Abstract

The roles of educators in adult education are constantly changing. Educators are increasingly called mentors, counselors, motivators, and evaluators: roles for which it is inevitable to have a wide range of generic and specific competencies. Given the scarce number of studies on the competencies of educators in Croatia, a survey was conducted to examine and analyze the attitudes of employees of adult education institutions on key competencies needed to work with adults and to determine attitudes about the importance of certain groups of competencies. The total number of participants in the research was 91. The data was collected through an online survey. The results of the research suggest that employees of adult education institutions believe that working with adults requires social and counseling competencies, competencies for designing and understanding learning, teaching, and evaluation, competencies for developing educational programs, using new technologies and continuous professional development. In addition, they understand the importance of competencies for the adult education process.