Strengths and weaknesses
From the very beginning I want to thank you all for being so patient listening to my presentation. It was a bit strange for me talking to my display instead of watching the audience… after all it was my first presentation online… I promise I’ll be better next time!
But too much about me! Let’s go to the topic!
When we developed the assessment structure in ROMATSA we had to define the competence objectives. I’m not talking only about scientific stuff, I’m talking also about the approach in training and assessment. At the very beginning we decided that the knowledge and understanding levels from Bloom’s taxonomy were enough… afterwards we’ve realized we were wrong and that authenticity has to be the focal point in our policy of competence.
In the early ‘90s we were kids. The problem we had was directly connected to the mentality, to the organizational culture and internal policy. We had (and still have) to change our way of thinking, our concept of assessment in order to make everything really useful, connected to the professional and mental development of our meteorologists.
Why did we develop this complicated structure? Mainly because we realized that we were far behind a lot of countries in developing our staff… maybe we exaggerated going in so many details… maybe we should change more than developing blended trainings and assessments…
I believe that most of the organizations are dealing with problems similar to ours and they’re trying to develop some structures tailored to their needs. CALMet online gives us the chance of cooperation, gives us the chance of sharing ideas and find solutions.
Nobody’s perfect! No assessment structure can cover all the aspects of competence… but we can improve together a lot. Just by identifying and displaying our problems we make a huge step in solving them.
Maybe it can be accepted a common European (at the beginning) assessment tool for the basic competencies. Something unique at a certain level. A common database that shall be used by the states to prove that they are compliant to some commonly agrees aspects regarding entry level. If it’s developed at a certain level it might be a great aid to the different organizations for the next competence levels.
Tools developed by organizations like COMET and EUMETCAL can be adapted to a certain level and are proven to be extremely useful. The problem is to use them in an integrated training and assessment structure.
As I told you during the presentation, we intend to develop a “blended” assessment. The problem we have is traceability. We need to have the history of each meteorologist in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses, the needs of training, etc.
What shall we do?