CVJM-Treehouse: Key Competencies

Basic Information

Certain key competencies are increasingly required by employers. This trend began in the 1950s. The following key competencies are the competencies that augment the professional abilities (hard skills) of an applicant.
Soft skills can be divided into four areas:

Social skills
These skills ease interpersonal relations. Good social skills make it possible to deal with others appropriately, even in difficult situations. Common social skills are: empathy, respect, relationship management, conflict resolution, teamwork and communication skills.
Methodological Skills
These are the competencies that help a person deal with problems and find solutions. Methodological competencies are: appropriation and application of knowledge, application of work and learning techniques, development of solution strategies.
Individual Skills
This includes all personal skills that help to optimize your own actions. Individual competencies are: reflection, adaptability, decision-making ability, values and ethics
Ability to act
The competency to act properly results from the positive interaction of the previous competencies. Together with the hard skills, they determine a person's behavior.

In summary, soft skills can also be described as key qualifications.

Key Competencies in Treehouse Camps

“Children and youth work constitutes, so to speak, an independent social-pedagogical arena in which children and young people can acquire skills that cannot be trained elsewhere in this specificity” (S. 83, HARRING; PALENTIEN; 2008, transl. by author).

Working with adolescents has alwayshas always provided a special opportunity to develop key competencies. In addition to school, where very formal education often takes place, youth work is the place of socialization for children and young people. Here they can test themselves and their ideas, prove themselves and develop socially in contact with peers. In the varying formats of child and youth work, skills are promoted in different ways. In experiential education, the focus is also on the development of personal skills.

“… learning processes initiated by experiential education are less about learning cognitive knowledge or reaching formal educational qualifications. Far from formal learning, experiential education primarily aims at the personal and social side of education.” (Wolfgang Wahl, aus MICHL u. SEIDEL, 2018, 29 transl. by author).

Due to the variety of possibilities, experience-based tree house camps offer very good prerequisites for helping participants grow in their skills. Self-efficacy for example is something that the participants experience, seeing how the tree house grows and how it can be inhabited by the end.

“Personality development through experiential education is essentially based on the construction of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy describes the attribution of the success of an action to one's own abilities: “I did it’” ( Wolfgang Wahl, aus MICHL u. SEIDEL, 2018, 28, transl. by author).

This experience of self-efficacy gives courage and motivation to face bigger challenges and to work on personal skills.

The 10 Most Prevalent Key Competencies in Treehouse Camps

Teamwork

Teamwork describes the ability to be involved in work processes with 2 or more individuals. The focus here is not just on working together, but rather on working towards a common goal. The ability to give and accept feedback is just as important as ensuring that the team members know their strengths and weaknesses and that they complement and support each other. By working towards a common goal, the team develops a sense of togetherness, so that the focus is less on individual performance than on team performance. In the past, competition was often the stimulus for performance at work, but more recently teamwork has become important to employees and employers alike because it increases satisfaction level.