Background. A transition from senior high school to university for some first-year students is not an easy process. Compared to high school, the university provides a new environment and daily demands so the first-year students might take time to adapt. They are continuously stimulated by new tasks and challenges to accomplish their role as the university student. Moreover, in daily activities of university students, they need to adjust in academic, social, personal-emotional, and institutional attachment context. In pursuance of this pace transition period, the first-year students need to understand their physical, social, and emotional capacity or state in order to manage themselves during their process of adjustment. Personal-emotional adjustment dimension which is similar to emotional competence concept – grounded in emotional intelligence, as one of these influence factors of these issues particularly in Psychology Major. Emotional competence is able to improve through a self-development program training. This training is named The Training Pengembangan Diri (TPD) Program. TPD was designed to help first-year students emotionally adjusted in academic, social, and organizational setting TPD was designed by Student Council of Psychology, Universitas Padjadjaran. This program aimed to improve the emotional competence proposed by Goleman (1995) through experiential learning activities.

Methods. A pre-test and post-test quantitative nonexperimental design were used to test the impact of emotional competence – based training program for first-year students (N = 155; M = 31; F = 124) in Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Padjadjaran. TPD was two days training program. There were 22 groups of participants and each group consisted of 11-12 students. Every group was accompanied by group facilitators. TPD program also had primary facilitators whose roles were giving general instruction at every beginning of activities, giving feedback to every group facilitator, and wrapping up the whole training program. Emotional competence was assessed with student self-report which developed from Goleman’s Emotional Competence framework (N of item = 89; Cronbach’s Alpha = .879). Wilcoxon signed rank test on non-parametric statistic was used to analyze the effect of this program on first-year students’ emotional competence.

Results. This study provides empirical evidences that TPD program improved first year students' emotional competencies. The pre-test conducted at a week before the TPD program and post-test at three weeks after the training had been held. A Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test revealed a statistically significant improvement of emotional competence following participation in TPD program (z = -4.068, p < 0.05) with a medium effect size (r = .33). The median score on the Emotional Competence Self Report increased from pre-program (Md = 5.5) to post-program (Md = 5.7). This study also examines improvement of 13 emotional competence' aspects. Seven aspects among them revealed a statistically significant improvement, there were self-confidence (z = 3.567, p < .05, r = .29), commitment (z= 2.570, p < .05, r = .208), adaptability (z = 2.046, p < .05, r = .17), achievement drive (z = 2.29, p < .05, r = .19), innovativeness (z = 5.143, p < .05, r = .42), empathy (z = 9.248, p < .05, r = .75), and communication (z = 1.979, p < .05, r = .16).

Conclusions. This study provided empirical evidence that Training Pengembangan Diri (TPD) program improves first-year students’ emotional competencies. There were 7 out of 13 aspects of emotional competence that improved, which were self-confidence, commitment, adaptability, achievement drive, innovativeness, empathy, and communication, with the highest improvement was in empathy.

Added value. Emotional competence study in Indonesia is lack of empirical evidence. Some researchers from Europe, Japan, and Singapore have already studied Emotional Competence empirically but Indonesia only has a few empirical evidence of this. Emotional competence is widely used for the personal and organizational development program. Emotional competence becomes one ability that predicts people’s success in their life. This study provides the report about intervention to improve emotional competence and empirical evidence to support program effectivity. Emotional competence will be developed due to activity that gives knowledge, comprehension, and skill through ability which Training Pengembangan Diri (TPD) self-development program provides.

Keywords: emotional competence, training program, experiential learning, adjustment to university, student improvement

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