Comparative Advantages of School and Workplace Environment in Competence Acquisition: Empirical Evidence from a Survey Among Professional Tertiary Education and Training Students in Switzerland

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThis paper sheds light on the questions how important competences are and which competences can best be learned at school and which competences can be acquired better in the workplace. Exploiting data from a survey among professional tertiary education and training business administration students and their employers in Switzerland, we find that competences related to strategic management, human resource management, organizational design and project management processes are most suitable to be taught in school. However, the results further suggest that soft skills can be acquired more effectively in the workplace than at school. The only exceptions are analytical thinking, joy of learning and organizational competences, for which school and workplace are similarly suitable. Thereby, the paper provides empirical evidence regarding the optimal choice of the learning place for both human resource managers as well as educational decision makers who aim to combine education and training, e.g. in an apprenticeship.JEL: A23, I21

The linkage between the education and employment systems: ideal types of vocational education and training programs

“…The numerous VET classifications focusing on learning places highlight their importance (e.g., Lauterbach 1984Lauterbach , 1995OECD 1985;Eichhorst et al 2015), although this is not the case for previous explanatory typologies (Allmendinger 1989;Hannan, Raffe, and Smyth 1996;Müller and Shavit 1998;Lavrijsen, Nicaise, and Poesen-Vandeputte 2014). As students learn some skills more easily in the school environment, whereas others are more suited to learning in the workplace, some scholars argue that these two learning places are complementary (Aarkrog 2005;Bolli and Renold 2017).…”

A Importância Dos Soft Skills Nas Descrições Das Vagas De Gerente De Projetos De Ti

“…As competências de pessoas podem ser divididas em duas categorias de habilidades: as técnicas (hard skills) e as pessoais (soft skills) (Bolli & Renold, 2015;Wikle & Fagin, 2015). Skill é uma palavra inglesa que significa: (1) "o conhecimento e a habilidade que permite você fazer algo bem" e (2) "é um tipo de trabalho ou ofício que requer um treinamento especial e conhecimento" (Collins, 1992, p. 748).…”

“…Os soft skills podem ser compreendidos como habilidades interpessoais (Bolli & Renold, 2015;Gray & Ulbrich, 2017;Skulmoski & Hartman, 2009). Já para Livesey (2017), soft skills são as habilidades que envolvem a gestão de pessoas.…”

Vertical Educational Diversity and Innovation Performance

“…In cases where a firm pursues different research projects simultaneously, cross-fertilizing spillovers across the projects might arise (Weitzmann, 1998). Hence, decisions are improved if different perspectives are involved in the decision making process (Alesina and La Ferrara 2005), which can improve, for example, the capacity to develop a new prototype into a marketable innovation: this requires not only scientific views and expertise, but also professional competences, work experience, and last but not least soft skills (Bolli and Renold, 2015) in many different fields of knowledge.…”

“…Third, regarding the application of that curriculum, students' doing a high percentage of their training at the workplace is a big advantage because apprentices or students at the tertiary education level learn on the best-available technologies used in firms while picking up all the softs and behavioral skills required for being members of high-performing teams (see, e.g., Bolli and Renold, 2015). In addition, a high percentage of workplace learning guarantees that knowledge and skills are encultured and encoded (Lewis, 2005), and that young people are exposed to unfamiliar and unexpected situations for a substantial part of their education time.…”