Professional Competencies: Perspectives and Challenges for the Tertiary Sector

Abstract

This chapter discusses the perspectives and challenges of professional competencies for the tertiary sector with examples drawn from studies of speech pathology and paramedic university professional degree programmes in Australia. While attempts to describe work performance in terms of competencies date from the behavioural objectives movement in the United States in the 1950s (Bowden and Masters 1993), competency-based training (CBT) has been applied to the workforce in the USA since 1967 (Houston 1985), the United Kingdom since 1988 (Burke 1989) and Australia since 1989. In a move to improve the skill levels and develop a better trained workforce, the Australian National Training Reform Agenda focused on explicit, precise descriptions of the skills exhibited in the workplace to determine learning outcomes of vocational education and training (VET) programmes (Mansfield 1989). In the same time frame, Colleges of Advanced Education and Institutes of Technology, which provided predominantly undergraduate level educational programmes for several of the professions, were amalgamated with universities to form an integrated national system of higher education in Australia (Dawkins 1988). The central role of workplace competencies in determining the development of curricula and the standards to be expected in training flourished in the VET sector in the 1990s (National Centre for Vocational Education Research 2000a) but has been less clear in the university sector. Statements of competence, referred to as competency standards in Australia (Bowden and Masters 1993), were developed by 70% of professions in Australia by the end of 1993 (Quartermaine 1994), but in their seminal report on the implications of a competency-based approach for higher education, Bowden and p. ix) a prophetic assertion “we do not believe that a full blown competency-based approach to education will become dominant in university courses” has been borne out.