Introducing an Artifact for the Assessment of Transversal Professional Competences

This paper departs from a project conducted with
the Trade and Craft sector of the Austrian Federal
Chamber of Economics. A design science perspective
scaffolds the development of an artifact, the net of
competences, to support the assessment of transversal
professional competences in the validation of prior
formal, non-formal and informal learning. This paper
contributes to theory by arguing for a structural
functional equivalence between a real spider-web and the
structure of the net of competences. A process perspective
shows how different stakeholders interact in the net of
competences. Specifically, we pose the research question
“How to assess transversal professional competences?”.
To answer this question, we describe the design of a
self-assessment by outlining item generation, generation
of verb levels and the triangulation of items and verbs to
create nodes in the net of competences. Abstracting from
the previous, we present the algorithm on which the net
of competences is based.