Competency-based training: different perceptions in Australia and Germany

Author/s: Silke Hellwig

Edition: Volume 46, Number 1, April 2006

Summary: The German dual apprenticeship system has traditionally been viewed as an effective system for generating a highly skilled workforce in the trades, crafts and service sectors. In addition, countries and systems looking to improve their own approaches to vocational education and training (VET) have considered as exemplary the main features of the ‘dual system’ (that is, two learning sites and shared responsibility between private employers and public vocational schools). Nevertheless, competency-based training (CBT) as it has been implemented in the Anglophone countries has increasingly attracted the attention of public officials, vocational educators and VET researchers in Germany. This attention has been especially focused on the modularisation of curriculum and the importance of vocationalism in education and training systems. Comparative studies of these dual concepts (for example Deissinger 2002, Ertl 2000) have been used to inform  policy and practice. This paper focuses on the competency-based approach to VET in Australia and examines how reforms aimed at developing a national system, and implementing CBT in curriculum, training delivery and assessment are evaluated by stakeholders (for example, representatives of government, educators and academics). It also compares reforms to VET in Australia with those used in Germany for reforming and restructuring the dual system. This analysis is used to generate conclusions about the extent to which aspects of the Australian CBT model might be successfully applied to dual system reforms in Germany.

Keywords: dual apprenticeship, VET, competency-based training, Germany

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The origins of competency-based training

Author/s: Steven Hodge

Edition: Volume 47, Number 2, July 2007

Summary: This article attempts to trace the origins of competency-based training (CBT), the theory of vocational education that underpins the National Training Framework in Australia. A distinction is made between societal and theoretical origins. This paper argues that CBT has its societal origins in the United States of America during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Public debate and government initiatives centred on the widely held view that there was a problem with the quality of education in the United States. One of the responses to this crisis was the Performance-Based Teacher Education movement which synthesised the theory of education that became CBT. The theoretical origins of CBT derive principally from behaviourism and systems theory – two broad theoretical orientations that influenced  educational debate in the United States during the formative period of CBT. Most of the component parts of CBT were contributed by specialists with a background in one or both of these theoretical orientations.

Keywords: competency-based training, vocational education, National Training Framework, performance-based teacher education, behaviourism, systems theory

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