Reinventing competency-based management education and training : forging a strategic alliance between the enterprise and Australia's quest for world competitive performance

This thesis has a genesis in frustration over why so many managers in Australia are either neglecting skills development or receiving education and training that is substantially divorced from the competencies required within their enterprise performance context. Outside normal research and literature review this thesis is based around material drawn from two sources. This includes personal experience derived since 1990 from working with enterprises and government bodies implementing training reform, and access to personal or contemporary records held by members of those bodies involved in managing training reform. What results is a study fundamentally influenced by the different perceptions held by enterprise executives interested in business success and those individuals managing training reform. Competency-based management education and training forms the central theme in this thesis. It serves to focus the exploration of the translation of management theory into developing the effective manager during a period of national training reform. This is not a search for a new theory of competency-based management education and training. Rather it is a search for a better understanding of how we can reinvent existing approaches to produce managers that can effectively achieve enterprise performance requirements. Through reinventing what exists the thesis illustrates it is possible to better integrate national training reform efforts with the sourcing of management education and training required by enterprises to achieve business success. This finding confirms the need to move debate from the actual process of reform (means) to a more collaborative basis concerning the perceived benefits (ends) sought by all participants. One such end advanced is the search for competitiveness; in both the local and global marketplace.