The training courses for healthcare assistants and social care workers certified by a Federal vocational education and training (VET) Diploma are relatively recent in the Swiss initial VET (IVET) landscape. Despite this, of the approximately 240 training courses on offer in the IVET, the two training courses rank 2^nd (healthcare assistants) and 4^th (social care workers) respectively in the ten most popular IVET courses undertaken by young people in Switzerland (State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI, 2022). These facts reflect the popularity of training in the social and health professions among Swiss apprentices and justify taking a more detailed interest in this population. More specifically and considering the place that emotions’ management holds in the learning of these professions, it seems to be very relevant to focus on emotional intelligence. Defining emotional intelligence (EI) as the capacities of an individual to identify his/her own emotional reactions, others’ emotional reactions, to express them, to control them and deeply understand and use this understanding as support to the action, the scientific literature reports the important role of EI in the health sector (Vlachou et al., 2016). Indeed, as this type of profession is centered on technical care and compassion, it requires an important emotional commitment, the latter influencing the quality of care. When nurses understand, identify, and manage their own emotions and the patients’ ones, the patient’s satisfaction increases (Dugue et al., 2021). As for the classical education path in health sector, several studies showed the correlation between emotional competences and achievement in nurse school too. Indeed, Nurse students with higher EI experience a higher resilience (Cleary et al., 2018), better chances of success (Singh et al., 2020), and manage stress and anxiety in a more efficient way than students with lower EI (Lewis et al., 2017).

In the field of social work and health, research showed the positive effects of EI on abilities to think, empathy, psychological health and resilience of social workers (Grant & Kinman, 2012; Grant et al., 2014). Despite the large literature covering the positive link between EI and success at school, especially in social and health sector, this subject has not been investigated in the VET context (Sauli et al., 2022).

Our present goal was to demonstrate the impact of EI in the education of professions such as health and social workers. Without trying to answer if EI must be considered as a trait of personality or as a ability (Mayer et al., 2008; Neubauer & Freudenthaler, 2005), we agree that EI as ability and as personality trait are complementary. Thus, we aimed to demonstrate that EI as personality trait and as ability influence positively school achievement in VET context—although in different ways--and will assess both aspects of EI. We predict that students with higher EI will be more successful than student with lower EI, meaning that they will obtain higher grades than students with lower EI. Moreover, we predict that students with higher EI will be more efficient in regulating their emotions and thus manage stress and conflicts in a better way than students with lower IE, leading to increased quality of life and higher engagement at school, both important factors fostering vocational achievement. To our knowledge, this study is the first to show that EI leads to better performance in the VET context.

An online survey was completed by 110 dual IVET apprentices in health and social care professions in a Swiss vocational school. The survey was composed by different psychological tests in their French version: the Situational Test of Emotional Understanding (STEU; assessing EI as ability), the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue; assessing EI as personality trait) the Ten Items Personality Inventory (TIPI), the shortened Raven Standard Progressive Matrices (RAPM; measuring general intelligence), and the commitment to school scale. Participants also answered some sociodemographic questions. In addition, a prior agreement with the participants and the vocational school had been reached to obtain the final exam marks. The survey was completed during a class period and lasted approximately 30 minutes. After exclusion of participants that did not fully complete the survey and after obtaining the grades from the final exam, we run the statistical analysis on 92 participants (77 females and 15 males; age: M=21,64, SE=2,63). The main results showed significant positive correlations between EI as ability and the final grade, r (92) = .24, p = .02. Moreover, we conducted hierarchical regressions analysis to observe the influence of EI as ability and as personality trait on the final grade. Finally, the third block was. The first block composed of the socio-demographic data revealed that gender significantly influence the final grade (β=.22, t(88)=2.13, p=.04). Neither age nor orientation (social or health) significantly influence the final grade. The second block (referring to the scores obtained at the raven and the TIPI) showed no significant influence of the sub-scale of the TIPI personality test. In the third block (composed of the scores obtained at the STEU and the TeiQue-VF), we observed that EI as ability (β=.31, t(85)=2.82, p<.01) and as personality trait (β=.32, t(89)=2.08, p=.04) significantly influence the final grade R2 = .20, F(2, 72)=4.98, p<.01. To fully investigate the impact of EI on school achievement, we created 2 groups (low EI vs. high EI) based on their STEU scores and 2 groups based on their TEIQue scores. Results from ANOVAS showed that EI as ability plays a role in the cognitive part of the theoretical training whereas EI as personality trait influences the practical part of the education. For example, participants in the ‘High EI as personality trait group’ obtained significant better practical work grade (M=5.37, SD=.10) than participants in the ‘Low EI as personality trait group’ (M=5.08, SD=.09), F(1, 84)=4.12, p=.045.

The present study aimed to demonstrate the role of EI on school achievement in VET context. We posited that EI as trait of personality and as ability will positively influence the final grades of student in health and social care domains. Our results confirmed our hypothesis and highlight the crucial roles of EI as ability and as personality trait on school achievement in the dual vocational education. These new findings showed that EI as ability is more likely to play a role in the cognitive part of the theoretical training whereas EI as personality trait seems to influence the practical part of the education. EI Research on the subject may be extended to understand which specific EI skills are most important for apprentices and for which professional sector. These results speak for taking more seriously the role of emotions and emotional competences in VET, especially regarding professions such as health care and social workers. Moreover, this result allows us to question the link between the choice of training and the tendency to have particularly high EI levels. In other words, it would be very interesting to study in more detail whether emotional competences have been acquired through apprenticeship in occupations where these skills are central, or whether having some kind of 'predisposition' or acute emotional sensitivity leads people to choose occupations in care and social work.

Cleary, M., Visentin, D., West, S., Lopez, V., & Kornhaber, R. (2018). Promoting emotional intelligence and resilience in undergraduate nursing students: An integrative review. Nurse Educ Today, 68, 112-120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2018.05.018 Dugue, M., Sirost, O., & Dosseville, F. (2021). A literature review of emotional intelligence and nursing education. Nurse Educ Pract, 54, 103124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2021.103124 Grant, L., & Kinman, G. (2012). Enhancing Wellbeing in Social Work Students: Building Resilience in the Next Generation. Social Work Education, 31(5), 605-621. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2011.590931 Grant, L., Kinman, G., & Alexander, K. (2014). What's All this Talk About Emotion? Developing Emotional Intelligence in Social Work Students. Social Work Education, 33(7), 874-889. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2014.891012 Lewis, G. M., Neville, C., & Ashkanasy, N. M. (2017). Emotional intelligence and affective events in nurse education: A narrative review. Nurse Educ Today, 53, 34-40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.04.001 Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: new ability or eclectic traits? The American psychologist, 63 6, 503-517. Neubauer, A. C., & Freudenthaler, H. H. (2005). Models of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence: An international handbook, 2005, 31-50. Sauli, F., Wenger, M., & Fiori, M. (2022). Emotional competences in vocational education and training: state of the art and guidelines for interventions. Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40461-022-00132-8 Singh, N., Kulkarni, S., & Gupta, R. (2020). Is emotional intelligence related to objective parameters of academic performance in medical, dental, and nursing students: A systematic review. Educ Health (Abingdon), 33(1), 8-12. https://doi.org/10.4103/efh.EfH_208_17 Vlachou, E. M., Damigos, D., Lyrakos, G., Chanopoulos, K., Kosmidis, G., & Miltiades, K. (2016). the Relationship between Burnout Syndrome and Emotional Intelligence in Healthcare Professionals. Health Science Journal, 10(5.2). https://doi.org/10.4172/1791-809X.1000100502