Competence Training and Employability

Abstract

The member countries of the European Union decided, two decades ago, to initiate a reform of university education, promoting the mobility and employability of students and emphasizing professional skills over the purely technical skills of each degree. Although the movement of university students between countries has been successful, there is still a significant gap between the demand for skills from the labor market and the university supply. Therefore, there is a need to investigate this fact and review from the employer's point of view, whether the skills training currently received by graduates of a Spanish university in the last three academic years is adequate to the demands of the labor market. For this, 367 interviews have been carried out from a database of 3,332 companies that have incorporated graduates of the university under study, either as interns or as employees; A mixed methodology is applied with online interviews and telephone interviews given the census nature of the study for those degrees with less demand. The research has a clear vocation for continuity, which will allow the analysis of the data to facilitate the guidelines towards a positive evolution of employability and skills training in future courses of different degrees, managing to reduce the existing gap between the labor demand of training in competencies and skills studies offered by higher education institutions.

Received: 10 October 2022 / Accepted: 23 December 2022 / Published: 5 January 2023