Ibbaka

View Original

Two podcasts on competency model design from Vancouver

Vancouver Skyline. Photo by: Kenny Louie licensed under Creative Commons License.

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

There is a lot of interest in skill and competency models bubbling up in Vancouver, BC. The innovation sector is growing rapidly and with this comes an interest in new skills and new ways to put skills to use. There is a growing community of competency model designers emerging and innovative ways to apply these models or frameworks are emerging.

At the same time, the impact of climate change is a major concern. Vancouver is vulnerable to climate change and many people in the region are interested in how we can mitigate and adapt at personal, business, community and societal levels. As a result, there is an emerging discipline around the skills needed to imagine, plan, prepare, design, set policy, communicate and implement climate change policies. A big part of this is how to develop shared community understanding of and commitment to these issues.

The Resilience by Design Lab and the Adaptation Learning Network at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC has been leading the development of a competency model or framework for Adaptation to climate change. As part of this work, they have been sharing a wonderful set of podcasts in the Resilience by Design Podcast.

The two most recent podcasts are with people active in the design of competency models.

Dennis Green talks about his work on the eCampus Open Competency Toolkit, a set of resources for the design of competencies available under a Creative Commons license.

Listen to his podcast here.

Steven Forth talks about the design of competency models and the importance of thinking of them as systems that connect to other parts of the ecosystem and thus as complex adaptive systems.

Listen to his podcast here.

Dennis and Steven are both engaged in the IEEE 1484.20.2 work on defining competencies and there is a lot of participation in this group by people in Vancouver.

These competency models are different from the old, staid models that were like straight jackets for learning. They are skill and roles based, dynamic and open to evolve. See Three metaphors for skills and competencies.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks