Based on OVAL Research Working Papers 03-12 and 03-14
The Australian Centre for Organisational , Vocational and Adult Learning (OVAL)
University of Technology, Sydney

The two working papers produced by the Australian Centre for Organisational, Vocational and Adult Learning raised a number of issues. This article focuses on just a few: why the contemporary work environment is demanding a new definition of competence that includes attributes; tensions between underpinning assumptions of competency standards and training packages and the emerging notion of collective competence; and the challenge for VET to think in terms of work-conducive learning.

The following is a brief summary and discussion of these three issues as presented in the OVAL papers.

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Some distinctive characteristics are emerging in contemporary organisations. One is the increasing tendency towards shorter term employment. As a result, employers are more frequently recruiting employees who are ready for work with non-organization specific skill-sets and capabilities that can quickly be adapted to new organisational settings.

Another emerging characteristic is almost constant internal restructuring and changes to the way work is done. “When workers are asked to do things differently in their work they are also being called on to become different workers. That is, to have different understandings of their role, to have different relationships with work colleagues and managers, to conceptualize their vocational knowledge and skills differently; in short, to change their identity at work” As a result, the attributes of workers become equally if not more important than the technical skills they may have.

“This means that contemporary VET must change from a traditional focus on developing skills to an equal focus on developing people. This change of focus demands different pedagogical strategies in which learners take greater responsibility for determining what is to be learnt and are involved in all aspects of the learning process including negotiating content, choice of learning strategy, assessment and evaluation.”

One of the central pillars of the Australian Quality Training Framework is the codification of skills in the form of competencies and an accompanying obsession on evidence-based assessment. This is in tension with the demand by organisations for workers to be more than just technically skilled bodies; to be able to re-invent themselves as their work and work environment change.

This tension demands a new definition-in-practice of competence that recognises competence is more than technical skill; it MUST include attributes and is context dependent.

“Current pedagogical practices were shaped to accommodate the introduction of competency standards, training packages and the post-1990 focus on evidence-based assessment. As a result they tend not to be conducive to the development of the type of attributes being increasingly demanded by employers.” Despite some shifts towards learner centredness and work-based learning, the predominant feature of VET in Australia remains a focus on skills development by individuals with little or no attention being paid to the development of those attributes sought by employers.

“An analysis of the main features of training packages identified by ANTA and cited by Dawe (2002 p.13) reveals that the learning process is not a central focus at the development stage [of the training package].

Competency standards and training packages tend to assume:

• Descriptions of work can be generalised for particular jobs or occupations.
• A degree of stability in terms of the work skills required and consistency in terms of the requirements different employers demand of workers.
• Vertical career mobility rather than horizontal mobility and standard jobs rather than non-standard jobs.
• The primacy of technical skills over generic employment skills
• The needs of enterprises and the needs of industry sectors are similar.

These assumptions under-emphasise the context dependent nature of competence. That is that competence is derived from the workers lived experience of work and competence is a process that emerges as workers experience work. Therefore, competence is not context free but is situationally dependent.

Competency standards focus on what individuals need to do in order to be considered competent. As a result, pedagogical practices also focus on developing individual competence. However, recent changes to work and the organisation of work, is shifting the emphasis from individual to collective competence – the product of the interaction of people at work.

The role of the group or collective as the basis for learning is increasingly being seen as important because although employees come and go, learned norms, behaviours and values persist in organisations. In conditions where employees are less ‘permanent’, organisational learning enables individual learning to be retained within an organisation.”

Collective competence helps explain the notion of organisational or corporate knowledge and why this continues to exist even after key individuals leave an organisation. If knowledge and skills resided only in individuals, the movement of staff in, around and out of an organisation would result in significant losses in continuity. However, such movements more often result in the growth of organisational knowledge.

If learning is thought of as a function of the activity, culture and context in which it occurs, institution-based learning can quite clearly not, on its own, be responsible for the development of competence. Similarly, if competence is thought of as collective rather than individual, the workplace becomes the primary site for learning.

“Individual learning continues to be critical not only because of its influence on the individual’s own work performance, but also because such learning can be shared and used by others, thus expanding the [collective competence] organisational learning/corporate memory.”

These ideas present a significant challenge for VET where learning continues to be seen as an individual activity and assessment continues to focus on the competence individuals. The VET system doesn’t yet recognise collective learning and collective competence and has no mechanism to assess it.

Collective competence, by definition, can only be acquired through work. After all, it is a function of the interactions of people at work. It makes sense then that the development of collective competence would be significantly enhanced by making work learning-conducive. Learning-conducive work comes about by managing aspects of the workplace environment.
“Primary responsibility for organising work to be more learning-conducive lies with the organisation. Hence, VET’s capacity to lead change in this regard is substantially constrained. However, VET can take a lead role in re-organising vocational learning to be more work-conducive (ie work-conducive learning).”

The VET system can’t directly support the lifelong learning of every adult throughout their working career. Hence organising learning in ways that explicitly contribute to workplace productivity will be essential to encourage the business sector to help resource vocational learning.

“The challenge for VET providers is to organise learning in ways that are more work-conducive. This may involve integrating, where possible, existing organisational learning strategies into learning programs and developing teaching and learning practices as well as targeting learning outcomes that add more direct and obvious value to the enterprise involved.”

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In summary, the three main issues raised in the Oval paper are as follows.

1. The contemporary work environment is demanding a new definition of competence that includes attributes. As employment becomes more temporary and workers move from environment to environment (or have their environment change around them), more important than specific skills will be generic and employability skills as well as other qualities, attitudes and dispositions that allow the individual to adapt.

2. There are tensions between underpinning assumptions of competency standards and training packages and the emerging notion of collective competence. The current VET system is based on assumptions about individual competence and certain stabilities in the workplace. However, the contemporary work environment is not stable and relies more on collective competence.

3. The challenge for VET is to think in terms of work-conducive learning. Organisations will need to take a lead role in developing learning-conducive work while VET providers need to re-organise learning to be work-conducive. These complementary changes will bring about a closer relationship between VET, workers, and organisations, and will enable the previous two issues to be more adequately addressed.