Az elmélet és a gyakorlat integrációja a munkaalapú tanulás gyakorlatában egy egyetemi mesterszak szakmai gyakorlatának vizsgálata kapcsán

Abstract

According to the most common criticism of today’s tertiary education, there exists a considerable distance between the objectives, content, and methods of university education and the rapidly changing expectations of the economy and the labour market. There can be several factors behind this phenomenon; however, if one aims at defining the key focus of the problem concerning the establishment and development of professional identity and the steady appreciation of work-based or on-the-job training; as a part of this, several issues can be found with regards to the nature, proportion, and content of the theoretical and practical training. The reason for this is that obtaining a formal qualification, such as a vocational certificate or a university degree, means only the beginning of one’s career, followed by a long process of self-directed development. (Kovács & Csaba, 2021). Work-related professional learning and professional development processes obtain considerable complexity (Zagir et al., Dorner, 2021), emphasizing the relevance of authentic work experience and practice that influences professional development, which can refer to both participation in formal professional development programs and learning from professionals, exchanging experiences or communicating problems in which out-of-work experiences are continuously integrated.

In the course of the pilot study - as a starting point for later research on a larger sample - we examined the characteristics of work-based learning within the framework of the ELTE PPK human resource consulting master's internship. We aimed to find out whether university, theory-based training and work-based learning are integrated. Further, we also wanted to investigate by what means the internship may contribute to the practical application of the knowledge acquired during university education.

The target group of the research consisted of alumni of the department, among whom we conducted survey studies by using an adapted version of internationally accepted and validated research instruments (Ackermann, 2012; Nghia, 2019).

This research is directed to focus on several issues with regards to the integration of theory and practice of work-based learning and outlines the main findings of the pilot research. The present study concerns a minor part of the first results of the pilot research, with the aim of sharing the authors’ experiences and generating a discourse concerning the integration of theoretical knowledge in practice during tertiary education.