Reflecting on the great waves of change that humanity has experienced in its journey through history, we clearly find that according to the speed at which knowledge was produced and transported, paradigms were created for the design of information systems. the creation of wealth and the routes to obtain it.
In the Second Great Wave, that of the Industrial Revolution, an increasingly wider and better designed path was configured that allowed the world's most important companies to compete and fight for the lead, at a higher speed.
Large and powerful, optimizing technology and its advancements, produced the Third Great Wave of computing and sophisticated predatory cannibalism using superiority measures: size, market share, and profits.
Taking as a model the successful and winning companies, which were running behind all the others, imitating and taking as universal models the strategies that made them powerful, to reproduce them in their management. The more speed the former gained, the more marked the lag of the latter became, and with this, the distribution of the world's wealth was distributed in a concentrated way in the vanguard, leaving those in the rear with nothing. As a result, today we see that only 6% of the population has and manages 50% of the world's money, while the remaining 94% have to cope with the other 50%, marginalization is increasingly serious and heavy.
For this and suddenly, the path ends here. abruptly! It collapses at the height marked by nature itself: the overpopulation, the depletion of natural resources, the degradation of the environment, the alarming extinction of species from 300 to 400 daily, the disappearance of tropical forests, the growing hole ozone, the terrible famine to which thousands of people die every day…… as a consequence of the paradigm of the materialistic system oriented to consumption, to unilateral growth, to the linear thinking of the dream of North American capitalism that became the world nightmare. (Regarding globalization. MA Octavio rolando Lara Martínez, 2009).
As the processes of globalization of economies are expanding and imposing, the changing world of economies and work places emphasis on controlling and raising the quality of production and merchandise, which in turn requires increasing productivity. of the human resources involved. A consequence of the foregoing has been the debate about the mechanisms in which educational institutions form resources, and the need to propose modifications in their organization, content and teaching methods.
And education what?
In our country, the issue of skills is recent. In other latitudes, the term has a history of several decades, mainly in countries such as England, the United States, Germany and Australia. Competences appear primarily related to production processes in companies, particularly in the technological field, where the development of knowledge has been greatly accelerated; therefore, the need arose to continuously train staff, regardless of their previous title, diploma or work experience. This is the context in which the so-called labor competencies are born, a concept that presents several definitions, among which the one that describes them as the “effective capacity to successfully carry out a fully identified work activity” stands out (iberfop-oei, 1998)..
From the perspective of labor competencies, it is recognized that the qualities of people to perform productively in a work situation depend not only on formal school learning situations, but also on learning derived from experience in specific work situations. Therefore, it is recognized that certificates, titles and diplomas are not enough to qualify a person as competent in work or professionally.
The development of competencies requires to be verified in practice by complying with clearly established performance criteria. Performance criteria, understood as the expected results in terms of learning products (evidence), establish the conditions to infer performance; Both elements (criteria and evidence) are the basis for evaluating and determining if competence has been achieved. Therefore, the evaluation criteria are closely related to the characteristics of the established competences.
The concept of competence gives a meaning of unity and implies that the elements of knowledge make sense only as a function of the whole. Indeed, although its components can be fragmented, they do not constitute competence separately: being competent implies mastery of the totality of elements and not only of some of the parts.
The comprehensive professional competencies model establishes three levels, basic, generic and specific competencies, whose range of generality ranges from broad to particular. The basic competences are the intellectual capacities essential for learning a profession; They include cognitive, technical and methodological competences, many of which are acquired at previous educational levels (for example, the adequate use of oral, written and mathematical languages). Generic competences are the common basis of the profession or refer to the specific situations of professional practice that require complex responses. Finally, specific competences are the particular basis of professional practice and are linked to specific execution conditions.
The competences can be broken down into units of competence, defined within the integration of theoretical and practical knowledge that describe specific actions to be achieved, which must be identifiable in their execution. The units of competence have a global meaning and can be perceived in the expected results or products, which makes their structure similar to what is commonly known as objectives; however, they do not refer only to actions and execution conditions, but their design also includes criteria and evidence of knowledge and performance (iberfop-oei, 1998). The grouping of different units of competence in groups with clear curricular configuration gives body to the same professional competences.
Once the levels of competence have been established, the learning units (subjects) are articulated in relation to the problem identified through the generic or specific competences and from the units of competence into which they are disaggregated.
As noted above, since it addresses training processes as a whole, the proposal of professional education for comprehensive competencies involves rethinking the relationship between theory and practice. However, for analysis purposes it is necessary to disaggregate the knowledge involved in practical knowledge, theoretical knowledge and evaluative knowledge.
Practical knowledge includes attributes (of competence) such as technical knowledge, which consists of disciplinary knowledge applied to the development of a skill, and methodological knowledge, understood as the ability or aptitude to carry out procedures and operations in diverse practices. On the other hand, theoretical knowledge defines the theoretical knowledge that is acquired around one or more disciplines. Finally, evaluative knowledge includes wanting to do, that is, attitudes that are related to the predisposition and motivation for self-learning, and knowing how to live together, that is, the values associated with the ability to establish and develop social relationships.
Understood in this way, educational models based on professional competencies involve reviewing the procedures for designing educational objectives, pedagogical concepts that guide teaching-centered practices (and with it, educational practice itself), as well as of the criteria and procedures for evaluation.
Conceptualizing different ways to educate future professionals does not mean disqualifying all previous experience. Changes are necessary in a society that poses new demands and challenges to educational institutions. In general, the proposal for integrated professional competences constitutes a model that allows incorporating current job demands without neglecting the comprehensive training of students in the human, professional and disciplinary fields. In this sense, competence-based education considerably enriches and provides feedback without contradicting them in depth; on the contrary, it can become a more up-to-date and higher quality vocational training proposal.
Within the most recent educational models, two proposals stand out to improve the relevance and relevance of education. The first poses a change in the emphasis traditionally placed on teaching towards learning. The second proposal is oriented towards the search for a more meaningful education, the model for integrated professional competences requires focusing training on learning and not on teaching.
Derived from the above, it is more important to apply adequate didactic instrumentation, which allows the teacher and the student to know and apply the knowledge in practice and for the teacher to look for the mechanisms to ensure this process through the correct use of the assessment instruments.
Hence the importance that teachers make a severe reflection with humility and ethics on our work in front of the group, that allows us to detect the incompetence that we have so that together with the directors short courses are designed to solve said incompetence.
The educational model for integrated professional competences for higher education is an option that seeks to generate higher quality training processes, but without losing sight of the needs of society, the profession, disciplinary development and academic work. Assuming this responsibility implies that the educational institution consistently promotes actions in the pedagogical and didactic fields that translate into real changes in teaching practices; hence the importance of the teacher also participating on an ongoing basis in education and training actions that allow him to develop similar competencies to those that are sought to train in students,Therein lies the importance that managers assign sufficient financial resources for the continuous preparation of teachers and this must translate into the departure of students with theoretical knowledge as well as the development of skills, which must have been demonstrated over the course of his career.
Therefore, the responsibility is not only for the teacher and students, if not, it is accompanied by the Directors who must provide all the necessary elements such as: equipment for classrooms, workshops, laboratories, didactic material, educational infrastructure, etc. In addition to training and updating courses for teachers, this with due planning.
Finally, remember that there will be no development in our country as long as we do not graduate students with sufficient capacities and abilities to enter the labor market, and that they can develop anywhere on the planet, let us remember that this is part of globalization and Mexico, our country does not may continue to lag behind.
