Introducing an Artifact for the Assessment of Transversal Professional Competences

This paper departs from a project conducted with the Trade and Craft sector of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Economics. A design science perspective scaffolds the development of an artifact, the net of competences, to support the assessment of transversal professional competences in the validation of prior formal, non-formal and informal learning. This paper contributes to theory by arguing for a structural functional equivalence between a real spider-web and the structure of the net of competences. A process perspective shows how different stakeholders interact in the net of competences. Specifically, we pose the research question “How to assess transversal professional competences?”. To answer this question, we describe the design of an self-assessment by outlining item generation, generation of verb levels and the triangulation of items and verbs to create nodes in the net of competences. Abstracting from the previous, we present the algorithm on which the net of competences is based