Abstract:

The Portuguese Naval Academy for more than 175 years has asserted itself as a school of excellence in the training of the Officers for the Portuguese Navy. With the organizational dynamics, it’s important to identify the competencies that could benefit from better development along the academic path. So, it is intended to identify the non-technical skills that characterize not only a Portuguese Navy Officer but also the officers of the Armed Forces, focusing on communication and leadership. As such, it is essential to have a system that allows any cadet of the Naval School to achieve excellence in the competencies deemed necessary to master, not only those who already reveal talent for their domain. In this sense, a competencies development system will be created including various types of assessments that allow measure the performance of naval academy students, as well as identifying the difficulties of each in various competencies creating processes for improving communication and leadership skills over a given period.

Thus, the need to increase the practice of leadership in the traditional initial training courses of the Officers of the Portuguese Navy had already been raised by other authors. Not only this fact, but the motivation also to study the development of transversal skills such as leadership and communication arose based on the four-year experience that the author obtained as a cadet of one of the traditional courses of the Naval School. This motivation led to the desire to create a system of skills development and, as Silva (2021) concluded in his study, to ensure that the competencies that characterize the Portuguese Navy Officers are evaluated and developed ensuring that after the completion of the course, there is a clear guarantee that the skills are mastered for each Officer.

Although the initial idea was to ensure control over the development of all non-technical skills that characterize the Officers of the Portuguese Navy, it became impossible to develop a project of this scale due to the high number of behaviours that would be necessary to develop and also due to the sample being cadets whose time is already filled with the normal responsibilities of military higher education and should reconcile with the extracurricular activities that this master's thesis introduced. Given this, the challenge of identifying and evaluating some non-technical skills and developing and mastering the skills of Communication and Leadership throughout the initial training of the Portuguese Navy Officers will be faced, contributing to a training and delivery to the Navy staff of highly competent leaders.

Keywords:

Leadership, communication, competencies, development.