Phil Rutherford

CBT at the edge of Chaos

Finding the room was the first test!
Should we push competence further, not just skills, knowledge and attitudes to perform to the work tasks, or rather should it be pushed to encompass the "emergent and evolutionary ability to adapt to one's skills and knowledge to meet emerging and ever changing situations"? I suppose to some extent this depends on how much you push the contingency management and transfer dimensions of competency. In a workshop with staff last week there was discussion about the fact that the transfer dimension of competency has been removed as a specific dimension as it should be built in as part of competency. So what Phil is talking about are the employability skills that incorporate problem solving, decision making, team work, reflection, adaptation of processes to suit local contexts. Is Phil's definition of competence more about lifelong learning and conscious self and professional development than competence? More about effective workplace behaviour?

We are training for known processes and contexts, but need to be looking more at 'knowable' (yet to be known) context and process. moving from a controlled and stable workplace to an uncontrolled and unstable workplace. More problem solving than decision making happening in the workplace, or when moving to more uncontrolled, shifts to troubleshooting. So how then do we train for this reality?
Argues that the Training Packages focus on known process and context, with stable environments. While I'm listening I'm thinking about some of the units in newer training packages that include things such as personal career development, and how we are approaching some units as more focussed on development and application of research and communication skills rather than product knowledge. In that last example we are not just focussing on the learners knowing how to identify a product, but within the activities the learner is required to research products, competitor's products and customer needs. I guess though the development of the delivery model has required a critical rethink about the training.

Employability skills featured in the questions to begin with. Phil obviously feels that the current talk and action about employability skills is not sufficient. Some doubt about whether we know what we mean about learning to learn.

Difficulty of Phil's definition of competence is that we may not be able to assess it through workplace behaviour. Perhaps competence is the base, and then capability is the further step? Competence is present, and then capability is furture based.
In some ways this was a strange presentation - challenging the definition of competence and suggesting an alternative definition did not really do anything for me. It felt removed from actual practice in VET today. I think it was some of the grand sweeping statements that really bugged me as they felt dismissive.