ABSTRACT
The UK Management Charter Initiative (MCI) movement towards competence-based education is an indication of the growing attention being paid to the notion of the competent professional. There are already developments by the UK accounting bodies to develop detailed programmes to introduce competence-based education to accounting students. Competences have been defined in various ways – a behavioural description of workplace performance; doing rather than knowing; a focus on output (what a person can do) rather than input (what he or she has been taught). The underlying notion is to provide specific skills that are relevant to professional practice. The paper suggests that competences are not enough, and that what is required – meta-competence – can be learned but cannot be taught. Meta-competence is the overarching ability under which competence shelters. It embraces the higher order abilities which have to do with being able to learn, adapt, anticipate and create. Meta-competences are a prerequisite for the development of capacities such as judgement, intuition and acumen upon which competences are based and without which competences cannot flourish. The authors suggest that before syllabuses are created for the teaching of competence-based learning to accounting students, issue should be taken to confront the problematic nature of such teaching, should the existence of meta-competence be ignored.
