There has long been a debate about the use of competency-based education and its limitations, particularly in relation to describing requisite knowledge and skills. Leesa and her colleagues point out that:<\/p>\n

\u201c[where] competency-based education [CBE] has had the most impact is vocational education because it is more tightly tied to work and buffeted by powerful external constituencies such as employer bodies and unions.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, as a consequence:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe language of so-called generic skills and employability skills has increasingly saturated curriculum in vocational education, based on the idea that qualifications need to include generic or transferable skills for employment and the specific competencies required to perform particular tasks and roles in the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

While universities have largely avoided this focus on CBE, their approaches to teaching and learning have evolved to promote the development of \u2018graduate attributes\u2019, \u201cpremised on the notion that graduates need a suite of transferable skills and attributes for the labour market\u201d often by being seen to meet the requirements of professional standards developed and promoted by external bodies.<\/p>\n

This is where generic and employability skills come in and promoted notions of education as a preparation for work. However, as the paper maintains, these generic skills like problem solving are, in fact, context and discipline specific. The same is the case for 21^{st<\/sup> Century skills although they are often written about \u201cin apparently neutral terms, based on a presumed shared understanding of what these skills are, the presumption that they can be defined, assessed and measured and the presumption they are a desirable policy goal.\u201d<\/p>\n}

This notion leads, it might be argued, to a fetish about \u2018skills\u2019 rather than seeing things more comprehensively using a broadly conceived occupational one requiring the \u201cdeep engagement with the specific knowledge and skills required for specific occupations.\u201d The danger is that skills policies are seen as a way to \u2018fix\u2019 education so that it:<\/p>\n

\u201csupplies the right skills by tying it ever tighter to the \u2018demands\u2019 of the labour market and employers. This [as the authors point out] takes for granted that the \u2018demands\u2019 from employers are coherent and well formulated, and that individuals will be able to use the skills they have in the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may not be the case in countries like Australia with a liberal market economy where there can be a looser relationship between qualifications and jobs than in coordinated market economies such as Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.<\/p>\n

So, the paper concludes that:<\/p>\n

\u201chuman capital theory has failed to deliver its promise of high skilled jobs in a high skilled economy, because \u2018The fundamental problem is not that there is a shortage of the relevant skills that employers demand but that there is a lack of good-quality jobs\u2019. It also builds on the work of [those] who argue that education is beset by two problems: \u2026 \u2018On the one hand education is positioned ambitiously as a key solution to economic problems; on the other hand, it is undermined \u2013 it is not seen as a distinctive and important social activity with its own problems\u2019 … The result is that skills policies are unable to solve the problems of the economy and they distort education and its potential to support human flourishing.\u201d<\/p>\n