In this paper we will present results from CoSMed, a project that is concerned with highlighting and measuring occupation-specific competences of medical assistants. Two German institutes, the Georg-August-University of Göttingen (Chair of Business Education and Human Resource Development) and the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), collaborate by focusing on different competence dimensions.

The BIBB’s research-emphasis is on the medical assistants’ social competences, the importance of which tends to be widely underestimated. Medical assistants must quickly appraise a sick person’s situation and emotional state, calm down agitated patients and stabilize them in difficult situations, and carry out certain procedures that patients find unpleasant. At the same time, the occupation calls for good coordination within the practice team composed of different hierarchical levels. These examples make it clear that besides the expected skills in healthcare and business, social competences form a fundamental component of the professional profile. Germany’s training regulation for Medical Assistants, dating from April 2006, enumerates various tasks in patient care and consultation, which especially underscore the importance of social competences. According to the broad educational vision that underpins the vocational education and training (VET) concept, personal and social competences need to be taught, supported and, where possible, assessed  (KMK, 2007). However, the visibility and recognition of these competences still seem secondary in this dual apprenticeship. One explanation may be that these are often seen as personal qualities that people “just need to arrive with”. Alternatively it is hypothesized that they are acquired through primary socialization processes and continuously developed in working life, mainly through informal and experience-led learning in the process of carrying out the occupational role. Another factor is that in the past, nursing, care and dealing with people needing help was generally a sector to which society paid little attention, and hence the requisite skills were not adequately perceived, much less professionalized (Dietzen, Monnier & Tschöpe, 2012).

From a scientific perspective, there are still disagreements on the definition of social competences (Kanning, 2005). The unclear nature of the conceptual construct and the multitude of different attempted definitions and systematizations are largely based on plausibility assumptions. As a rule, these are not empirically derived (Kanning, 2003; Rose-Kransor, 1997). Accordingly, the term can be used as an all-embracing construct that permits wide-ranging interpretations, and can be concretised in diverse and to some extent arbitrary ways (Euler & Bauer-Klebl, 2008). The above-described necessity of teaching, supporting and assessing personal and social competences (KMK, 2007) requires a clear definition of the subject. Hence a new field of research dealing with the transfer and, by that, with the concretization of generalized personal and social competence models into occupation-specific personal and social competence models is emerging, one of the first implementations being the work by Gartmeier et al. (2011) on teachers or Tschöpe (2012) on bankers. 

To sum up, the occupation-specific perspective in the recognition and modelling of social competences is essential. In this paper, we present a model tailored to the profession of medical assistant, based on pedagogical theories of general social competences and on actual competence measurements. In particular, we emphasize the importance of the cooperation between researchers and practitioners when developing such models.

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