Developing occupational standards and their impacts on capacity building

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework for enhancing organizational productivity and capacity building at the national, industry-wide level that is based on an active collaboration between elements of the industry that the authors will refer to as the organization and the educational system that trains/educates the human resources that play a vital role in enabling the organization to acquire and then maintain the competitive advantage needed to be successful. Design/methodology/approach This framework is based on the concept of competencies of the human resource and a competence-based model for recruiting and developing these human resources. This framework has been successfully applied by the Kemt Enterprise Training Partnership (ETP)/Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET-Egypt) project in the Egyptian papermaking industry to solidify an understanding of the required competencies in this sector. For the purposes, the term competency will be defined as a set of skills, knowledge and behavior that allows employees to do their jobs effectively and efficiently without interfering with either other tasks or tasks they will encounter in the future. Findings Organizational productivity will be assumed to be related to having a workforce that is both competent and of the appropriate size, and can be determined using an organizational function map coupled to the development of a set of related occupational standards. Originality/value The paper proposed a national framework competence-based model which collaborates all the national efforts to enhance the national competitiveness.