KOMPETENCIJE: TRAJNA VRIJEDNOST I TEMELJ ZA TRANSFER ZNANJA SVEUČILIŠNIH NASTAVNIKA
COMPETENCIES: PERMANENT VALUE AND BASIS FOR UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS’ TRANSFER OF KNOWLEDGE

Summary/Abstract: Universities have three main functions: to conduct research, offer scientific and professional education, and be at the society‘s service in solving problems which are of huge importance to the local and global community. Therefore, university professors are expected to possess the competencies necessary to do research, learn and teach, apply new knowledge in solving social problems, and perform administrative jobs. The aforementioned competencies, despite needing constant training, are university professors‘ permanent value and the basis for the acquired knowledge and skills transfer. University professors‘ career development is primarily dependant on published research, although a good researcher is not necessarily a good professor or administrative professional, thus confirming that the discrepancy among the teaching, research and administrative work is still present. On the one hand, the fast development in different scientific and technological fields, various economic and social problems, new knowledge in psychology and neuroscience, an increased number of students and their high heterogeneity, as well as the globalisation of higher education, demand for more attention to be paid to the quality of teaching and learning at universities. On the other hand, the range of teaching obligations does not let academics spend sufficient time doing research. According to numerous international research on the university profession, academics are not only expected to be successful researchers and professors, but take over numerous administrative and managerial roles. Namely, former basic activities, teaching and research, are today only a part of the wide spectrum of activities performed by university professors in Croatia. This pilot study aims to determine university professors‘ attitudes to competencies necessary to work at a university. A questionnaire was constructed for the needs of this research, and the obtained results established the reliability α=0.808 measured by the Cronbach‘s Alpha coefficient. The research was based on a quantitative and qualitative methodology encompassing the analysis of relevant literature and survey of professors‘ attitudes. For the descriptive and factor analysis of data the SPSS statistics software package was used. Results show that respondents consider all the mentioned groups of competencies important.

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