Competency Development in Distributed Work Environments

Today stringent customer demands, accelerated time-to-market schedules , and high levels of quality have put companies under pressure to adapt and modernize their product development processes. The ability to succeed over the long term on global markets depends in large part on keeping up with dynamic and constantly changing conditions. One way to meet these challenges is the organization of product development and production processes in cooperative, often international, company networks which can react flexibly to new developments on the market. A central characteristic of this new type of work organization can be seen in the increasing appearance of forms of " distributed work. " Distributed work can be understood as the organization of work across tasks, process chains, or production/service networks. In distributed work, employees from different departments, sites, and often countries, cooperate on a single task, a chain of tasks, or a network of tasks. One of the most important forms that distributed work takes is cooperation in temporary project teams, often supported by the use of modern information technologies. In such open work processes , a wide range of new demands arise for the work content and the competence development of engineers and skilled workers. A number of new dimensions enter the work process under conditions of distributed work which require companies to organize the creation and transfer of know-how and competencies differently. For instance, due to the limited time frame of distributed work projects, workers have to orient themselves to new work situations, tasks, and social frameworks over and over again. Another major requirement in processes of distributed work is the ability to react and respond in critical or unclear situations. In project organization, it is the participants who have to be in a position to make intelligent and timely decisions even in cases where information or data is incomplete (HINDS, KIESLER 2002).