Social skills have been studied in the university context due to its importance in interpersonal relationships and demands of academic's life adaptation. This study aimed to analyze the results of empirical studies about the assessment of social skills among college students, verifying instruments used, recurrent themes and results achieved. It was included articles indexed on PubMed, PsycINFO, BVS-PSI, SciELO and LILACS. Initially, 235 articles were found and, after exclusions, 29 articles were selected for the final analysis. Results showed a positive association between a good repertoire of social skills and assertiveness, sense of self-efficacy, satisfactory social interactions and academic adaptation; but not between social skills and intellectual reasoning abilities, type of course or university. Future empirical studies should consider including multimodal assessment methods, in order to help promoting guidelines for the development of protocols for social skills training. This study can contribute to advances in research in the educational area, as the school environment from preschool to college is a relevant context for the development of social skills.

Purpose: This study describes the reasons for professionals to stay or leave information technology (IT) organizations in Santa Catarina. Originality/value: Technology organizations have experienced challenges in retaining professionals. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on the subject by presenting the professionals’ perceptions about their reasons for voluntarily staying or leaving these organizations. Design/methodology/approach: Four hundred and forty workers from private technology companies freely answered two open questions in an online questionnaire (survey): “What are the reasons that maintain you working at this company?” and “For what reasons would you leave this company in the future?”. The responses, collected in the second half of 2016, were inductively coded and subsequently aggregated into categories. Findings: The results indicate that the professionals remain in the researched organizations primarily due to occupational (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, proper working conditions and perception of professional growth), organizational (adequate management practices) and environmental reasons (perception that there are no better work alternatives). The professionals surveyed would leave the organizations they currently work, primarily for occupational reasons (lack of job satisfaction and opportunities for professional growth, lack of an outlook on valorization and better working conditions), as well as for organizational (inadequate management practices), environmental (better job alternatives) and individual reasons (career planning). Based on the analysis of these results, an agenda for future research on the investigated topic is presented.