Higher education plays an important and effective role in the education of society's human resources by providing appropriate platforms and opportunities to acquire and develop students' leadership skills. In fact, many higher education institutions consider developing students' leadership skills as an important mission of higher education in order to prepare graduates for future leaders. Therefore, identifying the basic competencies of student leadership is a basic and fundamental step to move towards the professional development of student leadership. The current research was conducted with the aim of identifying students' leadership competencies with a qualitative approach and thematic analysis method. The participants of the current research were 18 experts in the field of leadership and students who were responsible for leadership in scientific and academic organizations and associations, who were selected by snowball sampling. The data collection tool was a semi-structured interview. The interviews continued until theoretical saturation. In order to ensure the validity of the data obtained from the interview, the method of recoding and receiving feedback from the participants was used. After analyzing and coding the data and combining and adjusting the data, 54 main competencies were identified for student leadership competencies. Then the identified competencies were classified into 7 main categories (individual/personality, cognitive, psychological, managerial, interpersonal, technical and moral competencies(. The attention of universities to the development of competencies identified in this research can help to better develop talent and leadership competencies among students.
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