Skills4Employability: Enhancing the presence of Soft-Skills in Higher Education Curricula Erasmus Project

Project Title

Skills4Employability: Enhancing the presence of Soft-Skills in Higher Education Curricula

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal); Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Project Summary

Higher education (HE) is considered to be a decisive asset for finding employment and having successful careers. Following this logic, in its renewed EU agenda for higher education (COM/2017/247 final), the Commission highlighted the importance of increasing the number of HE graduates to 40% and placing HE at the centre of innovation, job creation, competitiveness and sustainability (Europe 2020 Strategy). There are, however, increasing concerns that HE is not providing graduates with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a rapidly evolving educational and employment environment, and there remain continued skills mismatches in some Member States.

Knowing the requirements of the labour market is essential to match the supply and demand of skills so to improve the competitiveness of graduates. Indeed, providing students with the right skills for employment has been identified as one of four priorities of the flagship initiative ‘An agenda for new skills and jobs’ (COM/2010/682 final). In recent years, the growing importance of soft-skills in fostering student academic achievement and long-term success has been recognised by actors involved in education and in the labour market all across Europe. Soft skills are cross-cutting across jobs and sectors and relate to personal competences and social competences. Its development is intended to enable and enhance personal development, participation in learning as well as improve career prospects.

Higher education institutions (HEI) in Europe should react fast and shape its educational programs in order to ensure that its graduate students enter the work equipped with the sort of skills required by employers. HEIs can indeed play an important role in identifying needs at the local level and facilitating the transition from education to employment. Their direct involvement in the local socio-economic fabric would allow to enhance the employment environment and positively contribute to the overall labour market performance. For universities to have a real impact on labour market outcomes, it is essential that their educational offer matches the skills gaps at local and regional level. Equally, it is increasingly important to make the existing curricula more competitive and tuned to the forthcoming changes. One of the keys to making HEIs more responsive to skill demands is to help them effectively assess the extent to which their programs offer an appropriate curricula for acquiring and developing the skills that are relevant to the labour market.

Thus, the project seeks to support universities in their efforts to improve the quality of education by adapting curricula to the soft-skill demands of the labour market and, as a result, ensure a greater impact on the employment situation of future graduates. The project aims at strengthening HEIs capacity to assess whether and to what extent their programs match the soft-skills that are particularly valued in the labour market. Skills4Employability will be structure as follows:
IO1: Guidelines for Integrating soft-skills in HEIs’ curricula
-IO1.A1: Methodology for IO1.
-IO1.A2: Collection of sources of literature and practices related to soft-skills in Universities. (academic articles, European projects, Initiatives etc.)
-IO1.A3: National reports on the labour market soft-skill requirements.
-IO1.A4: Establishing the guide including findings partner countries.
IO2: Assessment of Soft-Skills in HEIs curricula.
– IO2.A1: Research on soft-skill assessment methods in Higher Education
– IO2.A2: Compilation of good practices in soft-skill assessment
– IO2.A3: Alignment between the soft-skill integration guidelines and the assessment
– IO2.A4: Development of the soft-skill assessment guidelines,

The O1 will carry out a preliminary research about the definition, relevance and gaps regarding soft-skills in the context of higher education and employment. The research will help to define what the most relevant soft-skills are, the objective being to establish a common set of soft-skills that will later serve as a basis for the development of the assessment procedure in IO2. First partners will focus on the higher education context and then move focus to the labour market. This twofold analysis is essential for bridging the gap between the skills required in the workplace and universities skills provision, that is to say, to reduce the skill mismatch. The main objective of IO2 is to explore the best way of measuring the soft-skill content of universities curricula and identify those criteria and indicators that better capture the soft-skill dimension within HEIs to finally come up with a comprehensive assessment that weights the soft-skills validated in IO1 against the criteria and indicators established at this stage. The soft skill assessment will allow universities to learn how they include these skills in their curricula and boost the adaptation of their programmes in accordance with the project’s result.

Project Website

http://skills4employability.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 155321,89 Eur

Project Coordinator

CONEXX – EUROPE ASBL & Country: BE

Project Partners

• KAUNO TECHNOLOGIJOS UNIVERSITETAS
• UNIVERSITATEA POLITEHNICA DIN BUCURESTI
• AGENCIA PER A LA QUALITAT DEL SISTEMA UNIVERSITARI DE CATALUNYA
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA LA SAPIENZA