Knowledge and skills dominate stakeholder conceptions of professional training in Transport Technologies

Abstract Background. The 2017–2024 reform of Ukrainian higher technical education obliges bachelor programmes in specialty 275 “Transport Technologies” to express learning outcomes through the five-dimension descriptor set of the European and National Qualifications Frameworks (EQF/NQF): knowledge – skills – communication – responsibility – autonomy. Whether the stakeholders who enact these programmes share that multidimensional understanding is unknown. Purpose. To describe and compare how students, teachers, and employers conceptualise the core constructs of professional training in Transport Technologies, to quantify the gap between these conceptions and the EQF/NQF descriptor set, and to explore – not confirm – whether pedagogical and digital orientations are associated with conceptual breadth. Methods. Convergent mixed-methods design. Parallel semi-structured questionnaires were completed by 31 students, 16 teachers, and 7 employers (N = 54) at five Ukrainian higher education institutions and cooperating logistics enterprises. Open and closed responses were coded against the EQF/NQF descriptors using a transparent dual-rubric codebook (inter-rubric Krippendorff’s αordinal = 0.66). Analyses combined qualitative content analysis, non-parametric group comparisons with effect sizes, a descriptor-coverage gap analysis, and an explicitly exploratory partial-leastsquares structural-equation model (PLS-SEM). Results. Stakeholders converge on a reduced “knowledge + skills” core. Within the framing offered to them, 100% of students invoked knowledge and 96.8% skills, but 0% invoked communication, responsibility, or autonomy. This pattern is partly an artefact of knowledge/skills-framed response options and so bounds, rather than measures, student cognition. Coded conceptual breadth differed across groups (Kruskal– Wallis H = 10.9, p = .004, ε2 = .17), but because the three instruments offered different options this difference is treated as descriptive, not as evidence of differing cognition; attitudinal valuations did not differ. Employers judged graduate preparedness far more critically than students judged their own programme. The exploratory PLS-SEM explained little variance (R2 breadth = .085) and no structural path’s bootstrap interval excluded zero, confirming that confirmatory modelling is not warranted with these data. Conclusions. The reduction of professional competence to “knowledge+skills” is empirically robust and cuts across stakeholder groups; communication, responsibility, and autonomy are systematically under-represented.We recommend instrument and curriculum redesign that makes the transversal EQF/NQF descriptors explicit, and we report the study’s small convenience sample from one national context as a clear limitation.