The Employability in Programme Development (EPD) project, which stems from a collaborative effort between higher education institutions (HEIs) in Spain, the United Kingdom and Belgium involving AQU Catalunya, has come to an end after a three-year period of activities aimed at understanding and improving graduate employability profiles. The project was funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ framework, and its main objective was to establish a feedback loop between the labor market and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This loop aimed to design educational programs based on information from the productive sector, thereby assisting graduates in acquiring the competences and skills demanded by employers.
The EPD has been clearly aligned with AQU Catalunya's Employers project objectives since 2014 and enabled reflection on university employability among stakeholders through the organisation of five dissemination events. The latest event was held last July at the Casa de la Convalescència and gathered academic and professional application evidence on university employability and developed a prototype and a roadmap on how to use artificial intelligence in university education to help students acquire the skills they need to enter the labour market.
Firstly, researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona led a systematic review of the literature on the effectiveness of university employability enhancement activities published in the journal Studies in Higher Education. The review shows that the current evidence on the effectiveness of these activities is limited and that it mainly focuses on study practices in Anglo-Saxon contexts, while ignoring other types of activity in other contexts.
The EPD has developed a prototype and a roadmap on how to use artificial intelligence in university education to help students acquire the skills they need to enter the labour market.
As such, a team led by the University of Glasgow gathered a set of case studies on the integration of employability in educational programmes, giving prominence to activities that go beyond the practices of studies in English-speaking countries. This collection of case studies has also made it possible to highlight the best practices of the Catalan Higher Education System, such as:
Other EPD project outputs, in this case led by the University of Reading, included a pilot survey and focus groups with employers on the recruitment process and the skills most in demand in the university labour market. These revealed that employers are recruiting graduates for jobs that are constantly evolving and therefore require skills such as adaptability and passion. While employers are happy with the technical skills acquired at university, they feel that students need to work on effective communication, teamwork, self-motivation and autonomy.
Finally, a team from the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels has developed a prototype dashboard created with artificial intelligence techniques (a demonstration is available on this website) and proposed a roadmap on the use of these techniques in the context of university employability.
AQU Catalunya and other project partners believe that the EPD was a successful endeavour in terms of bringing university education closer to the demands of a fast-changing labour market, and has provided the university community with a tool kit to improve degree programmes from an employability perspective.
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