Abstract:

Energy consultancy for buildings within the middle qualification level is prototypic for a change in occupational work tasks from commercial-technical professions to an increasing service- and customer-orientation. This change demands new qualifications, which will be developed in this article.
Nowadays, a lot of different and imprecisely defined service offers and education pathways without unitary standards and heterogeneous initial qualifications exist. Existing legislation and regulations rarely give information about the qualifications or the content of the services in this volatile branch. In addition, from the perspective of vocational and further education energy consulting is a little-researched domain. Existing curricula do not adequately describe the demanded skills. They exclusively describe contents from different domains, mostly consider technical knowledge and lack integration of interdisciplinary skills, e.g. interaction with customers.
A central step for the systematic illustration of energy consultants´ skills was the inquiry and validation of job-related fields of activities (i.e. complexes of work tasks) along the service chain of energy consulting services. They are used as a core for modern, action-oriented structures for further and vocational education. To enumerate and validate the fields of activities, curricular analysis, analysis of work processes and tasks as well as expert questionnaires and workshops were conducted. The Fleishman Job Analysis Survey (F-JAS) is used for the analysis of interdisciplinary skills.
Aim of our developed curricular framework is to connect the descriptions of the fields of activities with reference levels to provide clear goals for vocational and further education. Findings from the development of the European as well as the German Qualifications Frameworks have been considered in our concept.
A lot of work tasks demand a great amount of interaction with costumers, cooperation partners etc. as well as exposure to uncertainties in the execution of work tasks, which e.g. can result in conflicts of aims. In this context, for energy consultants an Education for Sustainable Development is essential. Finding an effective, sustainable solution is necessary, which includes the weighting between mutually dependent and often conflicting aspects of “economic effectiveness”, “ecological compatibility” and “social/corporative responsibility”. Thus, energy consultants are in need of special skills to accomplish those complex work tasks. We will present a curricular implementation of interaction work and dealing with conflicts of aims as special social and personal skills next to technical knowledge with the help of typical, occupational work tasks.
On the basis of our studies it can be concluded that a particular didactic challenge is to facilitate a big bandwidth of social and personal skills besides functional knowledge. To combine competence development with the uncertainty of energy consulting, constructivism and the principles of constructivist teaching offer a viable didactical approach. We will provide an example for concrete training modules.