Analysis of gap between competencies developed by higher education and required by employers in Hungary

Abstract

Several researches are focusing on education and competency-management (Tran, 2018; Herbert et al., 2020) refer to a „skill gap” between the acquired skills of graduated students and workforce skills required by the industry. The current Hungarian higher-educational system and regulations do not fully support the competency-based view of education. According to employers and reports of future work competencies (WEF, 2020) higher education programs are supposed to meet the requirements of work skills connecting to personal qualities of students. Therefore the character building of graduates needs to be emphasized by universities. The aim of the research is to analyse the required skills of Human Resource Management graduated students from various aspects: from the point of view of the higher education training and outcome requirements defined by Ministry of National Resources; from the perspective of employers, and from the angle looking at future competency expectations. In order to reveal and compare these different aspects, based on the triangulation approach, document-analysis and focus-group interviews were carried out, and a case study method was applied in order to represent the outcome of the research. Our study indicates that competency based educational programs need to focus on the development of the personality and essential skills in parallel in order to provide professionals fit to employers’ expectations and future trends.