About Participation of Association members in «The Baltic Area Alliance Meeting» (3th October 2011, Katowice, Poland)

The Baltic Area Alliance Meeting was held on October, 3, 2011, in Katowice (Poland).

The meeting was attended by Prof. Ludmila Karamushka (Ukraine), Ph.D. Angela Carter (UK), Ph.D. Anita Pollak(Poland), MA Katarzyna Wiecek (Poland), and Prof. Barbara Kożusznik (Poland).

 The Baltic Area Alliance Meeting was supported by EAWOP moderated by Angela Carter, the EAWOP representative.

 The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the assumptions of the BAAB program and to propose further directions of work on the Baltic Area Project. Moreover, the intention of the meeting was to present and discuss the results of the analyses of the data obtained in the BAAB Universities Survey.

 BAAB Questionnaire Survey was done at six European universities and compared the universities’ declared approaches towards teaching the WOP students according to the ENOP Reference Model. The universities which participated in the survey were: Catholic University of Lublin John Paul II (Poland); SilesianUniversity (Poland); Volin National University named after L. Ukrainka (Ukraine); Institute of Psychology University of Wroclaw (Poland); Ivan Ohienko Kamyanets-Podilsky National University (Ukraine); I.I. Mechnikov Odessa National University (Ukraine); Zaporizhya National University (Ukraine).

The results of the analysis showed that the universities’ approaches towards WOP training declared during the survey did not reach the standards postulated in the ENOP Reference Model. Furthermore, the curricula offered by the universities did not include all areas of the ENOP Reference Model, i.e. Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology. The investigation also identified the configuration of primary and enabling competences acquired by the students during their five-year-studies at the surveyed universities and checked how the surveyed universities coped with the internship. The survey found out the major didactic methods used in W&O psychology training at the surveyed universities.

Although the results of the survey showed that the examined universities did not perfectly fit the ENOP Model it was assumed that there was a common core in the WOP teaching standards shared by the surveyed universities. In connection with the ambiguity of the obtained results it seems to be very important to take the further efforts in order to reach the consensus about the approaches and minimal standards for the common framework of the education of WOP psychologists in Europe and the knowledge and competences that are needed for WOP professionals in Poland and Ukraine.