General Results of Assessment of Supraprofessional Competencies of 1st‑4th Year Students

Abstract

Subject. The problem of developing “soft” skills of recent graduates is acute in some areas of business. According to employers, young employees may have a high level of knowledge, but a low level of soft skills. The article considers the primary results of the pilot year of the project “Assessment and development of managerial competencies in Russian universities” (“Competence Centers”). The following competencies were assessed: information analysis; partnership and cooperation; planning and organization; result orientation; stress tolerance; following rules.Goals. Describe cross-professional competencies among university students; reveal links between different soft and hard competencies in university students.Methodology. The sample consisted of 28,933 students from 51 Russian universities. The following instruments were used to assess students’ soft skills: The Universal Personality Questionnaire, The Resilience Questionnaire, Tests for the analysis of numerical and verbal information. The analysis included correlational analysis, t-test and descriptive statistics.Results. The competencies “Stress resistance” and “Result orientation”, “Planning” and “Stress resistance” are strongly positively related (correlations are from 0.75). The competencies “Result orientation” and “Following the rules”, “Stress resistance” and “Following the rules” are negatively related (correlations are from — 0.22). The Information Analysis competency is not related to other competencies. The 4th year students show a higher result in “Information Analysis” and “Following the Rules” than the 1st year students.Conclusions. We describe differences in cross-professional competencies among students of different years of study and discuss possible explanations for these differences.