Work-based learning to acquire workplace competency

It is important to appreciate that in today’s employment market vocational students must have skills, qualities, and all-round competencies, which are portable from one job to another. All-round competencies are the key driver for a programme’s effectiveness. Previous studies have shown employers today need a wide range of abilities, skills, and accomplishments.

Our primary concern in work- based learning was that vocational education should provide students with the attributes for employability. Smith and Comyn (2003) confirm “the importance of the workplace as a site for learning and developing employability skills”. The development of employability skills plays an important part in human resource management and training plans. Lave (1991) supports the view that knowledge and skill are important to the extent that workers can apply them to real problems and situations they face everyday at work. Mayer (1992) defines the employment attributes as follows:

They are competencies essential for effective participation in the emerging patterns of work and work organization. They focus on the capacity to apply knowledge and skills in an integrated way in work situations. Key

competencies are generic in that they apply to work generally rather than being specific to work in particular ways in particular occupations or industries.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Business Council of Australia (2002) carried out an extensive enquiry into employer’s requirements for employability, and the associated skills necessary for employment. The research revealed a number of attributes or generic skills, which they preferred to term employability skills. These were described as:

skills required not only to gain employment, but also to progress within an enterprise and contribute successfully to enterprises’ strategic direction. Employability skills are also sometimes referred to as generic skills, capabilities, or key competencies.

NCVER (2003) reports the ever-increasing focus and demand by employers for generic skills in Australia and worldwide. Vocational schools increasingly must create and develop training packages1 to meet the demands of the labour market. They must focus on grooming the students to become ‘work ready’ in their generic skill capability.

However, there are variations in different countries as to what employers need in skills and attributes. Joyce (2001) encapsulates the need succinctly by suggesting:

Generic skills, soft skills, behavioural skills, enterprise skills, key

competencies, core skills, employability skills, people skills-many names for the same thing. Basically, they can be defined as those skills that are common to many vocations and are not specific to one job or industry.

1

In the Australian context a training package is an integrated set of nationally endorsed standards, guidelines and qualifications for training, assessing and recognising people’s skills, developed by industry to meet the training needs of an industry or group of industries (from the National Centre for Vocational Education and Research).

Kearns in his report (2001) (see figure 1) summarises the attributes needed by employers in four key clusters which lead to ‘personal mastery, autonomy and self direction’:

• Work readiness and work habits

• Interpersonal skills

• Enterprise, innovation and creativity skills

• Learning, thinking and adaptability skills

Figure 1 Clusters of key generic skills (Kearns, 2001)

On the other hand the pragmatic view is one which is sensible in the climate of today, that employability is about ‘gaining initial employment, maintaining employment and making transitions between jobs and obtaining new employment if required’ ( Hillage and Pollard, 1998). CBI (1999) defines the qualities and competencies which make up employabilityas: Enterprise, Innovation Creativity skills Basic skills Using technology Practicality Business & organising activities Self-management Communication Team skills Customer service Cultural understanding

♦ The interpersonal (or social)

Cluster with underpinning Personal attributes & values e.g. emotional intelligence, self understanding

♦ The cognitive cluster with

underpinning personal attributes e.g. willingness to learn

positive attitude to change & complexity mastery of mental models Enterprise Entrepreneurship Creativity Innovation Learning Thinking Analytical capability Systems thinking Adaptability Work readiness

& work habits

Interpersonal skills Learning, thinking & adaptability skills Autonomy Personal mastery Self direction

Values and attitudes compatible with work opportunities Basic skills

Defined core skills Customer service skills

Up-to-date job-specific skills and knowledge, and career management skills.

Vocational education tries to keep abreast with the labour market trends. The volatile nature of the market makes it difficult to cover the full range of competencies in technical proficiency. How can work-based learning serve that demand?

Work-based learning can help students acquire generic workplace skills—skills and competencies that are required for most jobs, as distinct from technical knowledge (SCANS, 1991). Generic skills comprise: problem-solving, communications, and teamwork (Stasz, McArthur, Lewis and Ramsey, 1990; Stasz, Ramsey, Eden, Da Vanzo, Farris and Lewis, 1993; Stasz et al., 1996).

However, the issue of how generic skills should be taught is complex. I am persuaded by Dawe (2002) who concludes from the research that generic skills training and technical skills training should be integrated. She reasons that the integration of generic and technical proficiencies makes both mutually dependent and relevant to one another in the workplace context. Moreover, seeing how generic skills relate to the job has a motivating effect. She believes a careful balance of work experiences and learning strategies are essential to produce the desired technical, generic, and transferability of skills to new environments. Waterhouse and Virgona (2004) support this view and emphasise:

Generic skills are those which transfer across vocational areas to enable individuals to work effectively with others, to contribute to the organisation and to achieve personal satisfaction.

They also make the point in their report that there is not one list of generic skills that is common to all work functions.

However, most commentators agree that the role of teachers and trainers is critical in providing effective training packages to develop the appropriate generic workplace skills (Callan 2003, Waterhouse and Virgona, 2004).

Our study revealed that employers expect the vocational school to play a major role in training and preparing students with the appropriate work-ready attributes (Gibb, 2004). We were aware that there is an urgent need to train our teachers to be able to develop adult learning strategies in generic skill pedagogy (Callan, 2003; Sanguinetti et al., 2004). The professional development of teaching staff is crucial to be able to promote the importance of generic skills, and ensure students understand their relevance in the context of employment (Callan, 2003; Sanguinetti et al., 2004). However, a cautionary note should be recorded about the role of the vocational school. Increasingly it has been asked to supply students with the skills and attributes determined by the employers. Payne (2000) and Kincheloe (1999) are critical of the power employers wield over vocational institutions. This view is supported by Virgona et al., (2003) citing Payne who warns that “We have reached a point…where skill means whatever employers and policy makers want it to mean”(Payne 2000). Some commentators point out that there are employers who seek ‘aesthetic labour’, where hairstyle, dress, accent, and body shape are pre-determined requirements. The VET sector has to ensure that it resists the more extreme employer driven demands to avoid accusations of inequality and discrimination. As Payne warns:

Not only does this promise to cast the VET system in a new and unfamiliar role of speech training and personal grooming ‘makeovers’, but the fact that individuals may be expected to have their personal and class based identities re-engineered in this way raises major ethical concerns (Payne 2000).

Training packages are acknowledged in the literature (Gibb, 2004) as an effective method to incorporate and deliver generic skills. Tess Julian (2004) in her

contribution to Generic skills in vocational education and training-Research readings

(Gibb, 2004) looked at various strategies to promote generic skills learning. She described how ‘dedicated’ and ‘embedded’ units are used as models for teaching

generic skills. Both models teach exclusively a generic skill function. In the embedded unit model the generic skill function is incorporated into the technical application or the work function.

An innovative strategy for teaching generic skills, developed in the United States by Alverno College is that of self-assessment (Denton, 2004). This approach has been adopted by Torrens Valley TAFE in South Australia. Learners assess their own competence in a given generic skill. Teachers then validate the assessment which gives it the authenticity and recognition the student requires. Giving learners the responsibility and control of their own learning including assessment is an established educational benefit and according to Loaker (2000) at Alverno College the ability to make self-assessments generates further learning and a capacity to switch their learning into new contexts. Denton (2004) believes generic skills are more

effectively absorbed through flexible learning, and giving the learner“empowerment to discover for himself the generic skills he must acquire in the workplace, the community, and in life”.