Abstract:

A proper attention to last year students at university is crucial, so that they could achieve a high degree of satisfaction with their studies. Besides, it may lead to increase the studies’ success rate and a better integration in the labour market; this is, in fact, the best promotion to attract potential new students to degree and master programmes.

This work sets up a comprehensive plan with the aim of guaranteeing an in-person attention to the last year students of Telecommunication Engineering at the university. Specifically, this plan deals with a set of actions designed to attend to the diversity of professional interests and requirements, among which the focus is brought to the potentiation of the so called soft skills. These soft skills, or transversal competences, are presupposed in students when they start their studies, but are not formally present in any regulated training programmes, although they are spread transversally among several subjects. Precisely, that transversality is what makes their objective assessment in a specific course difficult. Consequently, the actions proposed here are fully justified.

Innovative and focalized activities, together with more traditional ones, are mixed in the set of actions carried out in this plan. The traditional activities have been a personalized tutorial support for academic orientation and the monitoring of all the students involved in mobility and work placement programmes. On the one hand, the innovative activities have consisted of a series of technical talks provided by technological companies, aimed at career opportunities and, on the other hand, a series of workshops (TOP – Talleres de Orientación Laboral [Professional Orientation Workshops]) has been promoted to particularly develop the soft skills. These workshops dealt with topics related to good practices in technical-formal writing, the devising and public presentation of a technical report, the production of a CV, the recruitment process and job interviews.

To determine the efficacy of the proposed actions, the results and the acceptance of the plan were assessed through the information gathered with a series of surveys. The vast majority of the surveyed people considered the plan very positively and recommended its reiteration for the following years; they also recognized the usefulness of all the topics of the TOP workshops, as up to then, none had been addressed in detail during the studies. Speakers, methodology and the used resources received also quite high impressions. On the whole, the average rating the students gave to the plan was 9 out of 10 points.

Additionally, recently graduate students were collectively interviewed to value their perception regarding the training achieved during the studies in relation to the demands of the current labour market. They pointed out the responsibility, the ability to work in groups, the acquired knowledge, the know-how to speak in public and the technological updating as the most important aspects to work into the engineering field. Most of these aspects match, to a large extent, with the topics tackled within this plan, which corroborates its beneficial utility.

Finally, it stands out the high acceptance of all the actions. All of them were directed to a comprehensive attention of the last year students to help them with a successful transition and integration in the labour market.

Keywords:

Soft skills, transition to labour market, last year students.