Competency-based education (CBE), according to the non-profit organization EDUCAUSE, enables students to advance their development based on their learning capacity, skills acquisition, or competency improvement at their own pace. This learning journey could happen in almost all types of environments.
CBE creates opportunities for learners and employees to nurture integrated performance-oriented capacities that can help them handle different challenges. This strategy is designed to accommodate various learning styles and can result in more efficient learner outcomes.
CBE would not work well without high-quality trainer’s training. Trainer’s preparation is a critical component of successful CBE deployment. Trainers must learn how to assess learners and tailor learning experiences to their needs. They must have a thorough understanding of the CBE process, techniques for tailoring learning experiences, mastery-based assessment, and the critical role of technology in learning customization.
Developing competencies standards is a crucial part of CBE. It helps sustain skills at the enterprise level by defining an ideal competent performance to measure a worker’s actual performance. The competency criteria can be tailored to a specific country’s setting and confirmed through a local method. TheILO (2021) recommends considering the following factors when creating a local validation strategy:
The industry’s size and geographic dispersion (so representative businesses can participate)
The industry’s diversity (i.e., the technology utilized and the products produced)
The worker’s profile (to guarantee that all competencies are included)
Validation costs and validation time
They must be aware of the differences between CBE and traditional education (TE) while developing competency maps, assessment goals, learning speed, grading, and promotion. They must also understand the importance of assessment in adapting training.
CBE in Healthcare
Healthcare institutions and organizations are being confronted with a number of challenges, including developing clinical approaches and a scarcity of resources. On the other hand, healthcare providers are expected to use care skills effectively and put theoretical knowledge into practice (Eijkenaar et al., 2013; Goudreau et al., 2015). However, a growing amount of research from several countries demonstrates that the clinical performance of healthcare systems is not up to par (Eijkenaar et al., 2013).
Below is a case study demonstrating how CBE works, its effectiveness, and its application to professional practice. It includes a population of physicians, nurses, medical students (residents or interns), and nursing students. CBE courses were offered to improve the clinical performance of medical and nursing students, physicians, and nurses. Traditional education was provided to the control group, and the clinical performance of the study population was the outcome.
Thestudy “The effect of competency-based education on clinical performance of health-care providers: A systematic review and meta-analysis” aimed to evaluate the influence of competency-based education on the clinical performance of healthcare providers. The study takes into consideration the need to develop an intervention to improve the clinical performance of healthcare providers.
The criteria for inclusion were clinical or quasi-experimental trials; physician/nurse or medical/nurse participants; an age range of 18–65 years; adoption of the CBE approach; measurement of clinical performance of the participants using concrete tools of performance assessment; presentation of the results quantitative scoring; and the use of traditional teaching methods for the control group. The exclusion criteria are the use of a combination of CBE and other educational modalities, the lack of a control group, and the measuring of the participants’ theoretical knowledge or non-clinical abilities.
The study used six international electronic databases: PubMed, Ovid, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, ProQuest, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The national electronic databases IranMedex and SID were also used to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis. In addition, the study comprised other studies that were related to the research goals. The Cochrane Collaboration’s Risk of Bias Tool was applied to assess the studies’ quality.
According to the random-effects model, CBE could improve the clinical performance of health care professionals in the intervention group compared to the control group (SMD = 2.717, 95 percent CI: 3.722 to 1.712).
Competency-based education can help health care practitioners improve their clinical performance. Meanwhile, high turnover rates, decreased job satisfaction, increased presenteeism, poor patient safety, and increased medical errors are consequences of a lack of clinical skills and competencies
The pandemic has brought different kinds of challenges to various industries. Most thrive by keeping up with trends and reinventing systems to adapt to the changing needs. This is true for the education sector. One of the most interesting educational trends today is the Genius Hour, which focuses on achieving results through an unconventional process. The education trends that will be discussed here are those that use certain instruments or methodologies. Let’s take a look at them and see how they can be observed and applied to organizations and to individual work.
Trend 1: Mobile learning
Mobile learning or m-learning can be seen as an evolution of e-learning (electronic learning) where any of its three components can be mobile at one time or all at the same time: the learner, the gadget used, and the learning itself. A few of the best uses of m-learning in education and training are just-in-time learning, where one can pick out a mobile device at any moment learning is needed; mobility of the learner, such that one can learn from a cafe or any place of choice; and mobility of learning, an example of which is learning about the things that one can see along the way by making use of mobile technology lenses, such as the Google Lens.
On the other hand, organizations have the concept of the mobile workforce. It refers toIBM employees being connected through different mobile technologies, like laptop computers, smartphones, and other mobile devices, and not bound by a central physical location. An international study posted that a mobile workforce had a 67 percent increase in productivity, 53 percent increase in employee engagement, and 43 percent revenue growth. Supporting this finding is The Economist Intelligence Unit’s study on Mobility, performance, and engagement, where one of its key findings is “workers who say their employers use mobile technology well are typically more productive, creative, satisfied, and loyal.”
Different types of mobility can be observed from the mobile working experience of employers using mobile technology. One that can be inferred is working with mobile devices and apps while at work, which was reported by the study’s respondents to have increased their productivity by collaborating effectively (33% in Japanese respondents compared to 21% globally) and led to quick and easy access to information (53% in Australia and New Zealand compared to 42% globally).
Another kind of mobility is the ability to work from any location at any time. This was chosen by the participants from the countries surveyed (Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, UAE, US) as the most important productivity driver. The UK respondents, on the other hand, point out that the ability to access information easily is their most important productivity driver, the second being the ability to work from any location at any time.
Mobile working, whether merely using mobile devices at work, making oneself mobile while working, or working from a choice of place and time, can be viewed in parallel with the fifth industrial revolution’s (IR 5.0) personalization. As IR 5.0 is described by many as achieving personalization by means of higher product customization, so as working can be personalized through the benefits of mobility at and of work.
How to effectively implement mobile work
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s study mentions that the “employers using mobile technology well” have the practice of offering technical support for employee-owned mobile devices for technical issues affecting work. Another good advice it mentions is to make sure people have the right technology and use it in the right working environment; it can be inferred that this refers to mobile gadgets and applications used for work. Another recommendation that can be useful is strategizing for employee adoption and considering how to provide tools that employees need to succeed.
Trends 2 and 3: Gamification; Nanolearning and microlearning
Gamification in the education and training sector has been heard even in previous years as an effective strategy for 21st-century learners. In organizations, The KPI Institute (TKI) teaches it as one of the approaches in changing the organizational culture. In some of the certification programs offered by the TKI, such as the Certified OKR Professional, gamification is a part of a module taught.
In this Performance Magazine article aboutgamification, three steps are mentioned as key to its implementation: (1) adapting to the organization’s needs, objectives, and culture; (2) rewarding and having benefits provided to motivate employees; (3) engaging employees in a system that they can use to solve problems within the organization.
Nanolearning is a smaller version of microlearning, but in the education and training field, both of which are related to chucking information so that learners obtain optimal learning within 2-5 minutes for nanolearning and 6-10 minutes for microlearning.
Small bits of learning can be inferred to be highly effective since experts have found that in the year 2000, the average attention span of people was 12 seconds, and by 2015, this fell to 8.25 seconds.
From an individual motivation perspective, this finding can be relevant to chunking tasks into smaller pieces as necessary. Another thing learned from the in-house training organized by The KPI Institute about time management is that chunking tasks not only makes them more manageable, but it also gives a sense of accomplishment for every time tasks are completed. Hence, it can increase one’s motivation to work.
Trend 4: A student’s well-being as a growing mental health challenge
This last trend is about bringing the challenge to a spotlight rather than highlighting a practice. As per observation, the pandemic has forced most educational institutions worldwide to resort to distance learning, whether temporary or eventually leading to hybrid delivery (online and on-site). The same can be said to the workforce, where more people and organizations shifted to remote work. In the training statistics of The KPI Institute alone, the years 2020 and 2021 had a total of 84% and 99% live online training delivery, accounting for a 30% increase in the total training delivered online throughout 2008-2021. The result of the shift to the online environment can be feelings of isolation and the disadvantage of less social interaction and connection.
How to cope with the challenge
In the field of education, the result of mental health challenges is dropping out (Boston University as cited by Bandalaria, 2021). This is avoided through predicting, with the help of machine learning, and intervening early. In the workplace setting, the same prediction can be done through the help of the # Employee Engagement Index. In April 2021’sTKI KPI of the month, the concept is further discussed in an infographic, and practical do’s and don’ts are advised.
Further, thismental health at work article may also shed some light to cope with the challenge from an organizational and individual perspective.
The three other trends mentioned above as a part of improving employee well-being can also be a part of the solution to address the growing mental health challenge.
In conclusion, adopting these trends from the education field to a workplace setup requires proper alignment of organizational or professional mission, vision, and goals, down to the people’s needs and preferences. Though the trends mentioned here highlight the good impact, careful consideration and further review must still be done prior to implementation. Random literature (for example, Accenture’s article states that people are working an extra 2.8 hours a day at remote work setup to achieve the same level of productivity in-office) may suggest that not all trends will fit a person’s or organization’s work needs.
