Contenu du sommaire : Quelle reconnaissance des compétences transversales ?

The important of soft skills as a criterion for recruitment and career advancement in the academic and professional world throws into question the processes of formalization and reappropriation that accompany their recognition. This article puts forward a reflection into the construction of normative, pedagogical and evaluative tools involving technical aspects (the specificity and heterogeneity of soft skills) and social issues (the need to render accessible the semantics of soft skills and the reflexive approach that they require).

In the context of the reform of the French higher education system, soft skills are coming to acquire a special status for they are now at the heart of curricula. The author questions the implications and the organizational conditions for teaching and evaluating these skills in higher education. Their introduction calls into question the objects around which curricula are organized, opens up teaching to new methodologies, new types of learning and tends to change the modes of coordination of teaching work traditionally regulated by the formula : one single teacher, for one subject, during one class period.

The notion of social skills is at the heart of a problematic in today's society : how to promote lifelong social and professional integration for everyone. This article proposes a review of the scientific literature around four terms related to the social dimension of competency : social skills, soft skills, generic skills and emotional skills. The aim is to show to what extent these four terms apply not only to school education but also to the fields of the university or professional life.

In this article the author sets out to go beyond common sense and define these terms, which, even if they are in everyday use and are often wrongly taken as being synonymous, offer many variations of inter pretation. Of course, defining a term does not mean that the meaning of the word will be settled once and for all. The author makes explicit and compares the differences that these expressions cover ; he decides on their hypothetical potential of transferability and situates, where appropriate, their relative level.

The author considers skill as a modeling of the work activity that produces it. Thus, job analysis makes it possible to define a social skill as the result of work activity. Any social actor (notably a trainer) must therefore dispose of a theory of work activity in order to access the intelligence of human activity, including his own - on which to base an operational evaluation of social skills. This article focuses on a fundamental social skill for the researcher, the social worker, the teacher or the trainer : the ability to listen.

The article focuses on the place of cross-curricular competencies in university programmes, particularly with regard to the issues of mass academic success and the sustainable professional development of students. The contours of the notions are questioned as well as existing or emerging models. Using the results of a study, the author highlights the gap that remains between the frameworks for the development of these soft skills at university and the implementation models in the programmes themselves.

The competency-based approach has entered French universities because of new laws and decrees. Somewhat paradoxically, these sometimes lead to a rejection of the approach or at least to difficulties in its implementation. At a time when cross-disciplinary skills are particularly popular, the authors call for positive prudence regarding such injunctions : prudence with regard for the ideological dimensions underpinned by the notion and positive, because, in fact, the university has for a long time developed the different components of skills, and much more besides.

This article examines the conditions under which soft skills are constructed through the formation of knowledge in action, of knowledge gained through experience or of professional knowledge. In training programmes of professionalization, transmission questions the modularity of individual courses, and the circulation of knowledge between generations is present in certain trajectories of learning. In what way do soft skills constitute a pedagogical posture for the transmission of knowledge to young apprentices ? A survey has identified several spaces in which soft skills are combined with the experience-based modes of professional knowledge, relying on transmission practices with pedagogical effects.

The results of a quantitative and qualitative survey of French graduates, who are in employment and who have diplomas testifying to at least 5 years of higher education after their baccalaureat, support the hypothesis that these years of study fail to provide all the specific skills necessary. On the contrary, the results highlight the transversality perceived by young people in employment of all the skills that they have acquired, as well as the fundamental role these skills play in developing job adaptability, rather than simply providing an advantage over other candidates for the same job.

This article focuses on the development of cross-curricular competencies in masters degree programs. It sets out to analyze the fit between non-academic skills developed while studying and those skills thought to be useful or necessary to access a first job. The authors dwell on the link these skills have with the labor market.

The analysis of a study programme in product design carried out in work-study alternation highlights the ambiguity of the prescriptive texts that insist on the ʺ core of the profession ʺ while aiming at decompartmentalizing the fields of design. Because the boundaries between soft, transferable and specific skills remain unclear, students have to be « creative » in order to meet the different demands of the companies in which they find themselves placed in alternation and they regularly mention a need for specific job training.

This article presents a pedagogical laboratory developing training courses focused on social skills : interpersonal communication, teamworking, stress management, etc. This initiative came into being out of the frequent observation that young French graduates have good academic skills but encounter difficulties when it comes to working in a team or taking the floor in a meeting.

At a time when the need for soft skills is often expressed in the workplace and in adult education, confusion still surrounds the training systems that can develop them. Based on two recent studies, one on intercultural skills, the second on collaborative skills, this article focuses on describing their largely social nature, from the perspective of the microcompetences of which they are made up.

This article examines the issues and paradoxes of a teaching experiment in cross-curricular competencies in a school of management sciences in Quebec. Having been involved in this experiment, the authors present the institutional work and the collaborative teaching efforts, in a context where this approach was eventually undermined by shortterm considerations. They go on to describe the ways in which academic management practices got the better of their efforts, but not of their conviction about the place for cross-curricular competencies in this type of school.

The debate which exists around the term competencies illustrates the concerns generated by the questioning of models based solely on subject knowledge and their replacement by those based on competencies. Is this the reflection of a profound change, of an ephemeral fashion, of a switch from one model to another or of a semantic shift ? These questions refer to a variation of vocabulary in and for different spheres and uses and at different stages of development of the notion. So-called soft skills take on the appearance of new academic skills at university. These skills find their place in university programmes and in the articulation training-employability-living together.

Experience-based knowledge in the domain of health is acquired in a terrain involving particular experiences : experience of the body, of suffering, of the deterioration or loss of autonomy, of increasing dependency… Faced with these problems, the patient must learn to live with his or her condition. The knowledge acquired during these moments of vulnerability can only find a way to express itself and be formalized after the experience itself. These processes related to the expression of experience and the formalization of experiential knowledge are examined as part of a research-action with adults who have daily experience of the effects of a chronic disease : multiple sclerosis.

Leaving a full-time trades union mandate and returning to a professional career is a step that is not easy for trades union activists. Overwhelmed by questions related to their skills, their identity and their posture, they find themselves confronted with their own professional choices, often completely alone. Based on a reflective system using a dual approach combining activity analysis and biographical analysis, this article shows how these activists reflect on and qualify their skills, and envisage their transferability into new professional situations.