Competences and Work Contexts: Learning from the French Ergonomic Approach
Résumé
In the past decades, many French researches and HR practices about competences management concentrated on managing employment. In doing so, they paid less attention to recognizing difficulties workers face in their daily work situations and to their organizational causes. This chapter is a contribution to reactivating the link between organization, competences and work, drawing on French roots of competences management in ergonomics.
Through an empirical research in a large French company facing a major job transformation, we show that focusing on activity is a way to grasp work contexts and thus lead to a better understanding of competences. From that, we highlight the different scales of contexts and their contribution to the study of competences.