Defining Competences: Skills for Career Success

Understanding Competences and Skills

Defining Competences

What are competences or skills?

• They are what make people competent: the prerequisites for effective action.
• They should take into account all general and specific knowledge, skills, and motivations needed for effective action.

Action Categories for Graduates

According to Allen, Ramaekers, and van der Velden (2005), higher education graduates may find themselves in nine primary action categories:

• Directing productive tasks
• Directing the work of others
• Planning
• Coordination
• Control
• Innovation
• Information management
• Maintaining relations with personnel
• Maintaining relations with clients

Types of Competences: General and Specific

General Competences Explained

General competences can be applied across a range of contexts and content areas. Examples include: intelligence, information-processing methods, and key competences.

They are crucial for long-term employability because:

• They contribute directly to productivity.
• They help transfer existing specific competences to new areas.
• They facilitate acquiring new specific competences for evolving work situations.

Specific Competences Unpacked

Specific competences refer to clusters of cognitive prerequisites that an individual requires to perform adequately in a given substantive area (Weinert, 2001). An example includes the skills required to make a medical diagnosis.

• They are specialized tasks associated with particular jobs.
• They are important because they can offer strong productivity gains in the short term.
• However, they are prone to lose value over time due to technological changes and shifts in labor demand.

Competences: Policy and Economic Relevance

Policy Context: Youth Unemployment Solutions

To decrease youth unemployment, one of the primary solutions promoted by major institutions involves:

• Empowering youth with entrepreneurial skills.
• Creating a fertile economic environment for firm creation, thereby reducing the gap between education and the job market.

Productive Competences & Higher Education

Productive competences of university graduates are counted as part of their human capital stock. Furthermore:

• They are taught to facilitate their job matching and increase their wages.
• Higher stocks of productive skills are necessary in the growing advanced knowledge economies.
• The labor market success or failure of university graduates, apart from their wage, is often determined by the quality of their education-job match.
• There is a need to enhance the production of entrepreneurial skills within higher education institutions, leading to concepts like the Triple Helix Model.

The Triple Helix Model postulates that universities can play an enhanced role in innovation in increasingly knowledge-based societies.