Comparative study of employees' key competencies in selected health care and non-health care organizations

Abstract

The key competences of the employees are currently discussed and the open labor market. Competencies can be divided into three basic categories: knowledge competencies, application competencies and social competencies. Each work environment brings its specifics and the aim of the article is to find similarities and differences in the key competencies of employees of healthcare organizations and non-healthcare organizations. In order to achieve the objective of the article, a questionnaire survey was used, involving 791 respondents from healthcare organizations and 647 non-healthcare organizations. In total 1438 questionnaires were evaluated. The research was conducted from May 2017 to September 2018. The first phase of the research was conducted through semi-standardized interviews with 73 representatives of healthcare organizations and 69 representatives of non-healthcare organizations. Qualitative research was attended by representatives of the personnel department, respectively human resource management department. The second stage of the research was followed by quantitative research. Quantitative research was conducted from January 2018 to September 2018. Key competencies were selected on the basis of importance, and the author of the article deals with those that respondents have identified as most important for their work. Here we can find the first differences in the identification of key competencies in healthcare organizations and non-healthcare organizations. Respondents of healthcare organizations have identified as the most important the ability to communicate, the ability to learn, teamwork, reliability, dedication to work, empathy, emotional maturity and work under stress, while non-healthcare organizations respond as key communication skills, IT skills, creativity, team work, reliability, emotional maturity, and work under stress. Three research hypotheses have been identified. The research hypotheses were verified using the Two-sample t-Test statistic for equal means.