MasterClass Identifying and Fostering Future Excellent Professionals
“The X-factor for innovation”
The MasterClass of Janina Banis – den Hertog – is the last event in the series of events to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of NIKOS. It is recommendable for anyone interested in honours tracks, excellence programmes and educating empathic engineers! The master class will be opened and introduced by Jennifer Herek, dean of ATLAS, the Bachelor’s programme in Technology and Liberal Arts & Sciences of the University College Twente (UCT).
Janina Banis – den Hertog works as a lecturer at the School of Applied Psychology and Human Resources Management (AMA) and is a researcher for the research group Strategic Human Resources Management. She recently obtained a research doctorate on personality traits as predictors of “professional excellence” at the University of Twente. Feel free to visit doc.utwente.nl to read her doctorate thesis “X-factor for innovation: identifying future excellent professionals”.
In her research she followed students who participated in the various honours programmes that Saxion has on offer. The research showed that openness and a proactive attitude appear to be good predictors of innovative behaviour, which matches the definition of “excellence” in this research. Participation in an honours programme in itself appears an incentive for innovative behaviour as well.
According to Banis - den Hertog: “What applies to honour programmes, applies to, for instance, industry as well. It is really important there to give creative, proactive employees enough room to use these personality traits, even though the tendency often arises to label these employees and to expect all kinds of things from them. That way, you run the risk of preventing their strengths from coming to full fruition.”
