Abstract:

The present mission of the university has become more complex and proactive, concerning its relation with the labour market. The Professional Counselling Department of our university is the structure which has to ensure: the monitoring of the graduates insertion on the labour market, the determination of the degree of satisfaction of both the students and the graduates regarding education and training the services provided by the institution and the employers’ points of view concerning the professional quality of graduates. These indicators are relevant and important for the evaluations on which the university is periodically subjected to. Such evaluations include the study programmes and the regional impact of the university. These considerations have led to the need for developing a platform in order to help with data collection and data analysis processes, validated through the grant obtained by competition, within the CNFIS national project call. Through this project, which aims at the convergence of the university with the labour market by means of professional development and employability, a software platform that aims at the optimization of employability has been designed, tested and implemented. By means of this platform, three main actors have been taken into account as students, graduates and employers and the resulted information will have a certain role of readjusting the teaching and learning system, having as a final goal the optimization of the graduates’ insertion on the labour market.

The objective of this paper is to describe the software platform in terms of functionalities and usefulness for the data collection and processing for professional counselling. Therefore, a SWOT analysis has also been designed so as to evaluate the results and to draw out the direction of evolution of the existing software application from both professional and technical perspectives.

The functionalities of the software application will be presented as well, by pointing out the specific use-case scenarios and functional requirements. The survey components will also be analysed aiming at the development of a reliable platform for professional counselling services.

Keywords:

Employability, professional counselling, convergence, software platform.