Getting Closer to the Needs of the Labour Market

Abstract

A key measure of higher education’s success is the extent to which it can provide the labour market with graduates that excel not only in terms of their professional training but also in terms of their soft skills. To that end, the competences of students entering university must first be diagnosed. This paper presents a pilot study of such a measurement system, together with first-year results obtained by a rural university faculty. Equipped with better information about its freshman students, such a university can begin to address the revealed competence deficiencies actively, and, over the course of an entire training cycle, further improve the labour market value of the young people when they come to graduate. Provisional recommendations are made at the end of this paper; however, further data analysis, once undertaken, may lend further support to the practical approach outlined here.

Keywords

• competence development
• competences
• employability
• soft skills
• student success
• training needs diagnosis