Measurement and training on-line of emotional intelligence and competencies, and relevant criterion and socio-demographic variables in career starters.

Nowadays, the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) has become more and more important and popular, not only in various areas of behavioral research within the scientific community, but also in the commercial world. For example, the assessment of EI is thought to be useful in the work setting when evaluating ongoing functioning of employees at critical stages of their careers, e.g., at selection, training, and promotion phases. The method and selected findings will be presented of studies carried out within a three-year research project (founded by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo). The project focuses on career starters - mostly University graduates, and people with a high school diploma and/or short professional degree, who have entered or seek to enter the work context - in the hypothesis that EI has an important role for them, in their entering the work context (e.g., by facilitating them to fit their job-role requirements), and/or in their attempts to find a satisfactory job, in line with their personal and professional aims. The most general goal of the project is to develop, administer, and validate a set of EI assessment and training instruments - specifically aimed at career starters. More specifically, the project has both applicative and theoretical-methodological aims. First, to study EI components and their relationships with several variables hypothesized to interact with EI - socio-demographic, psychological ones (e.g., personality, health, well-being) and education-related ones. A second aim is to test whether EI abilities and competencies can be successfully trained. A third aim is to gain, by so doing, a better conceptualization, at both the theoretical and operational level, of the EI construct, especially as regards the distinction between trait-EI (Pérez, Petrides, & Furnham, 2005) and ability-EI (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, Sitarenios, 2001). The project is partially based on a method developed within a recent European Leonardo project, involving hundreds young Europeans, in the period 2004-2005, on the assessment and training of EI in career starters, and on its results (e.g., Kafetsios et al. 2009; Zammuner & Kafetsios 2005a, 2005b). According to the project aims, a set of EI assessment and training instruments was constructed, and tested. In this phase of the project, participants fill in on-line both the EI tests and the training. This paper will report on the overall design of the project, the variables that are measured, the procedures used to implement the aim of giving access to the instruments to a large sample. Some illustrative results on aspects of emotional intelligence and competences, and their relation to criterion and socio-demographic variables, will be reported.