What skills are the most important to succeed in the job market?

The concern of governments, social institutions and training centers about how to approach the relationship between the educational offer and the labor market is increasingly palpable. In this context, competency-based education has acquired great value for a long time. That is why there are numerous studies that focus on analyzing the skills that students should have acquired at the end of their studies.

The study that we are presenting today deals with this same topic, which was prepared by Maria Pujol Jover, member of the Management & e-Learning (Mel) research group, together with Maria Carme Riera Prunera, Nuria Rodriguez Avila, Yolanda Blasco Martel and Jordi López Tamayo. The article was published in Revista d’Innovació Docent Universitària in 2018.

Methodology

The study was carried out with 192 company tutors and 81 students who had received the Santander scholarship. The questionnaire consisted of 35 questions, 25 of them of a general nature, covering sociodemographic, personal, and business aspects. The remaining 10 questions asked for a specific assessment, made from a Likert scale from 1 to 10, of 38 competencies distributed among instrumental (11), interpersonal (12) and professional (15).

The assessment of competencies was required from two points of view. The tutor was asked to assess the level that she observed in the students, as well as the level that the company would require. For their part, the student was asked to assess both the level acquired throughout their university studies and the level required in the company where they carried out the internship.

Results and conclusions

At general levels we see how at the level of knowledge there are no major discrepancies between the vision of the company and the academic one. However, in the operational and management spheres, the competences related to these two spheres tend to be little differentiated in their acquisition and therefore a greater effort would be required in terms of their practice and acquisition throughout the life. university teaching.

If we look at where the skills most required by tutors are found, they are a mixture of people who are capable of doing their job effectively while interacting intelligently with the environment in which they operate.

Written communication and the foreign language stand out for their lower score compared to the first two factors, which may be an indicator of less need (as a result of the country’s productive structure, based mainly on small and medium-sized companies with room for internationalization).

As a final conclusion, the importance of companies being able to detect the training needs of their workers more quickly and based on this, review the planning of online studies with the necessary flexibility to adapt them to the productive needs of the work environment. Flexibility and adaptation are the challenges of the immediate future of education, which must offer a type of training oriented towards working life and not specialization for a specific job. For all this, a real involvement between the university and the company is required.

Consult the study

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