Vocational education and training (VET) seeks to prepare students to face the labor market with well-developed professional skills. Its challenge is to promote autonomous lifelong learning, flexibility, and the development of skills that will enable future workers to adapt to new situations and progress throughout their lives. We believe that studying the process of students’ competence development will help researchers to understand how the different components of competence develop in relation to each other and how they are integrated toward a more holistic professional competence. Our research was carried out with a group of more than 500 VET students in Madrid, Spain. The data was obtained through a questionnaire that sought to analyze the perception of transversal competences or soft skills to understand how they are acquired and developed and what personal, academic, and linguistic factors influence them. The results confirmed the influence of academic factors, while the results for personal and linguistic factors were mixed. One of the most relevant aspects that our study has shown is the need to develop more empirical research on the relevance of these factors in relation to professional competences. © 2025 Common Ground Research Networks. All rights reserved.
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