The challenge of competency assessment in aeronautical meteorology

The wind of change is blowing…. a change to a new approach in competencies, a change to more authentic training and assessment. What shall we do? What effort comprises this change? These are some questions we should ask ourselves.

Each country has implemented different approaches regarding competencies, more or less structured, but everyone has the same targets: improving the services,increasing their quality and, overall, having better meteorologists.

I want to show you our experience, the strengths and weaknesses of Romanian system in obtaining, maintaining and assessing the competencies of aeronautical meteorologists my country. I’m not telling you that is THE SYSTEM, I’m just using it as a starting point for our brainstorming in improving ourselves…

The Romanian system regarding competence approach has quite a long history,starting in the late 70’s and evolved, at the beginning, based upon the different scientific and political influences. Nowadays, it’s covering most of the aspects regarding competencies of aeronautical meteorologists but in a pretty complicated approach. A four level competence implementation and assessment is in force, requiring substantial financial and manpower efforts. It has to be improved, but how? Which tools can we use?

I think that I can thank the organizers on behalf of every participant at this prestigious conference – for the first time online – for the chance of sharing experiences all over the world, without becoming short of time in our discussions. We’ll have more time to settle some new ideas, talking about them, without taking care of any barriers …

I believe the most important thing is that everyone can take as much benefit as possible in this conference. I hope that even the most developed organizations in this domain might extract some useful ideas and also the ones which are at the beginning of implementing a competence approach can take benefit from the experience of other participants.

Participants will share their experiences in maintaining and assessing competencies show also strengths and weaknesses and, while discussing and debating, we might find some good solutions for everybody…

Some resources regarding the structure of the training and licensing of aeronautical personnel in Romania will be also available.

I’m sure we’ll have a useful time together!

Last modified: Tuesday, 18 September 2012, 2:38 PM