Enabling People to Help Shape the World of Work

Acting versus shaping: Both categories are fundamentally different from each other. Unlike vocational action competence, “design competence” refers to the creative quality of self-responsible action as well as to the contents of the scope for shaping. In contrast to professional action competence, design competence stands in opposition to a hierarchical form of deterministic work processes that is highly divided up by technology and precision planning. Technical change therefore challenges VET research to develop new forms of modernization of occupational profiles and training regulations: Consequently, modular systems are recommended for curriculum development. The identification and teaching of “key qualifications” frees VET practice and VET research from the pressure to adapt to the respective current work process knowledge. With the European ESPRIT project “Human Centred CIM Systems,” the attractiveness of the design approach beyond engineering and labor sciences and beyond vocational education and training was taken up by industry for the first time in the field of “large-scale” research in an almost spectacular way. Since then, “skill based design” has stood for the attempt to adapt technology for human-machine interaction to human abilities. In this context, vocational schools are challenged to deal with two questions: (1) Why are the respective work and the respective technology like this and not different? (2) Can it be done differently?