The role of skills and competences in the national higher education and in the labour market

Herneczky, Andrea – Varga, Erika – Marselek, Sándor

Keywords: competence, competitiveness, human resources, model, education, labour market

Due to the rapid technological, technical and economic development in the 21st century, knowledge and learning have become decisive economic factors and the role of human resources has also come in the limelight. The competitiveness of an entire national economy, a region or even a continent is basically determined by human resources with the suitable competencies. The labour market is in need of graduates who possess not only expertise in its strict sense but also master some economic, IT and foreign language skills. The free movement of labour is only of benefit to those who are able to communicate in a foreign language at a suitable level in addition to having specialised knowledge.
We set out to carry out a questionnaire-based study to prove that attitudes in higher education need to be changed. The findings clearly show that both the students and the employers agree that the effectiveness of foreign language teaching needs to be improved and that students should be equipped with broader and more modern knowledge in the fields of finance, accountancy, law, economics and marketing. At the same time, today’s higher education is characterised by too many programmes and majors rather than the development of competencies meeting the real needs of the labour market.
To sum it up, we can conclude that to improve Hungary’s competitiveness, the acquisition and the offering of the competences analysed in our research is indispensable.

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