مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله بین المللی آموزش مدیریت – The International Journal of Management Education

The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has prompted the need to advance the understanding of knowledge acquisition and competence development and the methods that can encourage them. In fact, this is one of the major challenges faced by European universities in recent years, but it also represents a ‘magnificent opportunity for universities to undertake a reform process that will enable them to adapt to the current social reality, the so-called Knowledge Society’ (Montero Curiel, 2010, p. 21). Currently, many European universities are undergoing a process of change in which the development of students’ competences becomes the central axis to articulate the teaching-learning process, apart from the basic knowledge that the student also needs to acquire.

In the education context, competences can be viewed as the talents, skills and capabilities that graduates will have, and that will contribute to productivity gains (García Aracil, Mora, & Vila, 2004). The EHEA strongly fosters competence development as a way to ensure education’s effectiveness and maximize the efficiency of schooling. In this sense, many higher educational institutions are now developing increasingly close collaboration ties with companies, in order to investigate the extent to which graduates are able to transfer skills and knowledge to the workplace (Green, 2013). Thus, and according to Botma, Van Rensburgb, Coetzeec, and Heyns (2015, p. 499), “transfer of learning is demonstrated by a competent student”, but competencies are not always observed in graduates’ behavior because transfer of learning is not an assured outcome of the educational process. This concern is also present in the field of education in Western countries, where the transfer of learning, understood as the application of knowledge and skills to new contexts, has “an eminent role in education”, although it is not exempt from criticism if it is considered the only purpose of education (Green, 2013). However, research on learning transfer is still necessary, specifically about learning environments where the knowledge and skills acquired by students can later be transferred to environments other than education (Burke, Jones, & Doherty, 2005).

Some authors in the field of higher education are concerned about overcoming the idea of an autonomous university and closely analyzing the relationships among society, business, and the academic world (e.g., Tynjal € a, V € alimaa, € & Sarja, 2003). These efforts have focused on the analysis of the relationship between higher education and the knowledge society (Vallima & Hoffman, 2008). In the field of business management, the development of competences has been associated with knowledge management and training. Both of these areas of business management are interested in transmitting knowledge and skills between units and employees in order to achieve better human capital that can do things better or in different ways. Along these lines, although the impact of higher education on personal development cannot be compared with that of training programs, due to the short-term nature of the latter (Vallima & Hoffman, 2008), the analysis of the relationship between higher education and working life could help to define the identity of higher education institutions (Tynjal € a et al., € ۲۰۰۳).