Employability in Programme Development
Started in January 2021, the Employability in Programme Development (EPD) project has a duration of three years (2021-2023). It is funded under the Erasmus+ programme with €433,771, and coordinated by the University of Glasgow.
The Employability in Programme Development (EPD) project aims to establish mechanisms to inform the design and development of training programmes and improve the employability of graduates.
This highly innovative project will put at the service of this goal artificial intelligence tools from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The project partners, along with AQU Catalunya, are the Autonomous University of Barcelona, through its research group Globalisation, Education and Social Policies (GEPS), which specialises in educational policies and their impact on equality; the University of Reading, via its Department of Economics, specialised in labour market economics and inequality and discrimination; and the project coordinator, the University of Glasgow, through the Education Leadership and Policy (ELP) research group, expert on the impact of educating people and economies.
The project's main stakeholders are higher education institutions (HEI), as the aim is to incorporate changes in teaching practice, so as to improve the employability of their graduates. To inform academics, there will be intermediate units to help the academic community (employment services, quality units, employment science institutes, etc.).
The employer group, the students, the employment services, etc. will meet at hackathons which will aim to develop a dashboard to provide solutions to the problem shared by all stakeholders: improving employability.
In total, four products will be developed:
- A framework entitled “Understanding Skills Gaps and Employability”.
- A pilot survey of employers.
- An employability dashboard.
- A best practice toolkit.
It should be noted that this project is clearly aligned with the Employers Project that AQU Catalunya has been carrying out since 2014 thanks to the support of the “la Caixa” Foundation.