even more complex if it involves more than one level, for example a human resources manager may have to look up to a higher level analyse the position of her company in the sector, and then explain the resulting competence development strategy to the employees in her organisation.

Taking a simpler example which does not involve multiple levels the tasks which are involved are still complex. Someone seeking to improve her competence profile has to:

 

• Find a place which defines the competence profile and competences which will enable her to meet her personal development goals

• Map her present competence profile onto the competences that she has identified

• Identify competence development opportunities which will enable her to acquire the additional competences which she needs.

• Select and carry out a set of competence development programmes

• Present her competence profile to prospective employers

The limitations of existing solutions

Valuable work has been done to provide methodologies and tools which support these processes, and they can help a great deal. They are limited, however, by being oriented to institutions which are responsible for generating and managing the information, rather than to the learner. These institutions include examining bodies, professional organisations, education systems, human resources departments, employment agencies, and so on. As a result the user is given the responsibility for keeping track of and coordinating all the sources, documents and activities which enable her to move this process forward.

This is not a satisfactory solution, because

• The way in which competence profiles, descriptions and development opportunities are presented varies greatly, and may cause confusion

• The user has to use a number of different applications to carry out the various different activities. These will involve managing a number of different identities, and perhaps using a number of different applications.

• Formally described competence acquisition is separated from informal competence development, participation in communities of practice, etc.

• Competence acquisition becomes something which is done when the learner remembers to go to one of a series of locations, rather than being a coordinating framework for daily activities

In dealing with this variety the user is at best confronted with a high cognitive load which may discourage her from pursuing a competence oriented approach, or, at worst, an impossibly complex task. We may reasonably ask why this problem remains unresolved. There are two powerful factors which sustain the current situation.

1. It would be an enormous undertaking to create a single application or integrated suite of applications which could provide a single solution for the whole range of competence development tasks. This would have to have all the functionality of a traditional Learning Management System, plus a great deal of additional specifically related to defining, exchanging and meeting competence development needs.

2. A unified system would inevitably impose a more restricted representation of competences than those available in currently available isolated applications, and this would in all probability be unacceptable to many user groups.

How TENCompetence addresses these problems

The Personal Competence Manager uses a service based architecture to create a system which can addresses the above points by:

1. gathering together competence related information drawn from sources at multiple levels. This means that there is no longer any need to create a single integrated system.

2. presenting and editing the information in a context, structure and format which is determined by the user.

It should be noted that the word “personal” here does not mean that the system is primarily focused on the representation and manipulation of competence information at the level of the individual person who has a competence development need. Rather it indicates that the different levels of competence related information (profiles, competence development networks, competence development plans) are presented in a way which is consistent with the individual users’ personal view of the domain. Thus the system is personal for the author of competence development programmes as much as it is personal for the participant in those programmes.

Similarly use of the term “competence development” does not mean that the system is focused only on the development of competences. Indeed the PCM can be seen as a environment which unifies the processes of representing competences, planning competence development programmes, and coordinating competence development networks, as well as facilitating competence development activities.

The system consists of servers which manage the competence development information (profiles, paths, development activities…) and an aggregator which brings together the information from the various servers, adds a presentation layer, and provides tools which the user can use to manipulate it.

 

Why the TENCompetence PCM is socially significant, not just a technical solution

The motivation for building this system is not simply technical satisfaction, but rather a vision of society in which people are empowered to take control of their own personal development and Life Long Competence Development. The purpose of the system (and the association) is, in the final analysis, to enable this attitude and practice by providing appropriate tooling. The functionality provided by the Personal Competence Manager which makes this possible is set out in the following table.

 

Supported by all Competence based systems	Additional features added in a Personal Competence Manager
Competence information remains on isolated institutional servers	Competence information aggregated and presented to the user
Competence development plans created and managed “top down”.	Personal development of competence development plans
Institutional context represented	Institutional, social and personal space represented
Institutionally driven competence development plans are strongly linked to the needs of individual organisational. This leads to an inflexible workforce.	Personally driven competence development maximises flexibility in the workforce. It also contributes to personal enrichment & personal fulfilment.
Users find it convenient to work with a single provider of competence development programmes	Users are supported in working with a variety of competence development programmes from different sources.

 

 

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