The universities of Catalonia are consolidated institutions of employability-oriented teaching that offer a range of quality degree programmes which equip people with the skills and qualifications required by the labour market. This is the main conclusion drawn in the last seminar in the AQU Catalunya “Employability and university education” series, where they reflected on the suitability of university degree programmes in the field of Industrial Technology in relation to their ability to equip graduates with tools that allow them to perform and grow in their profession. This field includes bachelor’s degrees from the subfields of Naval Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electronic and Automation Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design, Chemical and Materials Engineering, and Industrial Engineering and Organisation.
This series is also the culmination of the ambitious AQU Catalunya “Employers” project, launched in 2014 with the aim of including the voice of the organisations and companies that hire recent graduates in the data system compiled by the Agency. In line with AQU Catalunya’s strategic courses of action, this seminar helped gain access to quantitative and qualitative data that, in an integrated manner, allowed proposals to be put forth for improving the quality of the bachelor’s degrees analysed.
In this respect, the event incorporated a presentation by an internationally renowned academic expert, Professor Antoine van den Beemt, from the Eindhoven School of Education, who spoke about the use of challenge-based learning in Engineering degrees, and enriched the debate with information on how university education is structured to strengthen the skills most sought after by the labour market. Agency staff then gave a presentation on supply and demand, satisfaction, employment outcomes and employers’ opinions of Industrial Technology graduates. Finally, a round table comprising academic experts, employers and alumni was responsible for integrating the information – the perspective of the international speaker, AQU Catalunya data and the experience of the participants themselves – in order to produce proposals for improving the degree programmes.
Although the data presented show that graduates of these degree programmes are generally satisfied with the education received (even though we find differences between programmes, as explained in the report produced by AQU Catalunya), enjoy good employment outcomes and contribute positively in their workplaces, the seminar allowed points for improvement to be identified, a necessary condition to continually progress towards excellence. For example, with regard to graduates’ satisfaction with external placements in this field, they tend to disagree more with the statement “external work placements have enabled me to apply the knowledge acquired through the programme” than graduates of the Catalan University System (SUC) as a whole.
These and other points of improvement were discussed in the round table, which proposed a set of measures to improve learning among future Industrial Technology graduates from the perspective of employability. Firstly, with regard to the three skills that most employers identify as in need of improvement, which can be seen in the following table, the round table raised the use of teaching methodologies such as challenge-based learning, the planning of subjects that incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge and the introduction to the classroom of real problems proposed by the working world, asking the students to suggest solutions and contrasting them with employers’ representatives.
In relation to ability to communicate effectively with people without technical training, another of the skills that employers see in most need of improvement, and which coincides with the perception of students, who tend to be less satisfied with acquisition of communication skills than the university system as a whole, the round table proposed the implementation of a set of pedagogical resources both in the classroom and during work placements. These resources include the use of multimedia tools in the classroom, such as recording video presentations, promoting active and inclusive participation in the classroom and argumentation exercises, both oral and written, linked to specific assignments during the internship period.