Who Forms You Competent? Defining and Developing a Competency Framework for HE Lecturers

Abstract

There is quite a distance between the actionable knowledge, the actually developed skills and competences, and the formally defined aims of most kinds of training. This conflict inspired the business sector to formulate new approaches that promote a better development of working skills instead of merely having a certificate. All these led to the need of the reformulation of education, and, as a consequence of that, to redefine HE lecturers’ competences. The skill policy in the EU as well as the OECD skill strategy both provide a firm background to renewing the competence requirements in HE, targeting the improvement of teaching quality. The RDI project conducted by the author’s team focused on identifying the relevant competences of lecturers. This paper gives an insight to what kind of differences were identified among the views of students, lecturers and the representatives of the labour market regarding the content and the importance of HE lecturers’ competences. It also provides a method for how these competences were measured with the application of a professional HR model (RDA, Role Diagrammatic Approach). Finally, the paper provides an overview of the main conclusions drawn from the experiences of the development process as well as from a survey; also, it provides recommendations that were formed on the basis of the RDI project.

Keywords: Skill Strategy, Competences of HE Lecturers, HR Model (RDA), Quality of Teaching

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100382