Abstract:

Higher education increasingly focus on the usability of acquired knowledge and competences as the foundation of a professional career as well as the requirements of a dynamic and globalized economy. In this context, recent publications talk about an outcome-orientation of education - the German Scientific Council calls for a scientific based employability.

The objective of this paper is an overall approach to create reliable measurability of the process of providing sustainable employability of academic teaching. The focus of this paper lies on private universities in Germany. In an accreditation process these institutions should prove that a non-state university, too, can provide services in teaching and research according to scientific standards. As necessary prerequisites, the universities must describe the highly complex process of providing employability as well as they must define key performance indicators to measure the target achievement.

Based on a literature review, the development of the term sustainability from single-sided focus on environmental perspectives towards covering business processes is shown. Then employability is described as a process with distinguishable and characteristic phases. Subsequently sustainability requirements are defined, to be able to measure and assess the output of every phase of the process. Following the experience of business with a high degree of empirical knowledge in this field, a comprehensive indicator system is deducted for private universities.

A comparative study about the quality management of the German private universities showed that a multitude of different concepts exist - but no holistic and transparent approach. This gap will be closed with this paper. The result of this paper thus provides a concept, that defines the process, the priorities as well as a catalogue of measures to improve the potential of private universities in contributing to sustainable academic education.

Keywords:

Employability, sustainability of processes, measurability of processes, academic education, sustainable employability.