Youth work competence
The Council of Europe Youth Work Portfolio is a tool to help those doing youth work, primarily youth workers and youth leaders, but also managers and administrators, to assess and further develop their youth work competence and that of the people under their supervision.
Youth work, as a practice and as a field, is constantly changing and developing. Members of the youth work community of practice are life-long learners. Competence is a key concept for understanding the Portfolio assessment framework.
Competence is the “ability to do something successfully or efficiently”. The term is often used interchangeably with the term
‘skill’, although they are not the same. Two elements differentiate competence from skill, and make competence more than skill.
When one person is competent, they can apply what they know to do a specific task or solve a problem and they are able to transfer this ability between different situations.
The Portfolio wants to support you in answering questions about your competence, for example:
When you think about the youth work you are involved in, what do you do and what do you need in order to be able to do it well? What does it take to be a competent youth worker?
In youth work, competence is understood as having three interlinked dimensions:
When you think about your own work, that of your team or your organisation, what do you associate with the head, hands and heart? Ask yourself the following questions and use the picture to document the answers:
- What should people doing youth work know?
- What should people doing youth work be able to do?
- What attitudes and values should people doing youth work have?
- What do you bring with you to your youth work that makes you competent?
