Thu
22
Apr
2010
After living more than half a year in London and after discovering more plazes, cities and countries I was wondering if I could start measuring my own personal international competencies. But how?
So I asked myself: What exactly are International competencies? Is it speaking two or more languages? Is it knowledge about different countries, their history, geography and population? Or is it having visited different countries and experienced how people are living there, having worked in different countries, simply know how live runs in different countries of the world?
Probably all of the above.
So the problem is how to measure this. Using plazes.com for ranking the numbers of countries visited, comparing Facebook's 'countries I've been' or developing a score for ivebeenthere.com, geckogo.com and tupalo.com users might be solutions. But wouldn't this end up in misleading results? All the above social tools are great as they are. However it's mainly quantifying plazes instead of taking qualitative metrics into account. The number of countries visited doesn't give any information about international competencies. So what's the resolution for this problem? Asking people for their understanding could be a starting point, potentially. However this approach presumes that people have already reflected on this topic. Another option might be using quantitative and qualitative data that's already available on the above social platforms and developing a score out of that.
Perhaps there's a completely different solution I haven't considered yet.
Whatever the answer might be and however the score measuring international competencies would be built-up I'll keep improving my personal score based on my personal opinion on international competencies. This however mainly deals with feelings rather than hard facts and figures.