Abstract:

The Universitat Jaume I has openly decided to promote employability of students and to assume high responsibilities in the university-to-work transition. Indeed, the focus on internalization and mobility programmes for our graduates and students was set some years ago.
This paper shows how we have optimised the know-how in professional guidance, and linguistic and culture training for candidates who go abroad, mainly in English speaking countries, from our 9 years-experience. We organise such programmes from the Career Service Area, which is an extension of the Vice-Rectorate for Students, Employment and Innovation. Its aim is to introduce added value to the students’ educational experience, to increase their chances and prepare them to work in an international environment.

Since 2002 more than 250 graduates and students have made international placements in an enterprise or institution in Europe through the Leonardo Mobility Programme and Erasmus Placements programme. Every participant gets a specific pathway of vocational guidance and cultural and language training, who help them to search host destinations, to front better the selection process with host companies. Moreover, such specific training helps them to been adapted previoulsly to the host country, for a placement 3 or 6 motnhs length. Usually we organise such training in workshops, mainly in a classical methodology (clases presenciales)

The guide is inspired in a previous online guide (preocupa’t) a professional guidance guide for searching a job in Spain for undergraduates and gradutes. Promote includes three parts: Get started: which includes information about different programmes, conditions in each country, previous experiencies of participants in different countries. Get going: includes information and exerces related preparing a curriculum, motivation letter, useful websites, and linguistic and culture exercices. Finally, Multimedia (which incudes video in English and radio programmes, regarding topics as enterpreunership, working and living conditions in different countries, presentation of the Univerisity. All contents are hosted in the career service website, with opened access to some contents but restricted access to handouts or specific models. The guide is continuining been revised and their contents can be usuful also for staff and professors who go abroad.

We comment on some results and synergies for the guide. Finally, the implications for future development of the project are discussed.

Keywords:

Erasmus Placements, Leonardo programme, Mobility programmes, school-to-work transition, linguistic competencies, generic competencies, online methodology.