When it comes to selecting candidates for a study program or for a job, one always has to define certain skills, knowledge contents & levels or competences that one expects the candidates to bring along into the class or the workplace… However, in life-long-learning settings, we will always have to allow students or colleagues to develop certain skills, expertise and competences. Rather, we do expect them to keep on learning and developing these very skills…
Probably what we expect them to bring into the game and what we allow them not bring into the game depends on the characteristics of potential candidates in the pool… If a lot of people already show these skills, expertise and competences, we will be able to choose only highly-qualified candidates. On the contrary, if only a few highly-qualified people from the overall population want to enter the selection procedure, we will be willing to accept people without the “required” skills, expertise and competences and will be inclined to tell ourselves that it’s okay if they develop them during their studies or during their job career…
Ok, all these thoughts were actually trigged but not entirely determined by this comic:
And as the comic tells us, sometimes, we need to choose highly-qualified people because we simply cannot train them in-house when it comes to the “required pre-requisites” 🙂