Lesson 5

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

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.