Comments on: Competence concepts and competence transfer

By: asimong

asimong — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:04:19 +0000

Thanks, Simone, that looks like a good example of a coarse-grained set of generic / employability / key skills. One of the things I don’t see is a clear rationale for the assignment of level values. Yes there are different levels, but how are the different levels defined and differentiated?

By: Simone Laughton

Simone Laughton — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 03:00:15 +0000

Hi Simon,

Thought you might be interested in a project that Human Resources and Skills Development Canada has completed on Essential Skills. This is in response to thoughts expressed on your blog regarding skills that may be common across different disciplines.

http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/essential_skills/general/understanding_es.shtml

Hope this helps lead to further discussion …

By: asimong

asimong — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:59:58 +0000

Dominik – thanks for your interest and I very much agree with you. General management may indeed be like problem solving – and who knows (who has even researched?) how much of that ability transfers from one domain to another.

Phil – you make good points, thanks! What I was trying to get at here was just a reasonable starting point. The common ground between the two things you distinguish is, perhaps, that if you assess a competence in one domain, that is to some extent predictive of a competence in another domain, and that can happen either because they are common or key skills, or because what is learned for one purpose is useful for another purpose.

After further conversation with Phil (thanks!) I’d like to say that when I talk about “transfer”, really I don’t want to commit to any theory behind that, but rather (and this addresses also some of Dominik’s points) it is “merely” the observation of a correlation between ability in one area and ability in another. Calling it “transfer” does seem to imply some model of how it happens (which Dominik is quite right to call into question) which I don’t actually want to imply. I’ve edited the first paragraph to reflect this.

By: Phil Barker

Phil Barker — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:49:57 +0000

Simon, I’m wondering to what extent we could distinguish between “competence transfer” and “broadly applicable competences”. Some of what is described as competence transfer, the key skills, seems to me to be competences that relate to very broad situations (where I guess the broadest is “being human”). Actual competence transfer, i.e. what an engineer might bring to horticulture, may be much more interesting, but is probably not relevant to defining what it means to be a competent horticulturist or engineer.

By: Dominik Lukes

Dominik Lukes — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:02:45 +0000

This is a great start but I think we need to critique the whole theory of competence and competency transfer. There may be indeed skills/competencies which are the same across all fields of competence, let’s say typing or spelling (allowing for differences in vocabulary in different domains). But competencies at the most abstract end of the spectrum are much more problematic (even more than those that are very specific like hip replacement). Things like ‘critical thinking’, higher mathematical reasoning, management skills, marketing, etc. may or may not transfer to other fields of competence. Some people are better at transferring skills but most are not. For instance, many successful ‘general managers’ did a good job of dealing with schools but just as many crashed and burned. In fact many of the assumptions behind the ‘education as a business’ metaphor proved to be just so much voodoo.

There’s also a certain limit on the power of commonality between fields. In my experience, very often the surface closeness may hide fundamental differences and actually hinder transfer.