Website: skills4employability.eu

The Skills4Employability 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 in two intellectual outputs:

• IO1: Guidelines for Integrating soft-skills in HEIs’ curricula;
• IO2: Assessment of Soft-Skills in HEIs curricula.

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.

The Skills4Employability Consortium integrates six partners with relevant expertise in university social responsibility, community engagement and service learning: CONNEX EUROPE (BE) – coordinator, University Politehnica of Bucharest (RO), Universita degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” (IT), Kaunas University of Technology (LT) and AQU Catalunya (ES).