Competence Development in Theory and Practice: Competence, Meta-Competence, Transfer Competence and Competence Development in Their Systematic Context

This work raises the question, why the contents of trainings in further education are often not applied in operational and everyday business. The authors do not want to leave it at that but rather focus on the transfer of what has been learned in a training and how trainings should be structured after all so that transfer can indeed take place. For this purpose, the term ‘competence’ is introduced at first, which should not be confused with ‘knowledge.’ Competences rather are ‘applied knowledge.’ Then the concept of meta-competence is introduced. Meta-competence means a competence of using competences which is of interest especially to leaders. Finally we look at transfer competence, which is the ability to apply acquired knowledge in practice. Classic trainings fail to make knowledge relevant for practice because only little or no transfer competence is activated. Therefore, towards the end of this work, we introduce a training measure, which systematically activates transfer competence and focuses on competences. For this reason, the correct name of this type of training should be ‘competence development.’