The president has outlined his vision of an America built to last -- where an educated, skilled workforce has the knowledge, energy and expertise to compete in the global marketplace.
It should be evident to everyone in higher education that our colleges and universities must be the catalyst for creating a Federal workforce with the knowledge and skills it needs to compete in a marketplace which now transcends political ideologies and national borders.
Contemporary pre-service education (PSE) for the health occupations and professions focuses on the acquisition of competencies that are needed immediately upon entry into the workforce - the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary for safe and effective practice [ 1].
How do we create a workforce who are able to engage with the changing world, a workforce that has the knowledge, skills and attributes to allow them to be flexible, and who are entrepreneurial in their approach and who can change over time, and who can build future economies?
Today's complex firm may need a new matrix, with one structure for its knowledge workers and another for its more traditional workforce.However defined, the knowledge worker is not exactly a new invention.
Graduates enter the workforce thinking that the knowledge they have gathered during their education has prepared them for the world of work; yet a majority of human-resources directors say that it is increasingly difficult to find the right graduates with the right skills.
What we found after talking extensively to industry experts is that traditional curricula is producing a workforce armed with the knowledge of today's media--but not the competencies to adapt to the media of tomorrow.
Yet, a competent workforce must exemplify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable the professional to perform their tasks successfully [ 6, 7].
In many countries this increasing technical and programme complexity has not been matched with advances in providing a sustainable workforce that has the knowledge and skills to support these advances [ 2].
In this context, the use of competency based approaches have been widely advocated since such approaches provide an architecture for workforce development by codifying the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to effectively practice [ 11].
One of the most pervasive business trends of the past decade has been the rise of the "free agent", caused both by the breakdown of the social contract between companies and employees, and by the growing share in the workforce of knowledge workers with portable skills.
