Abstract:

Personal development is NOT one of the main purposes for which students choose to attend the courses of an academic program. However, this process is achieved in the period of university studies and the complete preparation of graduates, from a European perspective, includes both professional and transversal competences. Their cumulative training is not, by far, the result of the teaching process alone, but is a synthesis that comes from the interweaving of the various services and opportunities that exist in the academic environment. Professional counseling services are a way to enrich the skills acquired during studentship and increase the chances of a future successful insertion into the labor market. Even if psychologists, counselors, educators and mentors who work with students in this regard have certain aims and priorities, it is very important to know directly the expectations, needs, desires of students regarding their own evolution. As part of a project carried out in 2019, one of our aims was to increase social inclusion by diversifying and modernizing the strategies of counseling and career guidance of students. One of the objectives of the project was to involve the students (including those at risk) in counseling and career guidance activities to support the process of building their own professional and personal path. The beginning of this process is precisely the analysis of their training / development needs. The purpose of our study is to identify the expectations and needs of students regarding the impact of counseling activities on their personal development.Our research was observational in nature and conducted on the basis of a questionnaire, applied online on a sample of 119 students of which 75 were part of the target group of the project. The study aimed at identifying and ranking a set of 4 categories of competencies and a package of 14 skills corresponding to them, namely: personal promotion (self-knowledge, self-presentation, self-promotion); resolutive (problem solving; conflict resolution); managerial (organizing; managing emotions, formulating realistic goals and objectives, objective analysis of information, planning); collaborative (interpersonal communication, cooperation and collaboration, learning with other people, working in a team). The data identified were analyzed both from the quantitative and qualitative perspective of the students' needs and from the perspective of adjusting the counseling services in the directions highlighted by the students participating in the study.

Keywords:

Students’ expectations, personal promotion competence, resolutive competence, managerial competence, collaborative competence, counseling services.