developing and assessing generic skills, however, raises more complex questions than
have so far surfaced in the EU policy debates.
The concept of generic skill.
It is widely accepted that the organisational and occupational changes that were
described earlier have resulted in an increased demand from employers for broader-
based forms of skill (Green et al 1998; Kamarainen & Streumer 1998; Nijhhof and
Streumer 1998). The concept of generic skill, however, has to be treated with great
care for a number of reasons.
Most generic concepts of skill mention ‘teamwork’, ‘flexibility’ or ‘problem-solving’
as a necessary skill. Qualities, such as teamwork’, however, are not a skill but a
description of how work is or is not organised. What constitutes a ‘team’ is subject to
local definition and thus must be defined in relation to the working context (Darrah
(1994). The idea of teamwork also presupposes a clear sense of purpose about the
activities teams are expected to undertake and an indication as to the type of
knowledge, performance and result teams are expected to achieve. This implies that the
above qualities are not solely attributes of individuals, they are developed through
participation in ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) and hence are
shaped by the actual context of work (Boreham 1999).
When thinking about generic skill, therefore, it is important to differentiate between
the type of knowledge and skill that are required for routine activities as opposed to
more novel forms of work activity. This relationship between types of work and types
of generic skill alerts us to the extent to which young people might have to call upon
any of the following types of generic skill. They might have to: (i) resituate their
existing knowledge or skill in a new context to help solve a routine problem or
‘unforeseen event’ or ‘problematic situation’ (Boreham 1999; Fischer 1999); (ii)
participate in a workplace ‘community of practice’ in order to gain access to the human
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