Abstract:

Up to date, education system has been primarily focused on building skills in the fields of language, arts, mathematics and science. This is done in order to qualify students for the “existing jobs”. Nonetheless, in todays’ fast evolving environment and technology standardised world, the future of jobs is changing. These calls for more skills training involving critical thinking and problem-solving, and others. Global forces will stand up and influence the current standard living, by the force of technology, demography and longevity factors and society changes. All too often we find that students are not sufficiently equipped with these skills. Education technology can be uniquely deployed to facilitate the teaching of the 21st-centurys’ most coveted skills such as communication, creativity, persistence and collaboration. To thrive in today’s innovation-driven economy, individuals need foundational skills, but they also need to develop transversal competences in order to be able to answer to the new requirements of the job market. HEIs should be also concerned about developing their essential role on the creation, development and generation of new knowledge, especially related to information and communication technologies (ICT) capacities in order to promote opportunities on the digital transformation.

This article presents the results of an exploratory study focusing on the identification and characterization of transversal competences conducted across five Latin American countries in the context of the Erasmus+ project Students4Change (No. 2574133-EPP-1-2016-1-MX-EPPKA2-CBHE-J), an Erasmus Plus capacity building project.

This study addresses students on HEIs, from different professional areas, and involved the collection of data in five countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The proposed competence framework advances three dimensions for transversal competences including personal, collaborative and transformative domains, and proposes their deployment into dimensions, that are measurable trough a list of proposed items (Amorim et al, 2019).

The data collected allows for a characterization of the social innovation competences’ profile for students on the five Latin American countries, using a set of transversal competences that are specifically related with the capabilities of social transformation. In the present work we concentrate in the analysis of the self-perceived transformational skills identified by HEIs students in these countries. The purpose of the work is to contribute to the body of knowledge about transformational skills (social awareness, initiative, innovation and creativity, cultural intelligence, values driven and vision), by focusing on the competence requirements for individuals aiming at social transformation and impact.

The article offers a timely contribution aligned with the concerns associated with the new contexts of work as result of digital transformation and transformational skills perceptions from students, oriented for social impact. Moreover, the results of this work relate social innovation, transformational skills and soft skills required, jointly informing recruitment, as well as the development of education and training responses to meet the demands of social innovation contexts on a world of digital transformation.

Keywords:

Social innovation, competences assessment, change makers, Latin America, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), digital transformation.