Publish at August 02 2022 Updated August 02 2022
"If everyone moves forward together, success will come of itself." - Henry Ford
If the pope of competency frameworks Guy Le Boterf is to be believed, the notion of competency is limited and misleading, or at least it has been made to sound too much. In particular, competence has focused on the lone individual of its kind in the work situation, as if an individual could be declared competent without work partners and contexts that respond to its initiatives. There is not really competence in the absolute but contexts and judgments of competence.
This notion of competence, this "strange attractor," was notably promoted on the occasion of the Deauville agreements (Neyrat, 2008) between the Medef (Mouvement des entreprises de France) and the trade unions, it came to replace the Parodi grids (post-war French Communist minister) that irrigated many professional classifications, notably in the metallurgy or finance industries. These grids organized the salaried populations into "A" executives (managers and engineers), "B" executives (supervisors and senior technicians) and "C" executives (workers and employees) and sometimes "D" executives (laborers). Its aim was to pacify social dialogue and to recognize know-how at a time of great change. According to its birth certificate, it should therefore remain an object of constant dialogue.
More than the rapid obsolescence of individuals' skills, it is the obsolescence of the notion of skill that we should be talking about.
Every time a competence judgment is made on an individual in the context of a recruitment, a training need or a promotion, every time a reference frame claims to integrate all the richness of an employee through a grid, it locks him up and it reduces him to a static state. A grid reduces the uniqueness and creativity of a professional at work. A grid is above all bars that enclose.
The reality seems more complex since, without others, there can be no work; there is an entanglement between individuals and their tasks. In a thousand ways they relate to each other through this experience, each keeping his own view of what is experienced.
Every time the observer, the manager or the researcher wants to divert a skill from the complexity in which he observes it, he reduces it. This is where peer-to-peer learning is interesting since each one holds a part of the common work. Moreover, in a tertiary society (service economy), or even quaternary (knowledge economy), an increasing part of what unites us is invisible and collective. From then on, considering a competent collective and not just an individual allows us to address more complexity and to have multiple views on the world, varied ways of posing or solving problems.
The knowledge that circulates in a human collective is alive, it is continuously enriched by the nuance and intelligence of each person. The pairagogy accounts for this richness of peer-to-peer knowledge flow and offers greater resilience in groups when unpredictable situations arise.
The action research conducted with Sol France (see The Thirst for Learning) during Covid with 63 organizations showed all the importance of mutual aid and co-learning when reference points break down. In work situations, teams learned to make life easier for themselves and to overcome hardships.
Each of these configurations produces differentiated ways of learning together.
Of course the 3 configurations are often hybrid or muddled, But they denote distinct forms of cooperation.
According to these forms, effective action is socially situated. The margins of maneuver and the way in which trade-offs at work are made induce quite different possibilities of action. How can competence be evaluated if this human context is not described? In fact, an individual is competent in a given context and relational mode, but is completely inhibited in a universe of links that escape him. The taking of initiative and the way in which a task is carried out carry with them a subjective part of the person who cannot resolve himself to be a machine for carrying out orders or mechanically threading tasks.
This well-known discrepancy between prescribed work and real work resolves itself in the way in which a collective adjusts and learns in a situation to collectively correct the orientations of this or that member. From then on, pairagogy, this art of learning from one's peers, is a powerful asset for making an entire collective progress and become efficient.
The one who seemed to have gaps, to be slower, to have a dissonant style compared to the others turns out to be a resource, a useful variety to correct the progress of all. Learning to learn from each other, no matter how humble, allows for a wealth of knowledge and motivation within the group. Cultivating pairagogy is to increase the power of collective action, the power to integrate everyone and to develop shared know-how.
Sources
Neyrat, F. (2008). Work to the test of competence. Savoir/Agir, 3, 31-36. https://doi.org/10.3917/sava.003.0031
Guy Le boterf - Construire les compétences individuelles et collectives, Paris, Éditions d'Organisation, 2000
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/construire-les-competences-individuelles-et-collectives-9782212555608.html
The different job classification systems
https://www.classification-emplois.com/methode-de-pesee-des-postes/les-differents-systemes-de-classification-des-emplois/
Thot cursus - Pairagogy, the promising fruit of the co
https://cursus.edu/fr/10560/la-pairagogie-peeragogy-fruit-prometteur-du-monde-du-co
Batal, C. & Fernagu Oudet, S. (2013). Competencies, a folk concept in trouble? Savoirs, 33, 39-60.
https://doi.org/10.3917/savo.033.0039
Wikipedia Servuction https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servuction#
Studying. Prescribed Work/Actual Work - https://www.etudier.com/dissertations/Travail-Réel-Travail-Prescrit/592644.html
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