THE CORE AND CRITICAL COMPETENCIES

HUMAN ISSUES OF GROWTH CURVES
A student completes the degree not for the sake of degree certificate, nor for the sake of just completing it. A student undergoing a course means that student is in a phase. Completion of a course means end of a phase.

And, end of a phase means beginning of the next phase.

Hence, the issue is not that whether a student can complete a phase or not but whether he/she can enter the next phase or not.

Though, in the process of life scale, every phase has a next phase, it is not necessary that one has to step-up the next phase. One may very well get settled at some phase one’s own convenience or satisfaction.

But the student phase is not such a phase in life where there is no need for someone to get into the next phase. Everyone at this stage needs to get into the next phase.

Lot depends on the institution also, though a student of a graduate course is supposed to have some for-sight and self-initiative, feel more responsible, show more interest for greater clarities become more and more prepared to face the consequences of the choices of the self, etc.

To get stuck-up at the student phase is an inexplicable melancholy. It is horrifying. Yet, many get stuck-up mostly due to the cruel passivity of people in power towards this issue and partly the institution as such.

What an institute needs to do is not mere completion of the syllabus prescribed by the university. It should underline the core competencies that a student is supposed to acquire in that phase in relation to the next immediate phase.

CORE COMPETENCIES

A point for cognizance is that the systems of the next phase may not generally take the overhead of pulling up the students into that phase. Very often, it is the system, in which the student is, that has to push him/her into the next phase, not just by coordinating or managing a relationship but by transmitting to and training the student in those special skills and technologies which are operative in the entry level of next phase with an implied assurance of core competencies. Of course, there are significant number of occasions where this next phase pulls up the students also. (Campus-recruitments, training immediately after employment, etc.)

Whether the above truth of sharing of responsibilities, ratios of responsibilities, who and how much etc. are acceptable to institutes or not is becoming one of the important yardsticks for the institutions, competition among them, the changing perspectives of prospective candidates seeking admissions and their parents.

Hence, the issues that confront an institution are one, building up of core competencies in each student (forget and come out of the narrow-shell of bankrupt and conservative notions of completion of syllabus) and two, to impart worthy skills to the students on the technologies and tools of the contemporary scenario.

[ For this purpose the institute may purchase samples of such. Otherwise, frequent and sharply targeted industrial tours and visits have to be conducted. The world outside our doors is not hostile. It always welcomes pleasantly any initiatives provided we have proper approaches. ]

The core competencies and not the skills of what we made a mention are the essentials of a graduate. They only shape the real growth in his/her future. These core competencies give the intellectual abilities of “non-specific transfer”.

Whereas, the skills are only an edge for an immediate suitability to be a fit into a contemporary scenario – contemporary scenario, to repeat again – of the next phase.