The recently started ICOPER project organized a workshop at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) on December 4, 2008. The organizers managed to assemble most of the European projects dealing with competencies. The project aims at kicking off and fostering a standardization effort for a semantically enriched standard on competency-related issues, geared towards employability processes. MATURE’s scientific coordinator Andreas Schmidt participated in and contributed to the workshop.

While in general this is a good idea and could boost competency-oriented approaches, the discussions also showed hot areas:

• What is a competency? What is the difference between competence and competency? What is its relationship to performance, capability, potential? And to activities (a term used in the German DIN proposal)?`
• To what extent does an exchange standard make sense if we don’t have (and probably never will have) competency standards? Or will we have?
  • For some of the participants, factoring out context out of competencies was key.
  • For others – more to the MATURE direction – competency definitions are social artefacts under constant negotiation.
• Competency-orientation of universities was also seen critical: is the sole mission of the university to build up competencies needed for workplace performance?

The ICOPER project set up a Google site to collect the materials. 

So the competency topic remains exciting, and we will definitely stay on board.