ShareHow can the university improve the employability of graduates?
The Employability in Program Development project, which has ended after three years in progress, has helped bring together the needs of the labour market and university training thanks to AQU's collaboration with universities in Spain, the United Kingdom and Belgium.
.jpg)
The Employability in Program Development project (EPD) has come to an end after three years of joint work between AQU Catalunya and Spanish higher education institutions (HEIs), as well as those from the Kingdom United and Belgium. The founding objective of the project was to study how to improve the employability profile of graduates by adapting university study programmes to the needs of the labour market. This initiative, funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus framework, has sought to establish a feedback loop between the labour market and HEIs to adapt the design of study programmes and thus help graduates acquire skills and abilities demanded by employers.
Aligned with the objectives of the Employers project that AQU Catalunya has been carrying out since 2014, the EPD has encouraged reflection on university employability among stakeholders through five dissemination events, the last of which took place in July at the Casa de la Convalescència in Barcelona. The evidence gathered has been used to develop a prototype and a roadmap of how to use artificial intelligence in the context of university education to help students acquire the necessary skills for the labour market.
Throughout the project, a team led by the University of Glasgow collected a set of case studies on integrating employability into curriculum content to give prominence to activities that go beyond study placements. In turn, this collection of case studies made it possible to highlight some of the best practices within the Catalan Higher Education System. For example, entrepreneurship skills are developed through the university-business collaboration carried out in the TecnoCampus.
Other EPD project outputs, in this case led by the University of Reading, involved a pilot survey and focus groups held with employers on the recruitment process and the skills most in demand in the university labour market. These two initiatives revealed that employers are hiring graduates for jobs that are constantly evolving and therefore require skills such as adaptability.
Overall, the EPD provided the university community a set of tools to improve qualifications from the perspective of employability. The next AQU Catalunya newsletter will report further findings from the EPD project.