Many universities have specialist teams of experts in the professional development and employment of graduates to attempt to improve the job prospects of their graduates in the labour market. With this goal in mind, the institutions offer activities such as career counselling, support in the search for work, the development of skills in addition to formal education, and internships and work placements. The funding of professional services to help students obtain more satisfactory results in the job market offers an intuitive and attractive low-cost perspective that can easily be extended in the short and medium term.
The project Employability in Programme Development (EPD), funded as part of the Erasmus KA2 call and headed by the University of Glasgow, with the participation of Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Reading, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) and the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency, was established to analyse the employability policies implemented at university level. The ultimate goal is to encourage universities to makes changes to their teaching practices in order to improve the employability of their graduates. Different intermediate units were provided to inform scholars and to help the academic community, such as job services, academic quality units, and employment research institutes.
Employability services may be considered an essential part of the educational programmes in universities, as they encourage the development of diverse skills that are sought-after in the labour market
The project created an information map on the demand for skills for each participating institution, along with the needs of professionals from the participating higher education institutions with regard to the intelligence of the job market, in order to analyse the design of courses and programmes. The systematic review of the bibliography conducted during the project suggests that the higher education sector takes a positive view of these programmes. Despite this, the evidence-base is dominated by case studies and small-scale assessments that tendentiously lead to work-based learning studies and are not solid enough to construe the causal impact of employment activities in the development of students and the results of the labour market.
The EPD project also created new instruments to analyse the employability of students, such as a pilot survey for employers and two employability panels that structure the evidence and analyse the results of graduates in the job market using an artificial intelligence tool.
The goal of generating data infrastructure that is able to create solid evidence on employability practices remains pending, as was highlighted by the collection of good practices during this project. One example in Catalonia is the recent creation of the Open University of Catalonia Labour Market Research and Analysis Unit. Employability services may be considered an essential part of the educational programmes in universities, as they encourage the development of diverse skills that are sought-after in the labour market and decrease the risks of the transition to the labour market by students and employers by reducing information asymmetries.