National staff development model for LSC staff, IAG staff and partnership staff: research report, quality development

This report outlines the findings and recommendations resulting from a national Quality Development Fund (QDF) project commissioned by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) in July 2002. The aim of the project was to produce a development and training programme aimed at information advice and guidance (IAG) staff. Outputs from the project include a staff development framework on compact disk (CD), detailing the skills and knowledge required in various work areas within the IAG initiative and correlating these with specific training and development opportunities. This report also lists eight recommendations for further improvement put forward by the project team. This report is of interest to IAG managers and coordinators in local Learning and Skills Councils (local LSCs), IAG partnerships and other IAG organisations. The absence of a prescribed IAG staff development and competence model has meant that local partnerships have been empowered to come up with their own definitions of ‘competence’ and ‘experience’ locally. This flexibility has been enhanced by the promulgation of the matrix standard and its predecessor which state that ‘staff competence and the support they are given are sufficient to deliver the service’ but intentionally does not define what competencies are required to deliver IAG. The aim of this project was to develop a comprehensive competence-based training pack for IAG delivery staff, front-line and support staff in delivery organisations, IAG coordinators/ managers and LSC staff involved in the initiative

Organisational virtuality: a conceptual framework for communication in shared virtual environments

This paper shows how popular 'structure-driven' approaches fail those who use and design virtual teams, and presents 'organisational virtuality' a conceptual framework which is may be used to understand the ways in which advanced ICTs and face-to-face meetings are used to support communication between users of shared virtual environments. It is argued that if knowledge exchange requires the sharing of contexts, then virtual teams may only be innovative if the contexts (space, time, community) which are not shared between them are re-personalised, through a mediated sense of telepresence, temporal telepresence and telecommunity

Visiting Professors for 2008-2009 at LLILAS

Latin American Studie

Table of Contents

A list of article contents for this issue