Graduates’ emotional competency: Aligning entrepreneurs’ expectations and students’ competency profile

Objectives: Research on how higher education programs can be effectively designed in order to enhance students’ behavioral competencies according to the entrepreneurs’ expectations is still limited. Moreover, studies that investigate the relationships between learning methods and graduates’ competency development are still fragmented. Our research aims to contribute to fill these gaps addressing the following research questions: how can the alignment between firms’ expectations and students’ behavioral competency portfolios be assessed and what competencies firms consider as crucial when they are hiring graduates? what learning methods may favor the students’ behavioral competency development? Prior Work: Research has acknowledged that behavioral competencies play a critical role in work performance. Moreover, entrepreneurship literature has recently shown that the entrepreneur’s emotional, social and cognitive competencies account for an important amount of the variance in predicting firm performance. This evidence has spurred an increasing interest for those studies addressing the assessment and the development of behavioral competencies in higher education contexts, in order to achieve a better match between graduates’ competencies and firms’ requirements as well as to better prepare graduates for their roles as responsible leaders in creating and managing sustainable businesses. Approach: We carried out a study on a sample of Italian graduates and we analyzed their emotional, social and cognitive competencies by adopting a research method that includes a multi raters approach. Moreover, we compared the graduates’ competency profile with that expected by a sample of national and international companies. This study also defines a category of learning methods adopted in academic programs and tests the effects of these different learning methodologies on the students’ emotional, social and cognitive competencies, by using the Artificial Neural Networks method. Results: Findings show the impact of the learning modes and their combined effect in developing the students’ emotional, social and cognitive competency profile. Implications: These results add to the debate on how Universities can promote graduates’ competency development in order to increase both their employability and firm performance, especially in the context of Small Medium Enterprises. Value: This paper suggests an approach to compare different perspectives about the students’ competencies, making it possible to evaluate the alignment/misalignment between what is expected and what is possessed. It also takes into account a broader range of teaching pedagogies (traditional and experiential) and the different influence that each learning mode may have and their possible combined effect on students’ competency portfolio.