Information professionals' perspectives towards the competencies acquired from education and work

Abstract

As information and knowledge become the central capital and the most extensive source for development, information professionals and knowledge workers become valuable assets of organizations. They are, by virtue of their association with information, concerned about managing and applying required information and knowledge in their work. They are connected to the competencies they use to accomplish their work. This generally applies to all professional disciplines such as medicine, nursing and law. Professional associations took the responsibility of building sets of competencies to measure the attributes and quality of graduates and to match that with job markets. The purpose of the study is to measure the contribution of education and job practices at work in the professional development from the professionals' perspectives. The results indicated that generally there is a significant correlation between education and work in developing the required competencies. However, the individual tests of several competencies did not show any significant correlation, including organizing Knowledge and Information, knowledge and information management, and using and exploiting knowledge. The result reflected the centralization practices by the Ministry of Education in Oman in regards to collection development and organization and the unclear image of the profession