Abstract:

Over the past few years, the labor market for young professionals has been facing many challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to a remote/hybrid work format, changes in the communication system with potential employees, and new generational characteristics of young professionals, et al.

These challenges require restructuring and decision-making from both employers and educational institutions: employers have to review the requirements for applicants in such conditions; universities have to take into account the requirements and expectations of employers, but the curricula of the undergraduate programs are not always flexible enough to “catch up” with the changes described above.

The problem of the student’s transition from the educational market to the labor market also remains unresolved: the bachelor’s education system evaluates “knowledge” and “skills” at the output, and the labor market also takes into account soft skills (based on skills has existed for more than 20 years), the development of which requires candidates more time, effort and a higher level of awareness.

For management students, the labor market presents a long list of soft skills (it is worth noting that the skill set of each company is unique), which today are undergoing another round of change and expansion, but the generally accepted ones include communication, leadership, self-organization, decision-making, work in a team, et al. - sustainable competencies that EF MSU (Faculty of Economics of Lomonosov Moscow State University) together with partner companies included in the skill set for management students.

The key objective of this study was to analyze, using the example of EF MSU undergraduate management students, the influence of distance/hybrid learning format on the formation of the above competencies. For that purpose, we used the results of assessments of students of 1-4 courses of the undergraduate degree in Management who entered the EF MSU from 2017 to 2021 (more than 500 results in dynamics). The annual assessment at the EF MSU according to the same methodology allows comparing the results for students since 2014.

The analysis shows that in the period of distance/hybrid learning, the results of students are lower than in the period of traditional learning, so the results of students who graduated from school and started studying at the university in a distance/hybrid format are lower than the results of students who have studied in the traditional format at the 1-2 courses of the university. The study also shows that during the distance learning period, the following competencies are relatively weak: self-organization, leadership, and decision-making; at the same time, the number of competencies in the “strong” zone for each new recruitment year decreases.

An important conclusion of the study is the hypothesis that the competencies formulated in the pre-pandemic period may no longer reflect the quality of graduates since students who entered in 2020-2021 have a different set of strengths that was not evaluated in this study. It means that employers and universities (preparing students for these employers) in the current conditions need to revise and update the requirements for soft skills of new-generation candidates since the contemporary assessment tools and methods no longer reflect their real quality in the labor market.

Keywords:

Labor market, skill needs, higher education, management education, soft skills, managerial competencies.