Inserting transferable skills into the vocational curriculum

Abstract

In this chapter we want to illuminate the concept of transferable skills and to reconstruct how we tried to develop transferable skills and transform them into attainment targets. The core of this chapter is formed by two research and development projects granted by the National Institute for Educational Research (SVO) in The Netherlands. In the first study, core skills in vocational education (CSIVE), we tried to define and justify ‘transferable skills’ for two occupational domains, namely for civil engineering and office automation. This project took place in 1985–1986. Two years later we started a follow up study, in which we tried to transform the transferable skills into teaching learning units within a modular curriculum. Because of the time lag between the first and the second study, we felt the need to update the original transferable skills. In fact it was a procedure to test the stability of our findings. After the construction of the modules a formative evaluation was carried out. We learned from the construction of teaching learning units and the update that important changes in the original skills took place which might be attributed either to the procedure for justification or to the procedure for constructing teaching learning units, or both. In the nineties other studies came up with similar approaches. Some of these will be described as examples. In the last paragraph some conclusions will be drawn.