Practice Papers
Document Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Employability has become a central focus for Higher Education Institutions. The European University Association’s report states that graduates should acquire a mix of transversal and discipline-specific skills. An educational approach known for providing students with this is Problem-Based Learning. An institution known for successful implementation of PBL is Aalborg University located in Denmark. In this paper we will look at an initiative they have recently launched to improve the employability of their engineering graduates. Employability can be defined from different perspectives. In this paper we develop a framework where employability is viewed from three different perspectives. 1) Internal values, beliefs and aims for a future career, 2) Skills and competencies, both transversal and subject specific, 3) External factors such as the state of the labour market and utilising one’s knowledge and skills to navigate it. The initiative introduced here focus on perspective one and two. Here the students attend a mandatory competence profile workshop, in which they must hand in a competence profile where they describe their competences from four predetermined sets of competences: reflective, problem-oriented, interpersonal, and structural. This is done in a 3-step model where the students interview each other, then provide peer feedback to their fellow students’ profiles and then receive feedback from staff on their individual profile. The students complimented the initiative and the peer-feedback session. This confirms previous research done in relation to how to facilitate reflection among students in higher education, where the recommendation is to do it as an iterative process.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/YD0B-H510
Recommended Citation
Velmurugan, G., & Friedrichsen, D. (2023). Improving Employability With A Competence Profile (PRACTICE). European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). DOI: 10.21427/YD0B-H510
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.