Employability through competencies and curricular innovation : a Portuguese acc...

• Autor(es): Oliveira, Eva Dias de ; Guimarães, Isabel de Castro
• Data: 2009
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/4674
• Origem: Veritati - Repositório Institucional da Universidade Católica Portuguesa
• Tipo de Documento: Documento de conferência
• Idioma: Inglês

Descrição

More than 50 percent of Portuguese unemployed university graduates are out of work for more than six months (OECD 2009), against the OECD average of 42 percent. This suggests that universities need to do more to improve graduates’ chances in the labour market, and in many ways, the Bologna reform provided European Union universities with an opportunity to tackle this issue. This paper describes the outcomes of the Bologna process, at the Faculty of Management and Economics (Catholic University of Portugal), which began in 2005. Undergraduate degrees’ length was shortened to 3 years and strategies were implemented to improve graduates’ employability. The main strategy was the competency-based approach of curricula development, and the creation of three new subjects dealing specifically with transferable skills: critical thinking, communication and teamwork, and systemic thinking.