Abstract:

Recent studies and experiences have shown that students and also their higher educational institutions have to face new challenges. Universities traditionally offer knowledge-based education, but the expectations on the labour market has been changing and companies expect to have skills and competences, and also practice from entrants – which they often do not have.

Budapest Business School, as one the first universities of applied sciences in Hungary pointed out on one hand to change the content of the studies and bring it closer to the real expectations, and on other hand started to run researches to find out what the expectations really are on the labour market.

Authors of this article have run two separated research activities, though both have been concentrating on competences and the evaluation of competences.

One research – as part of the doctoral work of one author – was about the competences of the new accountants. Of course there were prior studies and surveys which authors could use, but a primer survey was also done within more than 1,000 representatives of specialists from the field accounting, taxation and consultancy.

The other research would like to help knowing better what kind of competences a real entrepreneur need to have. Willingness of entrepreneurship in the Hungarian higher education is quite low but authors have some experiences in a learning-by-doing based education where students run their own businesses. To make able to compare university based or national results, authors used the results of the GUESSS survey (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey) and based on that also previous survey results in the mentioned education.

Authors make an attempt to summarize the results of these two researches and to conceive some suggestions to higher educational institutions (including BBS as well) in competence development.

Keywords:

Competence, higher education, business, accounting, entrepreneurship.