Browsing by Subject "osaamisen johtaminen"

Objectives. Competence management has been a recent topic in public debate. However, it has not been researched so much in primary education. The purpose of my master's thesis is to describe how competence management and teachers' competence development takes place in primary schools. The focus of my master's thesis is on studying the practices that support school teachers' competence development. Through research on the practices that support competence development, the practices can be shared with other work communities. This is how primary schools can learn the competence development of each other. Methods. The data was collected by focused interview of the five primary school principals and school leaders in Southern Finland. The interviewees were selected for research by snowball sampling and according to interest in the subject. The results were analyzed using content analysis. Results and conclusions. The results show that competence management in the primary school principals' work was determined by identification, maintenance, development, and acquisition of skills. Primary school principals felt that their role as the competence leader was in directing competence development and setting objectives, enabling competence development, supporting learning, motivating and inspiring, creating frameworks and structures, creating co-operation between teachers, and controlling the development of competence. Primary school principals guided the competence development of class teachers with regular development discussions, continuing education and diverse workplace learning. Class teacher competence development in primary schools was supported by discussion and interaction, collaboration, and instruction-based practices. The practices that support class teachers' competence development are co-operation, organizational teaming, pair working, teaching together and co-teaching, learning from students, networking, pedagogical discussion, reading professional literature, sharing expertise in the work community, briefing, highlighting and use of teachers' strengths, giving different roles to teachers, and teacher guidance in the everyday life of education and teaching. The requirements and challenges of successful skills development are, looking from different aspects, related to class teachers themselves, resources and school culture. In the future, principals should help class teachers recognize the practices that support competence development as opportunities for their professional growth. Other schools can take ideas from these practices and further develop them to suit the needs of their own working environment. The practices brought on by this study should be a part of principal training, so that they could spread to other schools with various possible implementations. In addition, principals in basic education should be guided to realize the benefits and significance of vision in competence management.

The importance of competence development has grown, especially in expert organizations, because of the rapid pace of change in working life and the need for continuous learning. The aim of this study is to examine competence development in an expert organisation that provides business services. The first research question examines what conceptions experts have about competence development. The purpose of the second research question is to deepen the previous question by studying the role of managers in the competence development of junior experts. The data consisted of nine semi-structured individual interviews. All were collected from the same organisation. Six of the experts worked as associates/senior associates and three of them as managers. The first research question was put through a phenomenographic analysis in order to make it easier to tackle competence development as a phenomenon. The second research question was analysed through databased content analysis. The phenomenographic analysis resulted in three abstract categories, which describe the concepts of competence development in the target organisation: 1) competence development as an assumption and aspiration, 2) the contradiction between the necessity of competence development and its actual implementation and 3) learning at work and knowledge sharing. Thus, it can be stated that the experts of the target organisation consider competence development to be an important and necessary part of the organisation’s operations. Everyone in the organisation is expected to develop and want to develop their skills towards deeper expertise. At the same time, there is a challenge in terms of the amount of available time and the demands of client work, which limit opportunities to participate in training. However, the largest source of competence development was found not to be training itself but learning at work and sharing knowledge with colleagues and managers. When studying the manager’s role, the databased content analysis resulted in three different managerial roles: 1) instructor, 2) supporter-enabler and 3) sounding board-advisor. To sum up, the role of manager emphasises providing guidance, enabling developmental paths and acting as a sounding board and advisor. Based on the results of this study, it can be stated that competence development is at centre stage and is seen as being at the core of the expert organisation operations. However, ensuring that this is accomplished requires time in addition to the motivation of individuals and the opportunities offered by the organisation. Managers also play a particularly important role in ensuring that the needs of the organisation and the competence levels of the experts meet.