Expectations and deficiencies in soft skills

In our everyday teaching we experience that many first-year students are ill prepared for the demands of an academic study process in technical domains. Usually, the students´ problems are not rooted in a lack of intellectual capacity or previously acquired founding expertise in the chosen course of study. Rather, it is the deficiencies in more basic competencies such as practical and cognitive, self and social areas that place a major hurdle in the students´ learning process. In an attempt to elucidate and improve this situation, as a first step we develop a questionnaire that captures the lecturers´ expectations on student competencies in these areas, as opposed to their view on competencies that first-year students possess in reality. This questionnaire is also applied to capture the university-employer skill gap.