| Summary: | The historical and social condition of Brazil places it in a field of epistemic challenges. In the context of international higher education, these challenges are manifested in government and public universities´passivity when it comes to internationalization policies and plans. Given the need for operational, structural and pragmatic changes in the Brazilian Federal Higher Education Institutions (IFES – Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior in Portuguese) to deal with the internationalization demands, and the significant number of executive secretariat professionals who, over the last decade, have worked in university management, the purpose of this paper is to investigate if the executive secretary has competencies that enable him/her to contribute to the internationalization management in the IFES. We developed a bibliographical and documentary research, of which first stage consisted in surveying the necessary competencies for the internationalization management, while the second was based on the identification of the executive secretariat professional competencies, especially those related to the university management context. We organized a comparative conceptual framework of these two dimensions, which allowed to visualize a theoretical relation between them. We inferred that the executive secretariat professional competencies and his/her migration of an operational/mechanical profile to a tactic/strategic one seems to enable him/her to contribute to the management of integration of the international, intercultural and global dimensions to the purposes, functions and delivery of the Brazilian public higher education.
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