31. What is labour competencies assessment?

This issue has been greatly discussed when developing training and competency-based certification models. In fact, assessment is a crucial stage, it is a key aspect of certification and it enables the identification of eventual training needs. The following are some definitions of assessment of competencies:

SENAI(1) defines it as the process of collecting evidence about the vocational performance of a person with the purpose of forming an opinion about his competency with respect to a vocational profile and identify the areas of performance that should be strengthened by training or other actions in order to accomplish the required level of competency.

CONOCER from México(2) has defined assessment of competencies as the process of collecting evidence about labour performance of an individual, with the purpose of determining whether he is competent to do a particular working activity or not yet.

Other aspects of competency-based assessment can be illustrated by the following definitions:

The purpose of competency-based assessment is collecting enough evidence to prove that people can perform a particular activity according to specific standards (Fletcher).(3)

Assessments do not depend on the time spent in formal educational institutions (Grant, 1979).

In standardised certification systems of labour competency, the assessment of competencies becomes a process of checking evidence of performance comparing it to what is established by the standard. The verification of evidence can be carried out in different ways and according to different types of evidence, as it is shown in the chart below.

In the United Kingdom, assessment can be carried out directly by the certifying body or by a specialised assessment centre, whose quality is closelysupervised by the certifying body, and which should have been recognised in the first place. In Mexico, the assessment centres that have been recognised can be part of training bodies but in this case they assess the candidates that have not been trained in such centres. Thus, it has been recognised that part of the success in the assessment requires an environment and deep knowledge of the training process.

Assessment experiences in Brazil, for certain sectors of the economy such as soldering and industrial maintenance, use assessment centres that may work at SENAI Centres. The emphasis is placed on an adequate definition of profiles and instruments of assessment with the purpose of guaranteeing the effectiveness of the process.

The transparency and reliability of the certification system are always privileged in order to give certificates a high value and credibility which will finally favour their holders. In any case, assessment and certification are based on the technical standard of labour competency.

 

 

 

 

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1 SENAI, Metodologia de Avaliação e Certificação de Competencias, Brasilia, 2002.
2 CONOCER, op. cit.
3 Fletcher, Shirley, “Nuevas formas de evaluación y certificación”, in: Competencia Laboral. Antología de Lecturas, México, CONOCER, 1997.

 

 

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