3 questions for Szabolcs Prónay, PhD

Associate Professor, Institute of Business Studies, Division of Marketing & Management

How did you experience the pilot round? Were people rather tentative or keen on trying the assessment? As a first step, we identified the 4 challenges mentioned above: time constraints; survey fatigue; lack of incentive; limited awareness or communication. In response to these, we consciously developed a strategy to reach students, so that it was more work to design the concept, but also more effective to implement it.

Were the findings largely what was expected within your team or did it deviate a lot from your previous thoughts? When the results were assessed, there was relatively little previous data to compare them with, so we could judge the competences in absolute rather than relative terms. It was somewhat surprising that “Ethical and Sustainable Thinking” was the strongest competency, while “Learning through experience” was the second strongest. The latter may also suggest that young people learn the importance of experiential development already at university age.

What is your conclusion after the implementation of the pilot round (in your organisation)?

All of these efforts were crowned with success, as the University of Szeged EICAA student survey received 684 valuable responses – far exceeding expectations.