BEYOND APTITUDE. ATTITUDE DEVELOPMENT AS A KEY TO SUCCESS?

This paper intend to analyse how to develop managerial skills and competences concentrating training on those aspects that enhance employability, on the skills that multiply the insertion potential and employability of its graduates. In its 2005 communiqué on “The Role of the Universities in the Europe of Knowledge” the European Union mentions the fact that changes are needed in syllabuses: they must be oriented more towards output and the development of social skills. In order to know how and what to train we have analysed the skills and competences of the BAM and Economics students from the University of Alcalá. On the other hand we have seen that in selection processes businesses increasingly give a greater weighting to social skills such as:

• The candidate’s ability to listen and communicate verbally.
• The candidate’s adaptability and capacity to give a creative response to setbacks and obstacles.
• The candidate’s capacity for self-management, his/her self-confidence and the will to achieve.
• The candidate’s group and interpersonal effectiveness, cooperation, his/her capacity to work as part of a team and his/her conflict resolution skills.
• The candidate’s effectiveness within the organisation and his/her willingness to participate actively and make the most of his/her leadership qualities.

So knowing what the actual skills of our students are and what skills are demanding in the selection process we have developed a management skills programme in order to improve their skills.

MANAGEMENT SKILLS PROGRAMME

The following points have been developed in seminar:
• Developing personal and management skills through emotional intelligence.
• Theory of behaviour roles.
• The leader’s new role: its challenges.
• Leadership: the transition from situational leadership to leadership through involvement.
• The change of attitude though one’s capacity for self-motivation.
• Meeting Direction and Conflict Management through the development of negotiating skills.
• Developing collaborators through team work and delegation.

In order to meet the stated objectives we have create groups with no more than 30 people in them and the following working procedure was followed:

• The development of practical cases through group work, dynamics and role-play in which the participants will have to act and adopt specific roles, enhancing individual and group reflection exercises.
• The patterns of behaviour, attitudes and skills exhibited will be analysed.
• Behaviour will be redirected and debate among group members will be encouraged.
• Conclusions, in the form of brief theoretical expositions, for each of the themes dealt with will be drawn from the results obtained from the exercises.

The seminar will finish with an outdoor training session lasting for a day and a half. In our case, the students were taken to Los Ángeles de San Rafael where they performed different tasks whose aim was to develop the attitudes dealt with in the seminar.

This whole project aims to facilitate the student’s incorporation into the employment market and help him/her integrate into the business.