A cross-national comparison of effective leadership and teamwork: Toward a global workforce, by Jean Brittain Leslie and Ellen Van Velsor.
✍ Scribed by Linda M. Raudenbush
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 55 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Workforce education, school to work, corporate partnerships, and competencybased education are initiatives to make education more relevant to society, and by extension, to the global economy. The Bases of Competence: Skills for Lifelong Learning and Employability attempts to clarify competencies business needs from current post-secondary school graduates. The authors claim that it "is a call for reform to remake the match, to restore the historic role of higher education in preparing graduates for the workplace of the future rather than the past" (1998, p. xii). Data were collected over a ten-year period-from eight hundred graduates and students who were working in twenty major companies in Canada-about the skills new employees need and the skills they actually possess. Evers, the lead researcher, and his colleagues expected to find technical skills that were lacking. Instead, four generic competencies surfaced: managing self, communicating, managing people and tasks, and mobilizing innovation and change.
According to the authors, the book is of interest to instructional development specialists, academic leaders, faculty, and human resource professionals. Indeed, the book' s audience could also include career counselors and academic faculties who want to convert from a higher education emphasis to a workforce education emphasis. The authors promise the book can serve as a valuable resource for the development of transition programs "out of higher education and into work" (1998, p. xxv; emphasis in original). They proclaim that "executives must incorporate these skills in the selection, training, development, and retention of employees. The agenda for all is a learning culture fostered in education and workplace" (1998, p. xiv). However, the authors fail to provide practical and useful guidance for companies to use. The purpose of the book is to provide practitioners "with a common language of general skills needed" (p. xviii) by graduates for lifelong learning and employability. The authors are concerned "with the interface between education and employment" (p. 3) and specifically that colleges teach students skills useful in the workplace. Unfortunately, Evers and colleagues fail to create a common language or demonstrate how a business and education partnership promotes the skills necessary for lifelong learning and employability of workers. They do discuss what educators can do to incorporate the competencies into the curriculum.
The book is divided into four parts: understanding the nature of competence, the essential skills and competencies, developing individual competence, and several illustrative case studies. Part One ("Understanding Competence")