ABSTRACT
Competence-based education represents a major cultural cornerstone in our current society because we are experiencing a turning point towards the training of youngsters to satisfy market demands, and also because knowledge and information have become factors with an undeniable centralized social effect addressing new ‘ways of being of humanness’ and new subjectivities. The education systems and universities support a great deal of this humanness transformation from the intellectual standpoint. Demands from the labour market impregnate a discourse about competence-based education, forcing both educational institutions and individuals to think and analyse themselves the topic of permanent learning from knowledge economics and lifelong learning standpoints. The objective of this article about competences is to encourage the articulation of student training and the labour market, linking educational interests to job opportunities. The big challenge of any educational system is to train individuals for a global and interconnected market, and this means the certification of the competences gained by students anywhere in the world. This is the aim of the Bologna
Declaration or the Tuning Project: the determination of standards that constitute reference points for the competences gained by any professional from any discipline or occupation, including their insertion or adaptation to the requirements of the labour market. From this perspective, the public policies of countries and educational institutions must tend towards the design of curricula that can be homologated in order to encourage mobility and flexibility.
