How to Achieve Professional Skills in Higher Education?

During the last decade, higher education has tried to focus education on the achievement of professional skills. It is interesting to see how the learning strategies implemented may facilitate or make more difficult the achievement of competencies. By dealing with the challenge of a competency-based education approach, higher education points out the need of knowing how to build such competencies, i.e. how to design a learning strategy. Not much importance has been given to this issue, probably because the competencies can be confused with abilities, skills and attitudes and, therefore, the model can be associated to in- or out-of-classroom activities without a strategy to articulate the knowledge acquired with the cultural, social and economic contexts of the community and labor spheres, i.e., as a whole (Tobón, 2005). This paper analyzes the epistemological development of the competency-based approach in higher education, focusing on the implementation of professional competencies in the Sociology degree “Licenciatura en Sociología”, in two campuses of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California: Ensenada and Mexicali. This paper describes how competencies are built and explores different theoretical trends, their conceptualization and formation, based on in-depth interviews applied to students and teachers. It provides a mixed study to understand, based on the student’s point of view, the achievements of this study program in terms of professional competencies.

Perfil del docente en el enfoque basado en competencias

Recibido 03 de noviembre de 2010 • Aceptado 09 de marzo de 2011 • Corregido 13 de mayo de 2011 La educación basada en competencias contiene el potencial para convertirse en un plan eficaz tendiente a mejorar el aprendizaje del estudiantado y, de esta manera, prepararle para abordar el trabajo futuro. Pero este enfoque requiere de un largo proceso de reformas, lo que implica, necesariamente, la transformación de los actores educativos: docentes y estudiantes. Ya que grupo de docentes constituye uno de los pilares de la educación basada en competencias, en este artículo se presentan las necesarias características o perfiles de docentes universitarios para abordar este enfoque.