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The objectives of this project were to establish: (1) whether the proposed set of seven key competencies proposed in the 'Mayer report' covers the range of key competencies required by industry for effective participation in work, including for participation in emerging forms of work organisation; and (2) whether the draft key competency performance levels are appropriate and relevant to industry requirements at entry level. This stage one report of the project includes project findings and recommendations. Findings indicate that there is widespread support for all seven competencies as areas of skill and knowledge (competence) that are relevant to all industries but that the wording used to describe the key competencies was complex, confusing and failed to provide clear definition and meaning. A set of nine recommendations are included.

The subjectivity of workers, articulated in terms of the personal attributes required in ongoing conditions of economic change, has been at the forefront of current discussions of generic skills in Australia. This article explores the discursive construction and reconstruction of the ‘competent’ learner-worker from its initial elaboration in the Mayer Committee’s 1992 report on key competencies to its re-specification in contemporary reports concerned with developing a new framework of ‘employability skills’. I argue that various theories of subjectivity necessarily (if implicitly) mobilized in any consideration of the personal attributes of learner-workers generate confusion around their learnability. I suggest that a nature/nurture dichotomy haunts past and present discussions about the personal attributes of learner-workers and that this will likely create stumbling blocks as policy makers and educators attempt to codify personal attributes for the purposes of including them in training programs. Apart from its conceptual problematics and incongruities, the whole project of specifying the desired personal attributes of learner-workers and making these available for assessment against competency standards is necessarily a normalizing exercise. As such, the project will be subject to refusal, resistance, contestation, or appropriation in various ways by educators, trainers and worker-learners alike.