Toward a Collective Competency Framework for Educational Support Professionals in Postsecondary Technology-rich Education

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Traditional competency frameworks assume individual mastery as the foundation for professional effectiveness. This assumption becomes increasingly problematic for boundary-spanning professional roles, which may require fundamentally different models. Through an exploratory mixed-methods study involving 86 educational support professionals across 45 Dutch vocational, applied sciences, and research universities, we examined how third-space professionals in technology-rich educational contexts conceptualize essential competencies and envision their organizational implementation. Co-creative methodology fostered stakeholder ownership while maintaining empirical rigor. Results indicated an emergent pattern: practitioners predominantly conceptualized competencies as collective network capabilities distributed across professional teams rather than as individual attributes. Five specialized domains (advisor, coach, educational specialist, boundary crosser, innovator) emerged as complementary network functions for supporting technology integration and educational innovation. Taken together, these findings challenge dominant individual-focused competency theory and suggest that boundary-spanning roles may benefit from organizational approaches that differ from those typically associated with traditional professions.</p>