Changemakers and change agents: encouraging students as researchers through changemaker’s programmes

This paper examines the role played by a student-organized research conference in the age of research-led teaching and active learning. Drawing on our experiences of organizing two departmental conferences in Geography in March 2016 and March 2017, we begin to outline how institutional support and funding for student-led “Changemakers” projects can not only introduce students to specific aspects of research (in the case of our conference, to disseminating and communicating research findings), but also encourage collaboration and mutual support outside of formal staff-student hierarchies of teaching, learning and marking

A project for assessing public management competencies

From 2017 onwards, the Italian National School of Administration (SNA) launched innovative activities to measure and assess the competencies of senior executives, managers, and officials of central administrations. In particular, it designed an experimental path to identify a “protocol” to read and evaluate the individual and collective competencies of Public Administration (PA) managers. This pilot study involved 51 first- and second-level senior managers of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (PCM), where the positions, the competencies necessary to cover them, and the competencies actually possessed by the individual managers were assessed. The comparison between necessary and available competencies rendered it possible to identify individual development spaces and organizational development paths. This chapter presents and critically interprets the action-research project, jointly launched by the Italian Prime Minister’s Office and the Italian SNA, entitled “Analysis, Evaluation and Strengthening of Managerial Competencies in the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers”. The main aim of the project was to assess the competencies of a sample of public managers working at the Italian PCM in order to redesign the ideal profiles their roles require. A team of experts were involved, including human resources scholars and psychologists, and a multi-method approach based on individual interviews and assessment was adopted. This project was conceived as a pilot for a possible subsequent broader intervention; it may also be considered an essential prerequisite for designing appropriate development and training paths in a differentiated and targeted manner, as well as fostering a process of constant development of strategic managerial competencies