Session Outline

Professional standards and competency frameworks play a crucial role in quality assurance and enhancement, and help setting goals for professional development. However, they also tend to be abstract and generic. Seeing how frameworks can be applied in practice increases when steps are taken to specify and contextualise what the competencies represent at one’s own institution or unit.

In this workshop, we will present a simple set of steps developed at Maastricht University that help doing that, with ample time for the participants to try out this approach. Identifying main objectives for advising at one's institution (using the Academic Advising Continuum (Grey & Van den Wijngaard, forthcoming)), rephrasing abstract competencies into first person statements pertaining to one’s specific work context, and reflecting on the student needs and outcomes that are served through that competency, form the core of the process.