Understanding the Competencies

David developed a data collection tool for acquiring information from the  key informant companies, which I am continuing to use with firms. The tool was designed to collect a lot of information about job descriptions and competences required for people to be able to do the work required in job descriptions.

So what does it mean?!

Cognitive competence – This involves intellectual abilities, from the most basic “knowing” of facts to the more sophisticated intellectual abilities of coming up with (synthesizing) new knowledge and evaluating existing knowledge.  The cognitive levels are knowledge (level 1), comprehension (level 2), application (level 3), analysis (level 4), synthesis (level 5) and evaluation (level 6).

Behavioural competence – Involves skills that involve some kind of manual dexterity, from the most basic “guided response” of an action (imitation or following an instruction) to the more sophisticated psychomotor skills of origination (creative proficiency).  The behavioural levels start with guided response (level 1), followed by mechanism (level 2), complex overt response (level 3), adaptation (level 4) and origination (level 5).

Affective competence – These  competencies affect people’s attitudes and values, from the most basic “Receiving phenomena” of an attitude or value (open to experience, willing to hear) to the more sophisticated values of “Internalising values” (adopt belief system and philosophy).   The affective levels start with receiving phenomena (level 1) , followed by responding to phenomena (level 2), valuing (level 3), organisation (level 4)and internalising values (level 5).

We are also interested in how essential a competence is to an employer.  This ranges from the most necessary – Need to Learn (N2L), follwed by Good to Learn (G2L) and then Nice to Know (N2K).

If you have any questions about this please get in touch.

SRC Data Collection

I’ve been working to get a data collection tool for acquiring information from my key informant companies. The tool will collect a lot of information about job descriptions and competences required for people to be able to do the work required in job descriptions.

I looked at a lot of approaches to collecting the data – databases, spreadsheets and so on. The danger was becoming obsessed with the technology approach to data collection. Office 2007 has all sorts of new tools on it, but actually building an electronic form with a complex series of if-then-else statements on it was more time consuming than actually simply writing words down on a form in Word.

So I’ve created a simple form that will allows me to gather data by quick transcription similar to forms I used when I collected outcome and objectives data at Academee. I am also creating a briefing document to be used with my informants to guide them on the language of learning (different to the language of “doing the job”) and how we’ll collect the data. The third document is a rewrite of the paper I wrote 9 years ago on Bloom’s 3 domains of learning, which is the basis of our competence collection tool.

The next job is to get a date when all firms can come and join us to try and understand the approach to data collection.

ProDev Day 2008

Our 2nd ProDev Day took place last Wednesday at MMU, and this seemed to be another great success. Feedback from the event from both students and employers has been fantastic and it looks like it should be the sort of thing that should be a permanent feature on the calendar.

More than 500 students came ot the event with 50 Digital professionals talking and sharing their passion for their careers and roles in their organisations.

Supporting Responsive Curricula: Start-up Meeting

Robin Johnson (Project Manager for the SRC project across the University), Nicola Whitton (Evaluation Team for SRC across the University) and I attended the Start-up Event at Eynsham Hall in Oxford on Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th October. Aside from learning about how our programme fits in, it also gave us a chance to look at some of the other projects that won bids from JISC.

Of particular importance was how closely some projects from other Northern Universities fitted with ours, and so we agreed to create a kind of Northern Consortium of project workers. This puts us in touch with teams of workers at Staffordshire, Leeds Metropolitan and Bolton. The common themes for our project lay around our students having common backgrounds and the cities having similar challenges.