Skill and work experience in the European knowledge economy



at work and take responsibility for working with others to conceive of alternatives.
Third, encouraging learners to resituate their everyday knowledge and skill in new
contexts as well as encouraging them to contribute to the development of new
knowledge, new social practices and new intellectual debates. Fourth, developing their
confidence to cross organisational boundaries or the boundaries between different, and
often distributed ‘communities of practice'; and connect their knowledge to the
knowledge of other specialists whether in educational institutions, workplaces or the
wider community.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the extent to which work experience can help young people to
develop generic skill and thus support their employability in the emerging EU
knowledge economy. It has set the link between work, work experience and skill in the
following three contexts. First, it has explicitly taken account of economic and
technological changes which have given rise to the emergence of a knowledge
economy in Europe. Second, the paper has argued that the concept of generic skill,
which policymakers have claimed is central to working in the knowledge economy and
that can be developed through work experience, is more complex than is normally
acknowledged. In order to identify the complexity of the concept, the paper has
introduced a typology of generic skill. The typology illustrates the difference between
those conceptions which view skill as the
property of an individual and those which
view it in terms of a
relationship between individuals and context; and the difference
between the difference between the way skill has been conceptualised in relation to
fairly
routine work activities or to novel work activities. Third, the paper has argued
that the increasing demand by employers for more generic skills or competences
presents workplaces and vocational educators with an entirely new set of problems.
They have to try to help young people to develop context-free skills in context-specific
situations and, in order to do so, have to assist them to relate two different modes of

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