PERFECT has developed a purchasing competence assessment (PCA) tool for PSM skill evaluation. The focus of the PCA tool is on the breadth and importance of competences covered, the differences between competence types and variations between certain case demographics, such as job role and work experience, as well as type of organisation. Establishing the relative importance of different competences is, of course, a worthwhile endeavour and one that the PERFECT project had been dealing with in the work of IO3, which is a large-scale survey of PSM practitioners. The purpose of the PCA tool is to provide individuals with the opportunity to self-assess their PSM skills and competencies in a range of PSM related activities.This makes it necessary for companies to hire university graduates with other specializations and often spend years bringing them up to a skill level that graduates in other disciplines already possess. For students, a significant challenge lies in finding appropriate university courses and matching them to their course portfolio during their studies. For the higher education institutions involved, the varying course contents and depth in exchange programmes hinder a stringent teaching of basic modules first, and then building on them further for PSM. The PCA tool gives individual feedback and helps find the right areas of training and proper content for learning.
The tool is available for free
on the following website:
www.supplycompetence.com
The methodology applied and the outcomes of this 5th main work package are summarized in another White Paper available for free download: whitepaper_IO5_230818
The topic of this white paper for IO5 concentrates on the PCA tool, and this work package is led by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT). The IO5 core team consisted of Prof. Dr. Jukka Hallikas (IO5 Lead) and Elina Karttunen, both from the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Dr. Stephen Kelly from Staffordshire University, Laura Berger from the Technical University Dortmund, and Heike Schulze from Hochschule Mainz –University of Applied Sciences.
Questions regarding the PCA tool and the corresponding IO5 whitepaper can be sent to jukka.hallikas@lut.fi.
