Employability Competences

This book examines how industry-desired employability skills—or “soft skills”—are taught and learned in high school career and technical education (CTE) engineering and engineering technology programs. Identifying, recruiting, and keeping workers with strong personal and interpersonal skills is a constant challenge for STEM employers who need to hire young workers to replace an aging technical workforce. To answer the call, teachers interviewed explained that they maintain regimented daily classroom routines that include individual and small group hands-on activities and projects. In turn, their students explain learning personal responsibility, work ethic, teamwork, leadership, conflict management, and social skills in the classroom. Narratives from the workforce and classroom interweave to put employability skills frameworks into action.

This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers’ and students’ engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.

The book is the final report of the researches, discussions, conversations around and about the Project PRIN Employability & Competences which took place on March 9th-­‐11th, 2017 within an International Conference at the University of Florence. It was the final event of the project PRIN2012LATR9N which aims were: «to design innovative programs for higher education, to promote personalized and learner-centered teaching and learning, to build on job competencies, to value talents to create new work opportunities, to support young adults during their employment emergency, as a response to socio economic crisis and as a citizenship action». The research activities concerned the main phases of the students’ academic life: career guidance upon entry, personalized teaching, career calling, professional vocation, profession building activities such as internships and work related experiences, and lastly job placement.

′Delivering Employability Skills′ is an optional unit of the teacher training qualifications. This easy-to-read and accessible text is aimed at trainees undertaking this unit, or existing teachers wishing to refresh their understanding of delivering employability skills as part of CPD. With practical activities and examples throughout, this book supports delivery of the subject in a variety of settings. Please note: the qualification unit content contained in the appendices has since changed, and some legislation mentioned in the book has been updated.

This book will provide readers with an understanding of the employability concept and develop an employability skills improvement model to enhance the employability of built environment graduates to foster economic development. The developed model determines the influence of generic skills, discipline specific skills, work-integrated learning, emotional intelligence, university-industry collaboration outcomes and 4IR knowledge in predicting the outcomes of improved graduate employability. The model is developed with a theoretical lens on existing frameworks of employability and skills development. Whilst drawing comparisons with countries such as the UK, USA, Australia and Canada, the authors present the results of a two-stage Delphi survey in South Africa as a case study on the current state of skills development and on the skills of the future. The case study is presented in line with the South Africa’s long-term National Development Plan (NDP) aimed at developing the key capabilities and skills of its citizens by ensuring quality education on a broader scale by 2030. As automation continues to rapidly advance, the pressures on universities to revamp and restructure their curricula have become increasingly necessary. This book recommends that higher education institutions urgently need to intensify their efforts by introducing significant modifications to the science and technology curriculum to enable students to develop and acquire competencies in the rapidly emerging areas of artificial intelligence, data science, robotics, advanced simulation, data communication, system automation, real-time inventory operations, cloud computing, and information technologies. This implies that universities’ curriculum should be infused with 4IR thinking within the conventional primary sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics, with greater emphasis on digital literacy to boost 4IR understanding amongst the graduates. The book is therefore of interest to researchers and policy makers in the built environment that are placed in academia, the construction industry or at consultancy levels, it provides significant recommendations for universities as they intensify their efforts to develop graduates for the future.

This book is more than a prescription for success in developing employability skills and provides guidance on topics of relevancy to the employment environment. This book is unique and distinguished from similar books in that it provides a hand-holding approach which is complemented by solid case studies emphasizing the perspectives of employers. In addition, the book focuses on a broad-based audience, starting from the grassroots audience of graduates. However, as the book progresses, the techniques provided address issues that relate to any job seeker, be it jobless or merely seeking change of employment. The audience will benefit from models such as Skills Audit, Interview techniques and the whole employment process from pre-interview preliminaries to completing a successful probationary period.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the teaching-learning experience dramatically, creating an opportunity for new online and blended learning techniques and tools. This has also added a new dimension to practices and methods already adopted for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) within education. This requires a new paradigm shift in the teaching-learning process through the systemic and pragmatic assessment of student learning outcomes so that employability skills and competence can be developed in students for competing at the global level. Development of Employability Skills Through Pragmatic Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes discusses the best practices in the assessment of student learning objectives (SLOs), the mapping of SLOs, and the ways of developing employability skills in young minds so that SDGs may be achieved. It elaborates the theory, practice, and importance of developing employability skills through research-based learning. Covering topics such as graduate employability, outcome-based education, and technical undergraduate programs, this premier reference source is an essential resource for employers, libraries, students and educators of higher education, faculty and administration of higher education, pre-service teachers, government organizations, business leaders and managers, human resource managers, researchers, and academicians.