The discursive construction of the ‘competent’ learner-worker: from key competencies to ‘employability skills’1

This paper is drawn from an Australian Research Council funded project (2002–4), ‘Changing Work, Changing Workers, Changing Selves: A Study of Pedagogies in the New Vocationalism’. The chief investigators are Clive Chappell, Nicky Solomon, Mark Tennant and Lyn Yates, all of the University of Technology, Sydney.

Abstract

The subjectivity of workers, articulated in terms of the personal attributes required in ongoing conditions of economic change, has been at the forefront of current discussions of generic skills in Australia. This article explores the discursive construction and reconstruction of the ‘competent’ learner-worker from its initial elaboration in the Mayer Committee's 1992 report on Key Competencies to its re-specification in contemporary reports concerned with developing a new framework of ‘employability skills’. I argue that various theories of subjectivity necessarily (if implicitly) mobilized in any consideration of the personal attributes of learner-workers generate confusion around their learnability. I suggest that a nature/nurture dichotomy haunts past and present discussions about the personal attributes of learner-workers and that this will likely create stumbling blocks as policy makers and educators attempt to codify personal attributes for the purposes of including them in training programs. Apart from its conceptual problematics and incongruities, the whole project of specifying the desired personal attributes of learner-workers and making these available for assessment against competency standards is necessarily a normalizing exercise. As such, the project will be subject to refusal, resistance, contestation, or appropriation in various ways by educators, trainers and worker-learners alike.

Notes

This paper is drawn from an Australian Research Council funded project (2002–4), ‘Changing Work, Changing Workers, Changing Selves: A Study of Pedagogies in the New Vocationalism’. The chief investigators are Clive Chappell, Nicky Solomon, Mark Tennant and Lyn Yates, all of the University of Technology, Sydney.

The reports are Peter Kearns (2001), Review of research: generic skills for the new economy; David Curtis and Phillip McKenzie (2001), Employability skills for Australian industry: literature review and framework development; and ACCI/BCA (2002), Employability skills for the future.

See, for instance, Rose (1999), du Gay (1996) and Gee et al. (1996).

Particularly, in the United Kingdom, the NCVQ Core Skills and, in the United States, ASTD/DOL Workplace basics: the skills employers want (1988); subsequently taken up in the Secretary of the Department of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report (1991). This latter report's list of generic skills includes ‘personal qualities’ such as individual responsibility, self-esteem, self-management, sociability, integrity and honesty (cited in Kearns, 2001, p. 13).

Note that ‘team skills’ itself was the only one of the Finn Committee's ‘personal and interpersonal characteristics’ that fell within the definition of a Key Competency on the Mayer Committee's test.

According to Kearns (2001, p. 27), these included the 1999 formulation of the Australian National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-first Century, for example, which included personal qualities such as self-confidence, optimism, high self-esteem. These goals were taken up by the Prime Minister's Youth Pathways Action Plan Taskforce (2001).

Particularly, for Kearns, the revised British key skills which now included personal attributes and values (National Skills Task Force, 2000), Employability Skills 2000+ (Canada) and the OECD's DeSeCo project.

See Reich (2002) for a discussion of how the problematization of longstanding industrial relations arrangements and work practices, and notions of the ‘skilled worker’ associated with these, was a necessary prelude to industry restructuring in the 1980s. See a similar argument in Usher (1997).

Kearns’ construction of the desired personal attributes draws heavily on the OECD's DeSeCo project. While I refer to the official publications from the project, published after Kearns’ report, all the relevant background papers and discussions were available on the DeSeCo project's Web site at the time of Kearns’ writing. It is these documents that Kearns’ discussion refers to.

For critical commentaries on the concept of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ see Boler (1999, Chapter 3), and McWilliam et al. (1999). See Cruikshank (1996) for a critical commentary on ‘self esteem’.

Usher and Edwards (1994, Chapter 2) offer a useful outline of how cognitive and humanist psychology, amongst other schools of psychological thought, have found their way into theories and practices of education and, further, how these two in particular sit in some tension with each other.

The difficulty of the task is reflected in the timeline for developing the assessment instruments. The project anticipates that developing an assessment for ‘acting autonomously’ will enter its exploratory stage in 2010, with no indication of when it will become a major focus of efforts.