Attainment of up-to-date detailed and broad specific knowledge of at least one of the broad periods of History (in this case the contemporary era) including the different methodological approaches and the historiographical trends related to this period. The Postgraduate Official Programme (POP) Coordinating Committee has defined in its 'code of good practice' that the coordinators of the different modules will have at their disposal the means necessary to guarantee, in each course in particular and in the set of courses in a module overall, access to a bibliography and the carrying out of activities that will ensure a balance of methodological approaches and different historiographical trends.
Abilities and skills required for historical research applied to the contemporary period: specificities and great diversity of available sources (oral, statistical, hemerographical, memoires, etc.); Technical specificities for their management.
Familiarisation with comparative, spatio-temporal and thematic methods, which allow students to orient historiographical research and to integrate it in the current historiographical panorama.
Training resources that, besides critical analysis, make interdisciplinary analysis possible, which in turn allows students to integrate into their historical research interpretative proposals from other areas of knowledge, especially the social sciences.
Capacity for planning, performing and presenting orally or in writing, in accordance with the canons of the discipline, a research-based contribution to historiographical knowledge in relation to a relevant problem
Capacity to discuss within the academic community the research results and to transmit to society as a whole the advances produced in knowledge of the past, thus helping to construct among citizens a civic awareness identified with the values of democracy, harmonious living, respect for differences and peaceful solutions to conflicts. This competence has its advanced learning phase in the tasks to be performed in the monographic courses and especially in the Introductory Module to Research within the Master's programme (Module X), culminating, when appropriate, in the presentation and discussion of partial advances to be carried out in the framework of seminars given by doctoral students and doctors in the Doctorate Cycle as a prior condition for the final defence of the doctoral thesis.