Competency based training and National Qualifications Frameworks: Insights from South Africa

During the last thirty years, National Qualification Frameworks have emerged as an attempt by the state to 'manage' the relations between education, training and work. Drawing on South African experiences of ten years of development of a competency and outcomes based National Qualifications Framework (NQF), this paper highlights the areas of greatest contestation and achievement. We argue for a view of NQFs as a work-in-progress and as contestable artefacts of modem society, which can provide an opportunity to address, in a modest manner, aspects of lifelong learning that contribute to economic development, social justice and personal empowerment.