The Irish Computer Society recently hosted a Japanese delegation to explore European and Japanese competence frameworks. Eiji Hayashiguchi, Chief Advisory and Osamu Endo, Group Leader, represented Japan’s Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), an organisation affiliated with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). In keeping with IPA’s strong focus on growing quality ICT human resources, it has developed the IPA i-Competency Dictionary.
The two groups took part in a series of discussions and presentations that explored and compared the European and Japanese approaches to ICT competency frameworks. ICS President, Declan Brady, ICS Foundation Strategy and Operations Manager, Linda Keane, and outgoing Chair of the CEN Workshop on ICT Skills, Dudley Dolan, were introduced to the i-Competency Dictionary (i-CD) before explaining the e-Competence Framework (e-CF) to their Japanese guests, highlighting its recent adoption as a European standard, the broader European ICT professionalism project and ICS national strategies in this area.
Interestingly, the i-Competency Dictionary and the e-CF bear marked similarities in their structure and classification of key IT disciplines and competencies, although the e-CF takes a broader view for ease of adoption while the i-CD applies a more granular approach, classifying up to 2,000 individual ‘tasks’.
As the i-Competency dictionary is predominantly used by Japanese companies to drive ICT staff development, the Japanese delegation was very interested in how the ICS’s free online CPD platform integrates with the e-CF to assist organisations in resource planning as well as in acquiring and managing ICT talent.
The two groups plan to meet again at the IT Professionalism Europe Network launch in December.
Pictured (left to right): Dudley Dolan, Declan Brady, Eiji Hayashiguchi, Linda Keane, Osamu Endo
