Abstract:

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have a dual relationship with society. On the one hand, the degrees they create must be aligned with the needs of the labor market, employment trends, social and cultural changes that determine the evolution of skills and knowledge profiles and the skills required by a constantly changing world. These issues are in tune with recent studies and documents on the 2030 Horizon and its guidelines, as well as with the challenges of current and future education, which include a new approach to the curriculum, namely the urgency of combining knowledge and skills that reflect the demands of the contemporary world, such as soft skills, social skills and personal skills.

The curriculum design, nowadays, includes the ability to give future graduates this aforementioned union between scientific domains and an emerging set of skills, to prepare future professionals, but also for their personal development and for the development of the communities in which they are working and living.HEI must give enhanced tools to their students to help define their learning path and master new skills, considering their future careers.

To find ways to address these issues, a network of HEI devised the Project “Adaptation and Evaluation D.Y.L. Methodology to Individualized Career Planning in Higher Education Institutions”, DYLMIC, funded by the NAWA Program, from Poland, joining the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów (Poland), Université de Nice (France) University of Bologna (Italy) and the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre (Portugal), which combines the development of career definition paths with social responsibility.

In the DYLMIC proposed methodology, we have three main steps: Discover – the discovery of themselves and the intended professional environments; Innovate—definition of innovative paths of personal and professional development; Validate: validation of the intended and alternative paths of development.
With the main step of discovering, while applying psychological tools, students are driven to a self-discovery process, and after that, they could structure two main concerns with the help of the previous analysis: Introspection analysis; initial professional vision.

In Innovate main step, when all the circumstances are drawn, it can be divided into three sub-pictures: Past paths, intended personal paths, and intended professional paths, allowing students to structure personal and professional development paths as a model of development.

In the main step of the validation process, the intended and alternative paths of development are drawn, to get better clarity. This process concludes with an ongoing model in order for the students to get a final model of their intended development.

The mission of HEI must combine education with a sense of community responsibility. The DYLMIC project methodology translates these concerns and makes them operational. As shown, the methodology allows a path of personal discovery and the construction of a future career alignment for students. The methodology proposed by this project was tested and produced valid results in the scope of the training, the curriculum, and the need to supply students with tools that allow them to perform a self-diagnosis, looking at each one’s characteristics and career planning possibilities, uniting competencies and skills.

Keywords:

Curriculum Design, Social Responsibility, Career Planning.