Conference and seminar sessions in Employability and entrepreneurship
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- Employable skills (8)
- Work placements (8)
Are we assessing the right skills? Collaboration, learning, and work in a changing world
Panel at SWEETS Workshop 2026: Are we assessing the right skills?,Embedding careers in the curriculum: evaluation of a programme level approach for economics undergraduates
Presentation at DEE 2025,Working while studying: an exploration of the drivers leading students to seek employment over the course of their degree
Presentation at DEE 2023,Diversity and human capital accumulation in higher education
Presentation at DEE 2023,An evaluation of the University of Greenwich Employability Passport (GEP): journeying into employability
Presentation at DEE 2019,The University of Greenwich has supported effective employability policy and practice and worked closely with practitioners, managers, senior staff and academics to develop strategies to embed effective employability practice within the curriculum. The Greenwich Employability Passport (GEP) is one of these initiatives. The GEP initiative started some years ago (2012) with the purpose of expressly recognising student’s extra-curricular activities and endorse them more effectively to enhance the student’s employability opportunities. The ultimate aim of the GEP was to encourage students’ awareness of employers’ needs, students’ confidence, proactivity and expansion of professional networks. The GEP initiative prompted the design of a research project to explore and evaluate possible relations across the degree of students’ engagement in the scheme, the academic performance of students and the likelihood to obtain a good graduate job on completion of the degree. A unique data set was built to match and triangulate the survey data on GEP with centrally held university administration data on graduate outcomes and with data collected by the Higher Education Statistic Agency (HESA) on Destination of Leaver in Higher Education (DLHE). This new rich data set has been used in this paper to investigate students’ engagement in the GEP at different levels of academic progression and students’ academic performance, as well as to explore the effects of the GEP intervention across different cohorts of graduates (i.e., the 2014 cohort of graduates before the GEP, and subsequent cohorts of graduates under the GEP scheme). The results of the study are presented in this paper.
Schools of economics and business educational offer and employers’ expectations in Romania - case study: the Bucharest University
Presentation at DEE 2019,For universities, the labour market represents a reference and, in the same time, an indicator of the quality, utility and necessity of the educational programs they are providing. It is the place where educational activity is validated both from the perspective of the life content of the programs offered to different categories of learners and the effort implied to successfully graduate the program, but also from the perspective of the conformation at the present and future economic reality. More than non-economic universities an economic one such as The Bucharest University of Economic Studies with the mission to provide higher and in-depth knowledge in the field of economic sciences and to develop competences required to economists and professionals for public administration functions will demonstrate its own value through the value of its graduates and through their contribution to the keep the economy in function and to develop it. For every graduate who is willing to have a career and searching for success, to find a job and to be able to keep it are essential. The paper is analysing how educational offer of The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, the most important economic university in Romania, is adapted to the employers’ expectations and requirements. Employers’ opinions regarding the university programs, students’ knowledge, competences and work experiences are analysed together with their recommendations for educational programs with higher impact on students’/graduates’ employability.
Value added versus widening participation: the great employability debate
Presentation at DEE 2019,Human Capital suggests that a value-added approach can be adopted to highlight successful graduate skills formation. Evidence, based on that approach, has historically appeared impressive. Conlon and Patrignani (2011) for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), found that the earnings premium of a UK undergraduate degree is 27% compared to an individual leaving education with two ‘A’ levels or more. The average gross graduate premium is estimated at £125,000 over a working lifetime. Million+ (2013) have argued that a degree, not only providing access to a financial premium, also leads to more fulfilling careers and reduced state dependency. More recent evidence from the IFS (2018), however, has indicated less impressive outcomes. A third of male graduates, for example, were found to achieve only a negligible earnings gain. Our analysis investigates how the perception of degree value has changed. We consider the massification of Higher Education and the creation of ‘social congestion’ where an over-supply of graduates impairs career opportunities. Thus, with too many degrees chasing too few degree-level jobs, we conclude that the analysis into graduate employability should be refocused on attempting to level the playing field: to ensure graduates from working class backgrounds have equality of opportunity.
Support services provided by universities - case study: career counselling at Bucharest University of Economic Studies
Presentation at DEE 2019,Nowadays, the issue of integrating graduates into the labour market is a subject of great concern to universities and employers too. Universities should prepare professionals. That means that university programs should focused not only on knowledge but on developing professional competences to students too. These competences together with so called transversal or ‘soft’ ones will help them to find a job at graduation time, stay employed and be flexible and adaptable in order to develop and fulfil personally and professionally. From this point of view, universities together with employers have to provide students not with educational services only, but with career counselling services too. Counselling services will help them to properly manage their own potential and choose an educational and professional path. The paper is focused on support services for integration into the labour market provided by The Bucharest University of Economic Studies to students and students and employers perception on these services. It represents a synthesis of different research conducted recently on theoretical resources, on students enrolled at The Bucharest University of Economic Studies and partner-employers of the university. At the end of the paper some recommendations are provided as consequences of the conclusions of research.
The employability skills gap in economics
Presentation at DEE 2019,In this session we will discuss the results from the Economics Network 2019 Employers Survey and the 2019 survey of Employability Skills in UK Economics Degrees. We will compare the preferences and perceptions of employers on skill development to the current levels of provision and integration within economics departments. We will highlight gaps between the two, particularly in areas where employers suggest economics graduates’ skills are underdeveloped. We welcome discussion on whether these gaps should be managed going forward and if so, how best departments can improve skill development within their economics degrees.
‘And I must borrow every changing shape’: Changing perceptions in the value of a University degree, repercussions for Economics
Presentation at DEE 2017,Does acquiring a degree really have value? The standard answer, formulated in education economics, is one which is founded in basic human capital orthodoxy. This results in the continued reiteration of the positive reputation of higher education, where attractive investment outcomes are presented via the comparison of tuition fees with significant expected gain in lifetime earnings. We argue that this approach is inadequate because there is typically a substantial gap between objective and subjective perceptions of value. To investigate the importance of this gap, a two-stage approach is adopted. This initially offers an empirical investigation probing the characteristics of subjective perceptions of value. We test for deterioration over time and investigate the probable indicators that could explain such worsening. Focusing on aspects such as cultural capital and the congestion hypothesis, we then use this empirical analysis to inform the second part of our paper: investigating the repercussions for the future design of economics education. We discuss the need for more radical change in the pedagogical approaches that are typically adopted, where more flexible methods are required to shift emphasis away from the standard lecture format which still stubbornly anchors itself in the repetitive application of core theoretical concepts.
Does Studying Economics Influence Employment and Loan Decisions Later in Life?
Presentation at DEE 2017,The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study has been an ongoing project of the National Center of Educational Statistics and consists of three cohorts of college graduates from 1993, 2001 and 2008. While the data collected from each cohort varies, each generally includes interview data, transcript data, as well as data from follow-up surveys. This paper will focus on the 2008 cohort which was interviewed a year after graduation, and again in 2012. We will investigate the employment outcomes of economics majors and students who have taken economics courses. Economics majors and people with economics background tend to make different economics choices in financial decisions later in life. This expands on past research (Allgood, et al, 2011) on the longer-term outcomes of learning economics. Some of the questions the Baccalaureate and Beyond: 2008–2012 data might be able to address are: What kind of jobs to people who have taken economics courses tend to find? How do they pay back student loans? What are the trade-offs people with economics training make between different types of debt? Analysis will use regression models / probit models and will control for basic demographics such as gender, race/ethnicity and family status, as well as the educational and economics background of individuals. Whether economics coursework matters in these decisions is debatable: While economics helps people make more informed decisions about saving for the future (Bosshardt and Walstad, 2017), it is not clear that economics training is needed to understand the need for paying back student loans or car loans or finding a job.
