iComPAss (Inquire COMpetence for better Practice and ASSessment)

Society and its institutions depend entirely on specialized expertise. The inquire Competence for better Practice and Assessment (iComPAss) project has been an NFR supported competence project in which all partners were involved in the implementation of the project. As a competence project, the starting point was the organisations' need for expertise; in this case, the Master's in Organisation and Management at HVL (formerly the College of Sogn- og Fjordane) and decision makers in Fire and Rescue Services at Sotra Fire Protection IKS. Both organisations wanted to raise the quality of their training, to find methods to identify competency needs, and to develop methods and supporting technology that could provide a better overview of existing training and identified competency needs. NORCE and UiB have developed a method for identifying comptence needs and investigated the analysis and visualisation of comptence overviews. Three Masters students at UiB have developed apps to support aspects of firefighter training. In addition, Enovate AS has participated and further developed an existing product and developed a prototype for a data collection tool.

Results from iComPAss include:

• Identifying Competence Needs: Inquiring Practice, a method for identifying competence needs and developing a skills hierarchy that includes skills and the context around the skills in an organisation.
• Data collection tools: Readiness App, Assessment App, and fireTracker, an Indoor positioning and biosensor App for smoke diving.
• Using the visualisation tool Highcharts, we developed visualisations of data from the assessment application, with a focus on group and individual skills. The indoor positioning app visualises smoke diver movements within a smoke filled house.
• The project’s research partners and participating organisations developed knowledge about how data can be used to raise awareness of training and education development, and how such awareness can support the development of the organisations.
• iComPAss partner EVOVATE has plans for commercialising some of the applications developed in the project and our method for identifying competence needs will be used in further research and in consultant work.
• Project results from the project were disseminated to the education sector, the public sector, and the business community, which has led to new project initiation.