Gold in education and elite sport (2): how can we evaluate dual career support-providers’ competencies?

Competent professional dual career (DC) support is important in assisting student-athletes to cope with the challenges of theirDC pathway (European Commission, 2012). However, no researchers up to date focused specifically on what competentprofessional DC support exactly means. As such, during the GEES project, DC support providers were defined as “professionalconsultants, related to an educational institute and/or an elite sport organization – or certified by one of those – that providesupport to elite athletes in view of optimizing their dual career/combination of elite sport and education” (Wylleman, De Brandt, &Defruyt, 2017, p.18). Furthermore, to gain more insight in the actual meaning of competent DC support, the second work packageof the GEES project focused on developing a competency instrument, the Dual Career Competency Questionnaire for SupportProviders (DCCQ-SP), measuring the importance and possession of competencies of DC support providers. The DCCQ-SPconsists of 33 competencies (i.e. skills, knowledge, attitudes) divided into six competency factors: (1) advocacy and cooperationcompetencies, (2) reflection and self-management competencies, (3) organisational competencies, (4) awareness of studentathletes’environment, (5) empowerment competencies, and (6) relationship competencies. The current presentation’s objectivesare to (1) introduce the DCCQ-SP, (2) illustrate how the importance and possession of DC support-providers’ competencies areevaluated using the DCCQ-SP, (3) highlight the main findings obtained with the DCCQ-SP in N = 330 European DC supportproviders, and (4) provide insight in how the findings of this study and the DCCQ-SP can be applied in practice.