Professional Competence in Context: A Conceptual Study

• In Event: 65.078 - "Context Matters!" Antecedences of Vocational Education and Training Competencies

Abstract

In previous research an attempt has been made to structure the jungle of publications on competence and competence development (Mulder, 2011; 2014). The “competence as situated professionalism”-approach is the most current in the advancement of competence theory and research. The implied conceptual-contextual connection is visible both in theoretical underpinnings of competence and in professional contexts. A major constituent of the meaning attributed to competence in theory is the discipline, specialisation and epistemology of scientists who are using or developing competence theory. We see that this differs for 1. motivation psychology (White, 1959), in which the academic construct of competence emerged as performance motivation; 2. intelligence testing theory which showed that the predictive validity of testing for competence was higher than for testing intelligence McClelland (1973); 3. performance management theory, which indicated that competence and performance were strongly related, and that competence enables performance without necessitating an excessive amount of effort and costs (Gilbert, 1978); 4. educational science in which competence-based education was conceptualized as a system which is aimed at producing competent graduates who are certified based on demonstrated performance (Grant et al., 1979).
A major constituent of the situated professionalism-approach is the appreciation that a certain competence representation can mean something totally different for a one job holder or job situation than for another. Furthermore, important notions are that the agency of a person and the affordances of a job context (Gibson, 1979) enable the development of competence or effectivities (Shaw et al., 1982), that this approach is based on notions of situated cognition (Brown et al., 1989), the idea that the work context takes shape as a community of practice in which players interact and share and negotiate meaning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wenger et al., 2002) and that personal epistemologies (Hofer & Pintrich, 2002) have a stronger influence on professional development than mere skills training. Finally, it also acknowledges that desired competence is defined by what key stakeholders in a professional context expect in terms of professional action.

This paper is aimed at further elaborating the conceptual foundations of various competence theories and practices. The question which will be addressed is: what are the differences in the meaning of competence in varying professional contexts? This question is important because of the confusion in defining competence, which can be to a large extent be explained by the specific context in which the construct is used.

The research method is a literature review on frameworks for professional competence. They are analysed following dimensions of the competence construct like generic-specific, core-peripheral, task-behaviour, function-role, etc. More than twelve research areas will be included, e.g., medicine purchasing rural development entrepreneurship.
The major result of this analysis is that competence frameworks vary by professional context and that the context defines the functionality of these frameworks to a large extent. The paper is concluded by stating that criticism on the competence development approach needs to account for this contextual diversity, as there is no one approach.

Author

• Martin Mulder, Wageningen University