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This paper aims to propose an explorative metamodel of the key organizational competences management and presents a Web-based tool (Co.S.M.O.^© Competences Software Management for Organizations) for all-around assessment of the identified competences.

Building on the Great Eight Competencies Model- GEC, the European Qualifications Framework-EQF and focus group feedback, an online questionnaire was developed to manage the key organizational competences and to adapt the competence metamodel to the Italian context.

The competence metamodel described in this study and its newly designed tool (software with online questionnaire) could be used at the organizational level to improve productivity and efficiency by allowing an easy identification of key organizational competences and facilitating their acquisition and sharing.

Currently, the metamodel is mainly theoretical and the software sustained only a partial validation.

The developed tool is a dynamic, easy to use and interactive Web-based software useful for managing the competences in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

European official documents invite companies and institutions to work together and share human capital: the European Qualifications Framework-EQF, at the base of this model, facilitates a common organizational language for human resources management.

Managerial competence literature indicates that a comprehensive model capturing a link between the EQF and a managerial competence model has not yet been considered in the literature.

This paper aims to empirically examine career guidance services in terms of e-service quality, information quality and perceived value. It specifically examines students’ perceptions of quality to explore the effects of e-service quality and information quality on perceived value.

Students from the University of Verona participated in a quantitative survey, and 119 questionnaires were collected to assess the perceptions of respondents on e-service quality, information quality and perceived value about the career guidance e-service.

The results indicate that students perceive high value for the career guidance services; the perceived value depends on both service quality of the e-platform and information quality of the report; and efficiency is the most important dimension of e-service quality, while adequacy appears to be the most important dimension of the report.

These findings reveal that service organisations such as universities should invest in career guidance services, given that such services are appreciated by students and contribute to reducing the gap between education and job opportunities. In the design phase, service organisations should pay attention to students’ career development needs by developing e-platforms that are easy to use, appealing, efficient and with continuous system availability and reports that include relevant, understandable, reliable and adequate information. It is important to provide students with a report after they have completed a questionnaire.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research empirically evaluating the effects of perceived e-service quality and information quality on perceived value with specific reference to career guidance e-services.

The aim of the research presented here was to detect, in line with the European Union’s “Education and Training 2020” work program, the training needs of teachers and trainers working in the vocational education and training (VET) system in the Italian Region of Veneto to design courses, experiences and other training programs tailored to meet the needs emerged.

Four focus groups were including VET teachers and trainers were created, two before the construction and two after the online administration of an ad hoc questionnaire asking teachers and trainers to rate 67 competencies (43 for teachers, 24 for trainers) on the two dimensions of self-assessment (explicitly defined as the current level of mastery) and importance (explicitly defined as the expected level of mastery). Eight hundred twelve teachers and 166 trainers filled in the questionnaire which also asked them to give suggestions about the courses, experiences and other training programs to be designed.

In questionnaires, teachers and trainers declare they are competent enough to do what they do (self-assessment always obtains higher ratings than importance, except in one competence for teachers), even if in focus groups they say they want to be trained. Accordingly, they express a clear preference for short or very short courses, tailored on their specific needs and for training experiences and programs which are alternative to classroom training.

The research is a preliminary action to a European Social Fund project named “Training for trainers”, whose main aim is to give birth to courses, experiences and other training programs, specifically dedicated to VET teachers and trainers, to allow them to develop or refresh the competencies they feel they need for work. Besides, it allowed testing of the benefit of using mixed methods for a competence-based analysis of needs.

Data will be used to design courses, experiences and other training programs that really meet the needs of VET teachers and trainers in Veneto to tackle those aspects they consider really important for work in a lifelong learning perspective.

This study aims to test the effectiveness of a training intervention based on the psychology of perception, delivered to young Italian workers and employees, with low education, hired with an apprenticeship contract and involved in a compulsory training course (duration 32 h; the training intervention reported in the paper covers the first 8 h) whose aim was to let them develop such relational competencies as communication and cooperation with others.

By making use of optical-geometric illusions and ambiguous figures, participants were accompanied through a training intervention with the dual purpose of undermining their naive certainties about why they see what they see and increasing their awareness of how the perceptual processes work. At the beginning of the intervention, at the end of the 32 h (that is, after about a month) and after about one year from the end of the course, participants were administered a questionnaire to monitor the results of the training course by measuring their “perception awareness”.

“Perception awareness” increased from the beginning to the end of the course and still scored higher after one year. “Perception awareness” was positively related to communication and cooperation.

Although the literature is full of training courses delivered to improve communication and cooperation with others, little research has been carried out on perception-based training interventions delivered to young adults with low education hired with an apprenticeship contract for which this kind of training is compulsory.