Abstract
In Germany the dual vocational education system plays a central role in preparing young people for work. In order to succeed on the labour-market they need competences that go way beyond knowledge and cognitive skills. A quarter of trainees however dropout of vocational education raising questions about their professional action competence. This paper discusses the issue as to what extent subjective ideas of trainees from different occupational fields about their competences compiled using a questionnaire for Social, Methodical, and Personal Competences (SMP-C) are reliable and valid regarding the social, methodical, and personal competence classes. This entails an examination as to whether the SMP-C competence assessment questionnaire features satisfactory psychometric characteristics, on how the formed ability concepts behave towards each other and other constructs, and which competence values can be diagnosed. In order to examine these questions 937 trainees were asked about their competences and tendencies to dropout of vocational training. The analysis attests the assessment procedure overall satisfactory to good reliability, which speaks in favour of surveying social, methodical, and personal ability concepts using the subjective ideas of trainees regarding the application of competences. Furthermore, it seems that a stronger manifestation of specific social, methodical, and personal competences reduces the tendency to dropout of vocational training. Hence it might be possible to prevent early dropout from vocational training through specific strengthening of these competences.
Highlights
In Germany the dual vocational education system plays a central role in preparing young people for work, in developing their competences, and in responding to the labour-market needs of the economy (Field, Hoeckel, Kis, & Kuczera, 2009; Frey & Ruppert, 2013; Maclean & Wilson, 2009)
The current version of the SMP-C measures the social, methodical, and personal competence classes distributed over 17 ability concepts: The social competence class is divided into the six ability concepts Social responsibility (SV), Ability to cooperate (KO), Ability to deal with conflict (KF), Ability to communicate (KM), Leadership ability (FÜ), and Situation-appropriate behaviour (SA)
The competence assessed highest in the ability concept is Helpfulness and empathy, the competence assessed lowest in the ability concept is the Ability to analyse
Summary
In Germany the dual vocational education system plays a central role in preparing young people for work, in developing their competences, and in responding to the labour-market needs of the economy (Field, Hoeckel, Kis, & Kuczera, 2009; Frey & Ruppert, 2013; Maclean & Wilson, 2009). The dual vocational education system consists of a training programme in which young people work for three or four days for a company that pays them and teaches them relevant competences. The obvious advantages of the dual system lie in the practical nature of the education as well as in the mutual screening between potential employers and potential employees during training Another strength of the dual system resides in the fact that the partnership between the world of education and training and the world of crafts, commerce or industry guarantees that the competences acquired by the trainees have real relevance on the labour market. Today’s society presents young people with complex challenges in the field of dual vocational education They need competences that go way beyond know-. This is followed by a demonstration of how the detection of competences and the diagnosis of dropout tendencies from vocational education can be empirically approached with the SMP-C assessment survey
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