Collaborative Approaches for Self-Organized Competence Development

The ongoing digital transformation is changing work processes and production environments. Particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European textile industry are confronted with numerous related challenges. Among these, demand-oriented development and efficient use of employee competences are becoming ever more important for success. New decentralized and situationally adaptable solutions that enable self-organized learning paths and informal competency development are becoming a necessity for the participants in production processes to acquire the essential competences. Approaches to support self-organized learning paths and dynamic, role- and actor-based models for collaborative knowledge generation already exist and have proven especially worthwhile in the SME environment of the textile industry and its innovation processes. This paper presents challenges of collaborative competence development and approaches to solve them on different levels of the organization. In addition, it explains specific implementations based on project examples from the textile industry and outlines needs for further research.