Market, Management and Profession. Social Business in the Polder

In a recent policy document of the organized employers in the care and welfare sector in The Netherlands (the MO Group), directors and board members of care and welfare institutions present themselves as "social entrepreneurs", managing their institutions as look-a like commercial companies. They are hardly criticized and there is not any countervailing power of significance. The workers are focusing on their own specialized professional fields and divided as a whole. Many government officials are in favour or do not bother. The relatively small number of intellectual workers in Dutch care and welfare are fragmented and pragmatic. From a democratic point of view this is a worrying situation. From a professional point of view the purpose and functions of professional care and welfare work are at stake. The penetration of market mechanisms and the take-over by commercially orientated managers result from unquestioned adaptation of Anglo-Saxon policy in The Netherlands in the 1990's, following the crisis of the Welfare State in the late 1980's. The polder country is now confronted fully with the pressure and negative effects of unbalanced powers in the institutions, i.e. Managerialism. After years of silence, the two principal authentic critics of Dutch care and welfare, Harry Kunneman and Andries Baart, are no longer voices crying in the wilderness, but are getting a response from a growing number of worried workers and intellectuals. Kunneman and Baart warn against the restriction of professional space and the loss of normative values and standards in the profession. They are right. It is high time to make room for criticism and to start a debate about the future of the social professions in The Netherlands, better: in Europe. Research, discussion and action have to prove how worrying the everyday situation of professional workers is, what goals have to be set and what strategy to be chosen.

IT-KompetenzBarometer

Die kurzen Technologiezyklen in der IT-Industrie stellen Unternehmen vor das Problem, Mitarbeiter zeit- und themenadäquat weiter zu qualifizieren. Für Bildungsanbieter erwächst damit die Herausforderung, relevante Bildungsthemen möglichst frühzeitig zu identifizieren, ökonomisch zu bewerten und ausgewählte Themen in Form geeigneter Bildungsangebote zur Marktreife zu bringen. Zur Handhabung dieser Problematik wurde an der Hochschule für Telekommunikation Leipzig (HfTL), die sich in Trägerschaft der Deutsche Telekom AG befindet, ein innovatives Analyseinstrument entwickelt. Mit diesem Instrument, dem IT-KompetenzBarometer, werden Stellenanzeigen, die in Jobportalen online publiziert werden, ausgelesen und mithilfe von Text Mining-Methoden untersucht. Auf diese Weise können Informationen gewonnen werden, die differenzierte Auskunft über die qualitativen Kompetenzanforderungen zentraler Berufsbilder des IT-Sektors liefern. Dieser Beitrag stellt Ergebnisse vor, die durch Analyse von mehr als 40.000 Stellenanzeigen für IT-Fachkräfte aus Jobportalen im Zeitraum von Juni-September 2012 gewonnen werden konnten. Diese Ergebnisse liefern eine Informationsgrundlage, um marktrelevante Bildungsthemen zu identifizieren, sodass Bildungsangebote erfolgreich gestaltet und weiterentwickelt werden können.