## 4 Empirical Investigation on the Impact of Competencies on Job Performance and Job Satisfaction  
As outlined in Section 2.4 of this paper, research for Industry 5.0-related vocational education and training should focus on the investigation of adequate competence profiles for engineers in modern manufacturing enterprises and their cause-effect relation to various performance measures. Since, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no studies have yet been conducted in this field, this empirical investigation aims to explore the impact of employees 'competencies on job performance and job satisfaction by using secondary data from a large-scale field study. Thereby, the authors use a dataset from a field study by [PERSON] (2018), who focused on the investigation of decision-making processes in strategic supplier selection decisions in manufacturing enterprises in Central Europe [57; 58]. Therefore, in this section, the research methodology, the hypotheses, the operationalization of the variables, and the research results will be briefly described. The overall target of this empirical investigation is to investigate the impact of competencies, operationalized based on the level of education of the key respondents on job performance, measured by a set of economic indicators and job satisfaction, measured by a set of socio-psychological indicators, by using secondary data from a large-scale field study. Based on the theoretical analysis, the basic hypotheses of this study can be formulated as follows:  
**Hypothesis 1 (H1). **_There is a positive relationship between competence and job performance._  
**Hypothesis 2 (H2). **_There is a positive relationship between competence and job satisfaction._  
According to previous studies such as that of [PERSON] et al., the variables will be measured as follows: (1) Competence will be measured as a result of formal education by dividing the participants into the following four groups: apprenticeship certificate, high school education, university education, and other supply management-oriented education. (2) Job performance will be measured by using a validated construct for the strategic supplier performance which measures the cost-, quality- and time performance of the selected supplier based on a 5-point Likert scale [59; 60; 61; 62]. (3) Job satisfaction will be measured by using a validated construct for the purchaser satisfaction based on a 5-point Likert scale [63; 64; 65]. The indicators of job performance and purchaser satisfaction are displayed in Table 1[57; 58]. For the field study, a standardized questionnaire in the form of an online survey, based on the state-of-the-art guidelines for empirical research studies, was the selected method of data collection. The questionnaire was re-viewed and pre-tested by specialists working in the field of strategic supplier selection processes to ensure their applicability in the field study. The objectivity of the research method is ensured by the standardized research process guaranteeing the objective processing of the required procedures, a standardized method for the evaluation of the research results (including the evaluation of the descriptive results, the evaluation of both the measurement model and the structural model, the structural analysis, the hypothesis testing processes) and standardized guidelines for the interpretation of the research results. The participants were selected by using the following three membership directories: BVL (Bundesvereinigung Logistik Osterreich), BMOE (Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft, Einkauf und Logistik Osterreich), and MUL/IL (Montanuniversitat Leoben/Lehrstuhl fur Industrielogistik) for the identification of \"appropriate\" key informants. Content validity can be ensured by the structured research process which is based on theoretical analyses and a systematically deduced conceptual framework. The underlying indicators are objectively generated during the operationalization procedures.