Competences of students and expectations of employers regarding competencies in the training of teachers in economics.

Abstract

Most OECD reports stress the importance of helping students to acquire 21st century skills such as independent learning, problem solving, teamwork and creative thinking. This requires both the acquisition of basic skills and the continuous development of additional skills such as IT skills, language skills, reasoning and thinking in context. The paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey on competences among students and employers of the University of Nyíregyháza's economics teacher training programme. The student questionnaire was administered to the first graduating class of teacher of economics students. The labour market questionnaire was completed by employers (middle managers, senior managers, owners) of students with an active employment contract.  Based on the results, students' self-assessment shows that their communication competences have improved the most, which is fully in line with employers' expectations. The training did little to develop foreign language competences, which were rated by employers as less important (presumably because Hungarian is the primary working language of graduates and foreign language skills are only exceptionally needed for their tasks). The  gap between the development of students' competences and employers' expectations is noticeable in the case of digital competences. The trainees rated their digital competences as having improved significantly, while employers rated this type of knowledge as the least important. As the survey was conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic, employers' expectations of digital competences may have changed by today. In addition to providing an assessment of the economics teacher education at the University of Nyíregyháza, the research also highlights the importance of validating the quality of education from the employer side. The extension of the research to further years and majors, and its supplementation with international comparisons, appears as a perspective future research direction. A possible practical application of the research is the use of the results in the development of teacher training in economics.