Graduates’ Skills and Higher Education: The employers’ perspective

This paper presents the main results obtained from 40 in-depth interviews with persons in charge of human resources and/or company directors, and from a questionnaire targeting 872 companies surveyed from a data base of the 5,000 main Spanish companies. The objectives of this paper are the following...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Leguey Galán, Santiago, Hernández-March, Julio, Martín del Peso, Mónica
Format: article
Publication Date:2009
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Repository:BURJC-Digital. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
OAI Identifier:oai:burjcdigital.urjc.es:10115/28848
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10115/28848
Access Level:Embargoed access
Keyword:Graduates
Higher Education
Graduates Skills
Description
Summary:This paper presents the main results obtained from 40 in-depth interviews with persons in charge of human resources and/or company directors, and from a questionnaire targeting 872 companies surveyed from a data base of the 5,000 main Spanish companies. The objectives of this paper are the following: first, to identify the competencies required of university graduates by the labour market; second, to find out the mismatches that may exist between the current higher education students receive and company demands; and third, to discover how and to what extent universities can improve their education and training in order to reduce the gap that, according to employers, exists between current business needs and the education that graduates have upon entering the labour market. To carry out this research project, the competencies under study have been divided into two large groups: vocational and generic. At the same time, the latter have been subdivided into three subgroups: knowledge-related, methodological, and interpersonal competencies.