"Competencies" are a key concept in higher education because they link knowing and acting. Moreover, this concept addresses the changing conditions under which knowledge is produced, learned, and applied. Rather than focusing only on disciplinary content, competencies emphasize the ability to use and reflect on the generation and justification of knowledge in complex contexts. Working with competencies in higher education brings central fields of tension into focus: strategy and pedagogy, research and teaching, as well as formal and informal learning. While strategies often emphasize institutional innovation and students’ employability, educators and scholars may struggle to realize these ambitions in practice. According to Boyer (1990), four forms of scholarship are crucial for university life: discovery (i.e., research as it is commonly understood), integration (i.e., synthesis, often interdisciplinary in nature), application (i.e., applied research), and teaching (i.e., involving pedagogical learning and research). The idea of the research-teaching-nexus assumes a strong relationship between the two major functions of higher education, teaching and research (Tight, 2016), yet research-related teaching practices vary between and within institutions (Healey, 2005).

These fields of tension constitute productive spaces for educational research and development, highlighting how knowledge becomes action. Accordingly, they frame this symposium. We adopt perspectives at the meso level (strategy, institutional positioning) and the micro level (pedagogy, pedagogical practices) of the higher education system, and elaborate cases from Finland, India, and Switzerland.

At the strategic level, higher education institutions increasingly position themselves through competency-oriented profiles, such as the notion of the Skill University (Paper 1: India). These strategies emphasize continuing education, competency development, and the recognition of prior learning as responses to changing education systems and market demands (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Zürn, 2020). Comparative perspectives highlight an ongoing pedagogical paradigm shift that places new expectations on university teachers’ competences and institutional adaptability.

Moving from strategy to pedagogy, competency development is enacted through diverse teaching practices, including design-based education and research-based learning. These approaches demonstrate how higher education, research, and practice can be meaningfully integrated through authentic learning environments. Paper 2 (Finland) highlights design-based education, design thinking, and business labs, illustrating how competency orientation can be embedded in course design. Paper 3 (Switzerland) focuses on research-based learning, reflection, and self-assessed research competencies, examining the cultivation and reflection of research competency as part of university course design.

A central tension between institutional strategies that promote competency development and the realities of pedagogical implementation emerges, for example, in the process of establishing a new kind of higher education institutions or missions (Paper 4: Switzerland). Aligning strategic goals with the competences of teaching staff in such institutions is a multi-layered and complex process. The central question, therefore, is how competencies are approached and enacted in higher education.

The symposium argues that bridging market demands, and curriculum design requires coherent alignment between strategy and pedagogy, ensuring that competency development strengthens, rather than fragments, the research–teaching nexus.

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