Leadership Skills and Students' Behaviours; Perceptions on Students' Success

Leadership skills consist in a set of individual characteristics which can be either native or learned during lifetime. In higher education, students behave differently since they come from different family backgrounds, different regions, have different personalities etc. Some of them begin to act like real leaders among their fellows, others take the role of following ones, while some others prefer to adopt a non-active type of behavior. In many cases, professors consider students like adults and pretend them to act like ones, while in other cases, they still consider young generation to be in the need of parenting. Either considered adults or still children, students face a lot of challenges generated from the difficult higher education context - new and fast changing technologies, high local and international competition, employability constraints, economical environment based on uncertainty etc. Therefore, achieving success in professional life is not simple and has no general recipe. In counselling sessions and conferences students learn about successful entrepreneurs and people who have achieved a professional and personal successful life, becoming examples of best practices for them. Their main reason to come to higher education profile of study is to get them closer to their professional inspirational models. The main objective of this paper is to identify if there is any connection between leadership skills and students' success. The research methodology is based on two phases - one is a literature review meant to reveal the characteristics of the contemporary students' behavior taking into consideration some previous other research studies and a second one, based on a questionnaire addressed to two groups of students and professors in order to find out their perceptions on student success, mainly related to its determinants. The findings will show weather the students' success is defined by leadership skills and how current students can learn and develop towards leadership skills.