Silk Purses and Sows’ Ears: NVQs, GNVQs and experiential learning

Competence-based Approaches to the Assessment of Professional Accountancy Training Work Experience Requirements: The ICAS Experience

“…It is this stage, which seems to result in the many variations of competency models, (Hyland, 1994;Hagar and Gonczi, 2002;Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003) although there are essentially two extremes: the functional analysis method and the capability method.…”

“…Therefore whilst work based assessment may be deemed to be educationally effective, it can be far more resource intensive than collecting capability evidence from a variety of traditional assessment instruments (Hyland, 1994;Illot and Murphy, 1999;Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003;Lines and Gammie, 2004).…”

“…Candidates are evaluated against either a checklist of detailed competences (Gonczi et al, 1990;Hyland, 1994;Wolf, 1995;Kerka, 1998), often articulated as learning outcomes (Wolf, 1995), or against performance criteria contained within a detailed competency map (Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003). This mechanistic approach (Hamilton, 2005) suggests that only a minimum level of competence is required at a particular point in time (Hyland, 2004).…”

“…The 'functional analysis' method (or 'output' approach) is a behavioural method, which describes work place tasks (Hyland, 1994;McLagan, 1997 (Boritz and Carnaghan, 2003, p.4). Functional analysis categorises the work accountants perform into key areas (or roles), which are progressively broken down into units and elements and tend to describe behaviours, outcomes or actions using active verbs and objects (IFAC, 2003b).…”

No So Much the Learning Society ...

“…Looked at on a comparative basis, though most industrialised nations have been affected by global economic competition and recession, they have not all capitulated to New Right nationalism and economic realism (Hyland, 1994). Countries and economies with strong commitments to growth, planning, social policy and investment (Holland, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan) have been relatively more successful then those (the USA, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) which have 'downsized' their economies in response to recession.…”