Skill and work experience in the European knowledge economy

The aim of this paper is to analyse the assumption that work experience can make a
valuable contribution to developing students’ generic skills and hence supporting their
employability. The paper begins by providing an overview and interpretation of the
global economic and technological developments, which are assumed to have resulted
in the emergence a knowledge economy in Europe, before analysing several features of
the role of knowledge within the European economy. The paper then argues that one of
the reasons why it has been difficult to discern the implications of the knowledge
economy for education and training in general, and specifically for work experience, is
that writers have defined knowledge in very different ways. It points out that,
depending upon whether knowledge is defined in accordance with traditional scientific
or more pluralistic criteria (Spender 1998) it results in quite different conceptions of
the knowledge economy. In the case of the former, the concept tends to refer only to
those sectors of the economy that are explicitly based on advanced applications of
scientific and technological knowledge. In the case of the latter, the concept tends to
refer to all sectors where people are actively involved in transforming product and
service delivery. For this reason, the paper argues that the concept of generic skill,
which policymakers have claimed is a requirement for working in the knowledge
economy, is a much more complex issue than has generally been acknowledged and,
therefore, presents curriculum planners with considerable problems. The paper
illustrates the complexity of generic skill in relation to the initial discussion of the
knowledge economy by distinguishing between: (i) those conceptions of generic skill
which view it as though it were the property of an individual, and those which view it
in terms of a relationship between an individual and the context in which they are
working and, (ii) the generic skills called for when undertaking work activities of a
fairly routine kind compared with those work activities that are preoccupied with novel
or unfamiliar issues. The paper introduces the concept of consequential transition
(Beach 1999) as the basis of re-thinking the relationship between work experience, its
curriculum context and the development of generic skill. It argues that if work
experience is to support and develop generic skill, it will have to be part of a

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