Free Report Example on Airbus

Introduction

Competence, like skill, is a contested and sometime controversial concept, but there is broad consensus that it encapsulates the skills, knowledge and behaviours necessary to perform to the standards of employment in a work context. How such competence is developed, assessed and deployed inevitably varies substantially between sectors and occupations, but there are also pro­found theoretical differences between countries. Therefore, when the European Commission was seeking to create a credit transfer system for vocational education and training, and ultimately the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), it was necessary to find the best fit with existing approaches to competence. The team that developed the competence typology for the European Credit transfer system for Vocational Education and Training (ECVET) analysed the threedom­in ant approaches in European proposed a unifying framework based on the common factors.

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Competence Based Approach

The UK was the first to adopt a competence-based approach to vocational education and training (VET) with the system of National Vocational Qualifications, which was focused mainly on functional competence, skills required to undertake specific work tasks, and the underpinning knowledge associated with those tasks. France adopted a more comprehensive 'triptyque', a word borrowed from art, to describe a painting in three panels, like The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch that now hangs in Madrid's Pradomuseum. The French triptyque involves knowledge (savoir), skills (savoirfaire) and behaviours (savoiretre), implying that individuals need to know things, be able to do things, and to behave appropriately, to be effective members of a work team. The German approach is more complicated and involves in the knowledge domain (Sachkompetenz) both specific domain knowledge (Fachkompetenz) and work process knowledge (Methodenkompetenz), the latter straddling skills, along with social competence (Sozialkompetenz), which also straddles the behavioural domain, shared with personal competence (Personalkompetenz).

Since most European countries had adopted systems that are largely based on one of these three dominant approaches, it was possible to propose a best-fitty pology of competence with which all countries could align to enable credit transfer and mutual recognition of qualifications to support labour mobility. The French approach offered a framework that had most in common with the others and which corresponded most closely with Bloom's taxonomy globally used in training, often summarized as 'knowledge, skills and attitudes', but where' attitudes' underpin behaviours, the meaningful outcome measure. In terms of competence theory, those component dimensions

Qualification Frameworks

Whilst the analysis of European approaches to competence led to a best-fit solution for the competence typology proposed for ECVET, its adoption proved more problematic. Rather than adopting our recommendations, the Technical Working Group charged by the European Com­mission with developing ECVET decided to retain the terms' knowledge, skills and competences' from the original remit, subsuming meta-competences under' competences', leading to the con­fusion that competence was an umbrella term, a dimension and, in the sense of meta-competence, a sub-dimension. In parallel, the Expert Group convened by the Commission to develop the EQFretained knowledge and skills in their typology but replaced competence with 'personal and professional competence', which was further subdivided into four categories: autonomy and responsibility; learning competence; communication and social competence; and professional and vocational competence. Including autonomy and responsibility as a competence shows the extent of the conceptual confusion since the seare characteristics of work organization rather than individual attributes, even if responsible autonomy implies a certain level of knowledge and skills. Eventually the EQF competence framework returned to knowledge, skills and competence, but with the addition of 'responsibility and autonomy' in brackets after competence. In subsequent initiatives, competence appeared as an over-arching term, a dimension of that term and even as a sub-dimension of itself, suggesting that confusion has flourished in policy application.

Given the confusion in policy instruments, it is perhaps fortunate that the impact on practice has been relatively limited. Many companies had already been working on developing their own competence frameworks in isolation or in collaboration with other employers in the same sector and continued to do so. Companies such as Daimler, Ericsson and Metso were among the first to develop corporate competence frameworks. Progress had also been made on European-wide occupational competence frameworks, notably for nursing and welding, and insectors such as chemical processing. The case study below describes comparable contemporaneous developments in Airbus at Toulouse, where the first author had supervised managers studying on the Aerospace MBA at Toulouse Business School and was directeurdethese of these condauthor, the nadoctoral student at the UniversitedeToulouse with a CIFRE scholarship and working for the company.

Airbus, at that time part of EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company), is a European trans-national aerospace corporation headquartered in Toulouse. One of the world's leading manufacturers of commercial aircraft, Airbus is also a major producer of helicopters and military aircraft as well as having divisions dedicated to satellites and navigation systems. Airbus currently has some 134000 employees worldwide, compared with its major US competitor Boe­ing, which has 153000 employees. At the time the competence management project was under­taken, the A380, the world's largest passenger airliner, was in the final stages of test flights and while orders for the Airbus A320 were lagging behind those for Boeing's737, that situation has since reversed. For several decades the commercial aircraft industry has been a defacto duopoly of the set world dominant manufacturers.

Market Down Turn

During a market down-turn and bring them back in during the next up-tum. That traditional approach failed Boeing when laid-off employees were picked up by the ITboom in Silicon Valley, so aerospace companies began to think more strategically about forecasting future jobs and skills, and about managing human capital to retain core competence. The human resources team at Airbus recognized the need for a system that would help managers make more informed decisions in relation to future competence needs and to put in place mechanisms to forecast more accurately future competence gaps and to secure or develop these in the medium term. In the process, there was explicit recognition of the need to identify and retain core competence underpinning competitive advantage and avoid a situation where most of the higher kills resided in older employees who could soon be retiring.

Airbus already had in place a sophisticated tool, Optimise Skills, which involved employees and managers to get her comparing the required competences defined by the line manager and the acquired competences currently possessed by the individual in post. The process compares self-appraisal of existing competence with the line managers' assessment in the OptimiseSkills interview, leading to an update of any identified competence gap and subsequent training needs. The company was not, however, practicing a technique developed in France for predicting future jobs and skills needs known as GPEC (Gestion Previsionnelledel'EmploietdesCompetences), which was considered too challenging in such a complex high-tech operation.

The Airbus Operating Plan covering a five-year period was the starting point for the company's Resource Planning Model, which compared the workload calculation against work force capacity (headcount). At the end of that processs occupations were added to give a qualitative estimate of the workload/workforce conversion. Whilst Airbus already had one of the most comprehensive competence management frameworks, it was largely focused on current competence needs and the introduction of the qualitative dimension came tool ate in the process. The aim was to introduce competence scenario development and simulation linked with the appropriate business drivers at the outset of the process, and in consultation with internal stakeholders, six essential needs were identified for the competence scenario and simulation tool.

Conclusion

For each profession or occupational group, expert stakeholders were asked about qualitative changes in the key competencies involved as well as quantitative changes through internal mo­bility (in and out) as well as externally through recruitment and attrition. Users of the scenario analyses made hypotheses about the rate of quantitative changes while training hypotheses were added concerning the rate at which competence proficiency would be acquired. In six divisions of Airbus involved in the project, there was a positive correlation between the maturity of competence management and forecasting. Forecasting appeared to be the impetus to competence management, driving the improvement of tools and processes while raising perceptions of competence gaps to be addressed.