Knowing how to use digital tools does not necessarily mean knowing how to teach with them. Still less does it mean being able to prepare students for professions in which technologies, forms of collaboration, and workplace skills are constantly evolving. This distinction is particularly important in Vocational Education and Training (VET), where learning must be connected to real-world workplace situations and respond to highly diverse student profiles.
The article “Connecting Digital and Social Competences in a Flexible and Adaptive Framework for VET Teachers,” published in RIED – Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia by María José Hernández Serrano, Noelia Morales Romo, Víctor Gago Rivas, and Carmen García Gutiérrez, highlights the need to move beyond an exclusively technological understanding of teachers’ digital competence. Its proposal rests on a fundamental idea: the digital transformation of education requires integrating technological capabilities with the social, creative, and professional skills needed to make effective use of them.
To explore this integration, the researchers developed FLEXI-COMP, a framework comprising 26 competences organized into eight areas: five related to teachers’ digital competence and three focused on collaborative intelligence, preparation for employment, and creativity. Based on this framework, they designed a flexible online course incorporating microlearning, practical activities, collaboration, and gamification, involving 171 VET teachers from Spain. Comparisons of participants’ self-assessments before and after the training revealed statistically significant improvements across all eight areas, particularly in digital assessment, teaching, and creativity.
The perceived gap between knowing a competence and feeling capable of applying it also narrowed, except in the area of creativity, where the reduction was not statistically significant. Participants rated the course’s usefulness highly, with scores ranging from 4.12 to 4.24 out of 5. One particularly interesting finding was that older teachers needed more time to complete the training, although they did not differ significantly from younger participants in their assessments of the usefulness of what they had learned.
The study invites us to reconsider both the competences teachers need and how these should be developed. Rather than relying on standardized frameworks that prescribe similar learning pathways for professionals with very different needs, FLEXI-COMP proposes adaptable training linked to specific challenges in the classroom and workplace. Incorporating skills such as conflict management, identifying hidden talents, fostering creativity, and supporting students’ transition into employment broadens the meaning of digital competence and brings it closer to the real demands of vocational education.
Although the research relies primarily on self-assessments and cannot directly establish improvements in actual teaching performance, its findings support the value of combining technological and socioprofessional competences in continuing professional development. The fundamental question is not simply which technologies teachers should master, but what they should be able to do with them to help students fulfil their potential.
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How to Cite: Hernández Serrano, M. J., Morales Romo, N., Gago Rivas, V., & García Gutiérrez, C. (2025). Connecting digital and social competences in a flexible and adaptive framework for VET teachers. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 28(1), 323–346. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.28.1.41470
