The Challenge of Competence Assessment: Problematizing institutional regimes – proclaiming a paradigm shift?

Summary:
The paper places VPL and related strategies for recognizing people’s individual experience in the context of lifelong learning policy. There is a big discrepancy between the overall societal request for lifelong learning and the differentiated learning interests and diverse attitudes to education and training in the adult population. VPL could help bridging this gap by connecting individual plans to societal strategies for competence development. As an example is pointed to a Danish initiative by the trade union of unskilled workers to secure every member an education plan and not least open their outlook for future life prospects.
But in order to succeed in this bridging there is the need to integrate and reformulate all the criteria being used for validation, into a new language of competence which is independent of the two dominant discourses of formal education on the one side (scholastic, curricular categories) and on the other hand of labour market (instrumental applicability categories). The paper discusses the conditions of developing such a competence discourse, departing critically from the OECD key competence projects and their implementation. The paper points out the challenge to develop a competence discourse which is relevant and sensitive to the dynamics of individual life experience and learning motives.