competencies

Due to increasingly specialised, diverse and also new competencies and competency profiles it becomes progressively more difficult to interpret educational achievements and to match requirement profiles with the competencies of individual persons or groups. The computational support with regards to keeping the information up to date, communication, search and analysis is limited if the competencies are described in natural language only. Thus, it seems advantageous to model competencies in a formal and machine-readable specification language. The following article suggests the notion of a generic formal syntax for learning outcomes. We outline how this would allow expressing intricate learning outcomes in a machine-readable ontology and their further processing with the Linked Data- and Semantic Web-approaches.

The increasing digitalization of the working environment has significantly influenced the dynamics of almost all sectors. It is responsible for fundamental changes of surrounding conditions and poses new challenges to organizations. New knowledge and new competencies have to be accumulated in ever shorter intervals. The directed selection, utilization and development of relevant knowledge and required competencies have to be planned and realized systematically. Within a research project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), a self-assessment tool has been developed that is meant to support organizations in dealing with the critical success factors knowledge and competencies. The presentation of this tool is objective of the article at hand.

The main goal of a company is to conduct target oriented rationalization efforts. Thus, the challenges are, among others, to transparence, to bundle, to adapt, to re-interpret and to develop personal and organizational competencies for a systematic and methodic planning, designing and implementing resp. a sustainable improvement of processes and value streams. This article describes the further developments of “Value Stream Mapping” (Value Stream oriented Process Management, Value Stream Mapping and MTM, evaluation of alternative value streams, cost development of value streams by changing input parameters). Existing, implicit knowledge will be explicated and systematically bundled along the value stream from different departments of a company. The personal and organizational system and method competencies are therefore available to evaluate improvement measures and to perform their implementation target oriented.

Flexibility becomes increasingly the crucial success factor. This is the result of a current survey on small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany. More than a quarter of the participants indicated that flexibility was their most important business goal. What this result means for the personnel policy of a company and in the end for its employees is the focus of this article. The here presented survey is part of the BMBF project “FlexPro” that investigates different strategies of internal flexibilization as well as determinants of using external workers, especially temporary agency workers.