Abstract:

One of the current challenges of the Professional Counselling Department (from “VasileAlecsandri” University of Bacau) activity is the collection of feedback from the beneficiaries of the services provided and their transformation into new lines of action, departmental or institutional decisions. One of the major vectors in this approach is the relationship with the labour market. The implementation, by the department, of the national project Professional Development and Employability, during July-December 2016 – the convergence of university with the labour market (DeProfAn) has achieved another level of some of its specific activities: monitoring the graduates’ insertion in the labour market; determining the degree of satisfaction of students and graduates regarding the training and services offered by the university; identifying the point of view of employers regarding the quality of the graduates’ training. Specifically, based on the funding obtained in the CNFIS competition (National Council for Higher Education Funding – from Romania) under the title FDI (Institutional Development Funds) there was obtained funding for the design, implementation and exploitation of a software platform to achieve these objectives. Our paper aims to describe the informatics tool in terms of the categories of information that have been designed to be collected. Our study involves an analysis of the answers obtained from the three categories of project platform users (students, graduates, employers). A qualitative data analysis was performed for each of them. The respondent employers (the third category of the platform’s target group) were involved in another stage of the research. Based on the answers to the online questionnaire, there were developed questions for the interview guide, for two focus groups involving 12 employers from the project database. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of all the results obtained from the online questionnaires from the project platform and of the data collected from the two focus groups led to the identification of three sets of management implications associated with each target group of the project: from students and graduates, suggestions for improving the quality of the services offered by the university; from graduates, the identification of activities that the university should perform to increase their insertion on the labour market; from employers,the nomination of specific sets of soft skills that employers would want the university to build/develop at prospective graduates. We shall analyse the flow of data obtained, their relevance to the categories of managerial suggestions that can be extracted for different levels of academia (professors, decision-making factors at the level of all university sub-levels: department of professional counselling, academic departments, social services. These will be integrated and presented in a systemic manner to be exploited in future decisions.

Keywords:

Employability, labour market, counselling, informatic tool.