International Perspectives on Competence in the Workplace

In the future a more competent workforce will be required as workers will have to acquire the competence to predict and deal with novel situations at work. This book aims to provide the reader with insightful perspectives about competence in different situations and contexts. It presents a more enlightened view of human competence by opening up an international dialogue about the meaning and interpretation of competence in the workplace, and the impact of learning environments on workplace policy and practice. Five major premises which provide a basis for how we interpret, experience, and teach competence in the workplace are put forward: notions of worker competence, and the persuasiveness of informal workplace training; developing competence as an individual, and the inherent relationship between the worker and work, and the lifeworld; learning which develops higher level competences based on a more holistic conception of competence; characteristics of learning environments as integral components of learning at work; learning environments construed as theoretical and methodological problems in terms of their impact on the acquisition of competence.