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AQU Catalunya has taken part in drawing up the Section on the Current Entrepreneurial Situation “New staff recruitment: university and business" of the Business Climate Survey.
The Business Climate Survey (CLEM), drawn up by Idescat and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, is a quarterly statistical operation that collects the opinions of company representatives with activities in Catalonia, regarding the evolution and expectations for a set of variables relating to the economic development of their company.
The quarterly survey includes the Section on the Current Entrepreneurial Situation, which contains questions that vary according to the areas of interest in the business environment. AQU Catalunya has worked with Idescat on the section
“New staff recruitment: university and business" of the CLEM undertaken in the first quarter of 2021, which complements AQU Catalunya's employer study, seeks to establish the opinion of companies and organisations of the skills of recent graduates and provides information representative of establishments in Catalonia active in the stipulated period. These are the most noteworthy results:
- A third of establishments that have hired personnel in the last three years have taken on recent graduates. Large establishments (50 employees or more) are more likely (45.1%) to do so than small firms (18.6 in those with fewer than ten employees).
- Establishments that have taken on recent graduates in the last three years rate the skills of these graduates as very good (7.4), although the average satisfaction varies according to the area of activity. Commerce is the sector that rates them most highly, with 7.9; while Construction gives a slightly lower mark, 6.8.
- Employers consider that the skills in most need of improvement amongst recent graduates are: practical or applied knowledge, cognitive skills (problem analysis and solving, decision-making, coming up with new ideas, etc.) and soft skills (adapting to new situations, teamwork, organisation and work planning, responsibility and initiative).
AQU Catalunya's contribution to the design of this Section on the Current Entrepreneurial Situation of the CLEM survey is part of a series of collaborations between the Agency and Idescat on university statistics. In this case to design a new methodology for gathering data from AQU Catalunya's employment outcomes survey and the cross-over of information between the latest survey and data on Social Security affiliations, to improve the delivery of results on the employment outcomes of recent graduates. The two organisations are also currently working on a project on equal access to the labour market in the Catalan Higher Education System.