Students’ Perception on Developing Conceptual Generic Skills for Business Constantin Bratianu Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania Elena Madalina Vatamanescu National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania
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This paper should be referenced as following: Bratianu, C., & Vatamanescu, E.M. (2016). Students’ perception on developing conceptual generic skills th for business. In S. Moffett & B. Galbraith (Eds.). Proceedings of the 17 European Conference on Knowledge Management, Ulster University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, 1-2 September 2016, pp. 101108. Reading: Academic Conferences Publishing International Limited.
Abstract: In this new turbulent business landscape, universities face a significant change in teaching their students. The classical approach of teaching and learning based mostly on knowledge transfer is questionable since knowledge life cycle is shortening and new type of jobs appear every day with new knowledge request. Thus, the question is how to switch the focus from learning knowledge to learning generic skills able to help future professionals to think and learn by doing. Generic skills, also known as core skills, key skills, essential skills, basic skills, key competences, or employability skills are those capabilities which are able to power personal and professional development based on learning. The difficulty of implementing such a new vision concerning generic skills comes mostly not from professors, but from students who should work harder in developing their conceptual skills. The research question we have put forward is the following: What is the perception of students about developing generic skills and how are they prepared to assume the responsibility of becoming the main actors in the learning process? We developed a questionnaire containing 30 questions and addressed it to over 500 students involved in undergraduate and graduate programs of management and business from two important Romanian universities. We validated finally 340 questionnaires and process them by using the specialized package of SPSS. We performed also a factorial analysis trying to extract the most important factors which are involved in developing generic skills in our university programs. Results demonstrate that most of the students from the undergraduate programs would prefer the classical approach which means less implication and responsibility in doing a harder conceptual work, while most students from the master programs are open to this new perspective of learning to learn, and in developing generic skills. Keywords: conceptual skills, core competences, generic skills, knowledge acquisition, learning, teaching
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1. Introduction Globalization and turbulence of the external business environment generate new approaches from companies in developing and implementing their knowledge strategies. From the rational and planned strategy, more and more companies switch today to the emergent strategies or to the process of strategizing to cope with uncertainties and chaotic times (Bratianu & Bolisani, 205; De Toni et al., 2011; Kotter, 2012; Nonaka & Zhu, 2012; Spender, 2014). In this new turbulent business landscape, universities face a significant change in teaching their students. The classical approach of teaching and learning
based mostly on knowledge transfer is questionable since knowledge life cycle is shortening and new type of jobs appear every day with new knowledge requests. Thus, the question is how to switch the focus from learning knowledge to developing generic skills (Dawe, 2002; Gibb, 2004; Goatman & Medway, 2011; Singh & Gera, 2015) which are able to help future professionals to think and learn by doing. Thinking and action should have a new dynamics based on the whole spectrum of knowledge composed of rational, emotional, and spiritual knowledge fields (Bratianu, 2015). Generic skills, also known as core skills, key skills, essential skills, basic skills, key competences, or employability skills are those capabilities which are able to power personal and professional development based on learning. The difficulty of implementing in universities such a new vision concerning generic skills comes mostly not from professors, but from students who should work harder in developing their conceptual skills and the capability of learning to learn in a changeable business environment. Learning to learn becomes the new mantra of university education, such that students develop their capacity of searching for new knowledge instead of acquiring it ready processed through explicit lectures. That means that students assume responsibility for their learning and developing generic skills as mechanisms able to handle new problems in a changeable world. Generic skills will increase their chances for employability and further learning (Chan, 2010; Fallows & Steven, 2000; Rahman et al., 2011; Senge et al., 2004; Sin et al., 2016; Singh et al., 2014). Generic skills are essential for developing personal mastery, one of the five disciplines considered by Peter Senge (1999) necessary in the new business environment of the learning organizations. According to him, personal mastery “is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization” (Senge, 1999, p. 7). Thus, developing generic skills means a new perspective on knowledge management both in university and in any learning organization. Developing generic skills reveals new “connections between personal learning and organizational learning” (Senge, 1999, p. 8). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate students’ perception concerning changing the teaching and learning modes from those based mostly on knowledge accumulation and reactive thinking models towards developing generic conceptual skills like: collecting and processing data and information, problem solving, creative thinking, learning to learn and strategic thinking. We consider both undergraduate and graduate students and compare their perception of the need of developing generic skills and their readiness for being more active in the complex process of teaching and learning. We performed a quantitative research based on a questionnaire we designed for that purpose and addressed to students from two important universities in Romania.
2. Generic skills Generic skills became in the last two decades a frequently debatable issue not only by the academic communities but also by the business representatives and different governmental agencies and councils st (21 Century Workforce Commission, 2000; Chang et al., 2016; Conference Board of Canada, 1992; Curtin, 2004; Curtis, 2004a; OECD, 2001; Mayer Committee, 1992; Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council, 2006; Rodzalan & Saat, 2012; SCANS, 1991; Ulger, 2016; Wilson et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2016). According to Curtis (2004b, p.141), “A skill is regarded as generic if observers see a skill manifested by different people in many different contexts. It is transferable if an individual who demonstrates the skill in one context is able to apply it in others”. Industrial experience demonstrated that generic skills are important since they contribute to the increase in efficiency and productivity of work, and they are valuable intangible resources in achieving a competitive advantage. For graduating students, generic skills increase their chances for employability, the process by which they can get a job in concordance with their education, attitude and motivation (Gibbons-Wood & Lange, 2000; Hande et al., 2015; Vainikainen et al., 2015; Wickramasinghe & Perera, 2010). For this reason, many authors identify generic skills with employability skills, which can be defined as “skills required not only to gain employment but also to progress within an enterprise to achieve one’s potential and contribute
successfully to enterprise strategic directions” (Curtin, p. 39). Since generic skills integrate rational, emotional, and spiritual knowledge, they contribute directly to the knowledge dynamics management (Bratianu, 2015; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). In many countries, academic, business and government representatives performed ample research projects in order to identify and to define the core employability skills such that universities could introduce them in the academic curricula. In the United States The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) Report sought to document these employability skills. Synthetically, this report described three categories of skills (Curtis, 2004a, p. 23): Basic skills – literacy, numeracy, and communication. Thinking skills – decision making, and problem solving. Personal qualities – responsibility, self-esteem, and integrity. st The work done by SCANS has been extended and upgraded by the 21 Century Workforce Commission established by Al Gore. This commission was established in response to concerns about America’s competitiveness as a result of technological change and globalization, and it emphasized the importance of the new literacy requested by the information technology. In Canada, employability skills have been the subject of the work done by the Conference Board of Canada. That Board developed the Employability Skills Profile (ESP) which identified the generic academic, personal management and teamwork skills which are required, to varying degrees, in every job. The work done by the Conference Board of Canada has been further developed by the Human Resource Development Canada within the Essential Skills Research Project (ESRP), and then with the Employability Skills 2000+ Project. This last Project defined five fundamental skills: Skills needed as a base for further development. Skills for communication. Skills for managing information. Skills for using numbers. Skills for thinking and solving problems. In Australia, the Mayer Committee (1992) defined seven key competencies: Collecting, analyzing and organizing information. Communicating ideas and information. Planning and organizing activities. Working with others and in teams. Using mathematical ideas and techniques. Solving problems. Using technology. Based on the work of Mayer Committee, the Department of Education, Science and Training developed an Employability Skills Framework in which there are integrated some personal attributes. It is important to mention the fact that although these above examples refer to skills like to some discrete entities, they are overlapping and interrelated (Dawe, 2004).
3. Research design From among all these generic skills identified in the reports presented above, as well as in many published papers, we selected for our research the group of thinking or conceptual skills. These thinking skills are fundamental in the managerial decision making process, and students in business and management programs must develop them. We considered the following five thinking skills:
Searching, collecting and organizing data, information, and knowledge. This skill is related to digital literacy and it is necessary in any job for a better understanding of the issues and the context in which decisions will be made. Problem solving. In our universities, professors used to formulate problems and then to present them to the students for finding solutions based on some standard methods. Even if there are case studies, the formulation of them and of the thinking framework is done by professors. Developing problem solving as a generic skill implies that we ask students to identify and formulate problems, and then to search for solutions. Students should be aware that a badly formulated problem does not have any solution, and it is necessary to re-formulate it. Creative thinking. The turbulent business environment will bring always new problems for which the old methods are not workable anymore. Students should develop their creativity and a new attitude towards new business challenges. Learning to learn. This might be the most important thinking skill since it allows the students to renew their information and knowledge bases in concordance with the new professional environments and requirements. The Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council (2006, p. 16) defines this skill as follows: “Learning to learn is the ability to pursue and persists in learning, to organize one’s own learning, including through effective management of time and information, both individually and in groups. This competence includes awareness of one’s learning process and needs, identifying available opportunities, and the ability to overcome obstacles in order to learn successfully”. Strategic thinking. In business it is important to think in a long run, to think for the future. It can be considered as a metaskill since it integrates all of the above skills.
We described each of these five thinking skills by six items and constructed a questionnaire containing 30 items formulated as assertions. We asked students to evaluate these assertions by using a Likert scale with five options: 1 (to a very small extent), 2 (to a small extent), 3 (to a moderate extent), 4 (to a great extent), and 5 (to a very great extent). In addition to the core items of the research, the sociodemographic items were meant to depict the general profile of the respondents, relying on foor coordinates: age, gender, education level, occupational status and university. We distributed 500 questionnaires to undergraduate and graduate students from two important Romanian universities: Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Faculty of Business Administration, and National University of Political Studies and Public administration, Faculty of Management. We formulated the following research hypotheses: H1: Graduate students appreciate much better the skill of searching, collecting and organizing data, information and knowledge than undergraduate students. H2: Graduate students appreciate much better the skill of problem solving than undergraduate students. H3: Graduate students appreciate much better the skill of creative thinking than undergraduate students. H4: Graduate students appreciate much better the skill of learning to learn than undergraduate students. H5: Graduate students appreciate much better the skill of strategic thinking than undergraduate students. The research was conducted between January 20 and February 5, 2016. By the end we got 340 valid questionnaires. The sample was considered large enough to process the data by using SPSS software (version 19) and to derive relevant results. A preliminary exploratory factor analysis was performed in order to underscore the factors resulting from the sentences under analysis and then to provide a clear measure of the tested dimensions. The structure of the statistical population brought to the fore the following features: the average age of the subjects is 22 (M=22.42, SD=10.62), the sample comprising 60.6% females and 39.4% males, 60.9% undergraduates and 39.1% graduates.
4. Results analysis and discussion The statistical analysis of the collected data was founded on five main conceptual pillars describing specific generic skills, as previously mentioned: Searching, collecting and organizing data, information and knowledge, Problem solving, Creative thinking, Learning to learn, and Strategic thinking. With a view to process the collected data more thoroughly, we resorted to a factor analysis which facilitates the identification of the most significant factors able to depict the coordinates of the investigated population. The accuracy of the method was checked by employing the Bartlett and Kayser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) tests (Table 1). The KMO test allowed us to determine the efficiency of the application of factor analysis onto the data collected. A small value of the KMO test (i.e., less than 0.7) would indicate the inadequacy of using this particular method, whereas a large value of the test, converging to one, supports the application of the method to sum up the information comprised in the variables. Both the Bartlett test and the KMO test suggested a very good accuracy for using the factor analysis for the present research. Table 1: KMO and Bartlett's Test Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy. Approx. Chi-Square Bartlett's Test of Sphericity df Sig.
,760 1588,425 435 ,000
In order to perform the factor analysis, we started with the principal components extraction, applying the varimax orthogonal rotation. This specific rotation maximizes the variance of the factors components, leading to a smaller loading of variables onto every factor, and making the interpretation of the identified factors more pertinent. Hence, using the varimax orthogonal rotation, 11 identifiable factors comprising 58.874% of the information embedded in the original set of data were retrieved (Table 2). Table 2: Total variance explained for the first extraction Component
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Initial Eigenvalues Total
% of Cumulative % Variance
4,550 1,808 1,687 1,478 1,384 1,296 1,169 1,133 1,078 1,058 1,022 ,986 ,879 ,856 ,844 ,812 ,764
15,166 6,028 5,622 4,926 4,613 4,319 3,895 3,777 3,593 3,528 3,406 3,288 2,931 2,854 2,813 2,707 2,546
15,166 21,194 26,816 31,742 36,356 40,675 44,570 48,347 51,940 55,468 58,874 62,162 65,092 67,947 70,760 73,466 76,012
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
,733 ,686 ,669 ,631 ,614 ,587 ,548 ,540 ,493 ,451 ,434 ,411 ,399
2,445 2,286 2,231 2,104 2,047 1,955 1,825 1,802 1,643 1,503 1,447 1,370 1,330
78,457 80,743 82,975 85,079 87,126 89,081 90,906 92,708 94,351 95,854 97,301 98,670 100,000
By investigating the composition of each factor in terms of initial variables, and the main five skills or directions of analysis, we performed a second extraction of the main components. The structure of each factor in terms of the initial variables is presented in Table 3. Four of the five factors include three indicators while one factor (Factor 4) includes four indicators. Table 3: Composition of the 5 factors extracted Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Collecting and Problem Creative organizing solving thinking information Q16=0.727 Q17=0.704 Q18=0.785 Q21=0.791 Q22=0.872 Q23=0.881 Q26=0.857 Q27=0.855 Q28=0.911
Factor 4 Learning to learn
Factor 5 Strategic thinking
Q14=0.750 Q19=0.848 Q24=0.873 Q29=0.837
Q15=0.707 Q20=0.915 Q30=0.922
A Cronbach alpha coefficient test was conducted on all five factors to test the reliability of all of the item variables. This was to determine the internal consistency of the scale used. The test results indicate higher values than 0.7, proving a good internal consistency (Factor 1=0.707, Factor 2=0.747, Factor 3= 0.825, Factor 4=0.847, Factor 5=0.810). The items inclusion in one of the five skills and some significant results from the descriptive statistics are presented in Table 4. For all the variables, the minimum value is 1, and the maximum value is 5. Table 4: Descriptive statistics Item number
Variables
Q15
The learning process must continue after graduating the university. Future is not a simple extrapolation of the present.
Q16
I like to make connections between the new ideas found in the bibliographical references.
Q14
Skills (factors)
Mean
Std. Deviation
Factor 4 Learning to learn
4.69
.630
Factor 5 Strategic thinking Factor 1 Collecting and organizing information
4.04
1.008
3.56
1.170
Q17 Q18 Q19
Q21 Q22
Q23
Q24
A badly formulated problem has no solutions. Each of us can develop a creative mind. Learning is efficient when it is based on a good motivation. In business, it is important to collect and organize by yourself the information you have about the market and competitors. A well-formulated problem may have several solutions. Developing a creative mind is more important than learning a large knowledge volume. Learning to learn is more important for your career than simply learning professional knowledge.
Q29
Future exists in our mind as a set of events which are more or less probable. In university, the emphasis should be on developing the skills for searching, collecting and systematizing information and less on the quantity of transferred knowledge. In business, problems may have an economic rationality nature, as well as an emotional one. For developing a creative mind it is important to count on both successes and failures. The university is the most adequate place where you learn how to learn.
Q30
Strategy is the way through which one can achieve an objective in a long run.
Q25
Q26
Q27
Q28
Factor 2 Problem solving Factor 3 Creative thinking Factor 4 Learning to learn Factor 1 Collecting and organizing information Factor 2 Problem solving Factor 3 Creative thinking
3.19
1.319
4.22
1.014
4.62
.724
3.49
1.127
4.04
.998
4.11
.926
Factor 4 Learning to learn
4.21
.875
Factor 5 Strategic thinking
4.07
.878
Factor 1 Collecting and organizing information
4.17
.981
Factor 2 Problem solving
4.21
.990
Factor 3 Creative thinking
4.56
.669
Factor 4 Learning to learn Factor 5 Strategic thinking
3.09
1.167
4.50
.739
The preliminary analysis of the descriptive statistics in terms of the main conceptual dimensions shows that the items referring to the process of searching, collecting and organizing data, information and knowledge (i.e., Q16, Q21, Q26) have the lowest average mean (M=3.74), indicating that the respondents rely on outside mentors, both in university and in business, to provide relevant information. The idea to be the one to collect and organize information, to make connections and develop personal skills for searching, collecting and systematizing information is somehow perceived with skepticism by the questioned students. The situation is rather similar when focusing on problem solving, as the items reflecting this dimension have the second lowest average mean among the five identified categories (e.g., M (Q17,Q22,Q27)=3.81). Respondents are not clearly aware of the fact that a badly formulated problem is likely to lead to wrong solutions and that business challenges are complex, requiring a rational and emotional approach at the same time.
The findings indicate a more optimistic perspective in what concerns Creative thinking (Q18, Q23, Q28, M=4.29), Learning to learn (Q14, Q19, Q24, Q29, M=4.29), Strategic thinking (Q15, Q25, Q30, M=4.20). Focusing on creative thinking, students are more interested in creativity than in learning a large knowledge volume. They assume that both success and failures lie at the core of a creative mind and they believe that each individual can develop a creative mind. Although they lack awareness regarding the importance of properly collecting and organizing information, they acknowledge the fact that learning how to learn is very important (the items in this category gathering the highest values). Students believe that a good motivation is decisive for learning while learning to learn is more important for the career than simply learning professional knowledge. Also, they are aware that learning is an ongoing process which continues after graduating university. In what concerns strategic thinking, respondents acknowledge that strategy is the way through which one can achieve an objective in a long run. Future is not just an extrapolation of the present, it comprises opportunities and risks, and they should be open to a wide array of possibilities. In order to deepen the analysis and to test the advanced hypotheses, we performed Independent-Sample T tests to see whether there are differences on the five skills between undergraduates and graduates, males and females. Investigating the results through the lens of undergraduates and graduates dichotomy, several items illustrate statistically significant differences. The first item (Q16. I like to make connections between the new ideas found in the bibliographical references) indicates that the undergraduates appreciate less making connections between new ideas than the graduates (M=3.44, SD=1.18 versus M=3.74, SD=1.12, t(338)=-2.360, p
