BASIC
COMPETENCES NEEDED FOR THE WORK MARKET
The
information society has brought a change in the productive activities
and services, now they are more complex.
There
is now a new way to understand ways of organizing functions and tasks
for workers in a company. The demands have also changed to get the
work market to overcome the mere academic training and accumulation
of titles.
They
require the workers to be competent, that's to say that "they
know how to do things" and that they are motivated to learn new
things, besides having the minimum knowledge to confront the task.
A
correct definition of competence is:
“Work
competence is the capacity of an individual which is defined and measured
in terms of performance in determined work contexts, and not only
in knowledge, distress or abstract skills. Competence is the integration
between knowing, knowing-how and knowing who to be".
Agustín
Ibarra
There
are three types of work competences:
Basic competences: these are the minimum
requirements that most jobs require. They refer to all of those skills
and the knowledge that you need to carry out the majority of jobs.
Although there are always exceptions and there are differences between
different professions. Experts agree that today the basic competences
are:
Ability to speak another language
Know and be able to apply information
technology (surfing the net, processing texts...)
Knowledge of law and economics so that
you can fulfil a productive task (rights, obligations...)
Professional competences: these are
a mixture of skills and knowledge related to a particular job position.
An administrator is required to know how to use certain programmes,
accounting.....These types of competences, therefore are different
for each occupation.
Transversal Competences: skills and
knowledge which are not specifically related to a professional activity.
You state them for different occupations, and they are more to do
with the way you carry out your work. Those which have more impact
in the work place are those that are related to other people: we talk
about our capacity to work in a team, problem solving and negotiating.
Many
problems that people have when faced with maintaining a job are explained
by their lack of these competences, which are more social competences
than work competences.