Vikten av chefens kompetens - “Vad väger tyngst? ”

The aim of the paper is to identify which competencies are asked for in workplace announcements for managers in a specific region. To achieve the purpose the authors of this paper have chosen three research questions. 1. Which competencies are written as important in the workplace announcements? 2. How are the competencies motivated? 3. Do the competencies differ from each other in different workplace announcements? This paper consists of empirical data from 38 workplace announcements in the Swedish public administration sector. The theoretical framework are based on the Danish education ministry's definition of DeSeCo:s competencies referred to in Illeris (2013) book “Competence”. The competences referred to are literacy competence, education competence, self-managing competence, creative and innovative competence, social competence, communicative competence, intercultural competence, democratic competence, health competence, environment competence, technical competence and economic competence. Technical competence and economic competence was added from DeSeCo:s competence definition to fulfill the theoretical framework designed by the Danish education ministry. The study was conducted through the using of qualitative document analysis and the authors of this paper searched for the appearance of different competencies in the workplace announcements. The most important competencies identified in our study are social competence, communicative competence, literacy competence and competence in economy. Furthermore are the competencies motivated through the use of descriptions of different kinds of skills wanted from the managers who are supposed to fill the void that the announcements seek to fill. Some of the requirements are more developed than others and the linguistic quality concerning the formulation of the announcements varies from simplistic to well described descriptions of skills. A final conclusion is that the descriptions of the workplace announcements differed in what competencies who were sought for even when the work position was for same kind of work. For example, could the position of principal require seven competencies in one add while the same position in one other announcement required four competencies. It could be that some competencies are taken for granted in some announcements while others are more clearly formulated. Other students or researchers may take on the task of investigating if our competence results hold true in workplace announcements in private sector