MANAGEMENT AND PLANNING OF LIFELONG LEARNING PROJECTS: A QUALITATIVE PICTURE OF MANAGERIAL COMPETENCIES OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Designing, planning and managing projects, at the time of the society of knowledge and lifelong learning, belong to the necessary competencies of managers in the field of the management of education. The success of implemented projects depends not only on the personality of the manager but also on their competencies and skills in areas such as management, organization, personnel management, time management, finance management, monitoring, evaluation, etc. In this respect, the paper focuses on individual aspects of managerial competence, namely in undergraduate students of the 3rd years of the bachelor study programme Guidance in Vocational Education of the Institute of Education and Communication of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, who should be able to apply such competencies in their future professions in the position of counsellors. It is these students who should be able to analyse the educational needs of the groups concerned and to design, plan and manage educational programmes, including all the necessary steps that the project management involves.

The aim of the paper is to make a content analysis of assessment reviews of projects of further education designed by students of the 3rd years of the bachelor study programme of Guidance in Vocational Education during the academic years 2013-2014 to 2016-2017. This is therefore an analysis of the level of managerial competence of the target group of a particular educational institution, based on the designs of lifelong learning projects processed in detail by the students. The following indicators, including the skills of the given competence, point to the level of managerial competence of the students: justification of the need of the project, the ability to formulate aims, planning the curriculum content of the project with focus on budget, time management, the suitability of the selected evaluation of educational and control activities, the identification of partial steps reflecting organizational skills, coordination and final project evaluation, including dissemination.