Competency Training in Higher Education: Research Trends in The Last Decade

Developing relevant competencies for optimal job performance ensures graduates' professional inclusion and success in the labor market. Competency research is examined from the business contexts of higher education and with the actors involved: faculty, students, graduates, and companies. This paper reviews the research on competency-based training of the last decade. Bibliometric analysis methodologies were approached with 539 documents. As a selection criterion, only articles and conference papers were considered, and 75 were selected for a detailed examination of their content through stratified sampling. The results indicate that empirical studies predominated over theoretical ones; self-reporting and interviews were the preferred techniques; the areas with the highest number of studies were Arts and Engineering, the Exact Sciences, and the Social and Legal Sciences. It is concluded that more studies examining competencies at the graduate level in higher education are needed. From these findings, we derived a taxonomy of competencies identified by areas of knowledge, which is presented in the results. © Proceedings of International Conference on Research in Education and Science 2024.