Abstract:

During the last years, at the business school of Vitoria-Gasteiz (University of the Basque Country), as in other European universities, we have faced the challenge of designing a new Grade: the Administration and Business Management Degree.

Within this process, the definition of grade competences emerged as one of the more complex tasks, not only because it would become the commitment we made to our students, but also because the difficulty involved in capturing in a small text the skills that the graduate should hold.

For this reason, in order to contribute to the correct definition of the grade competences, we initiated a process of reflection and we made a study to know the type of competences that our graduates consider to be important for the performance of their professional activity and the degree in which, in the grade to extinguishing (the Diploma in Business Sciences), they were capable to develop the above mentioned competences.

In the current academic year we have begun to impart the Administration and Business Management Degree and, therefore, we are immersed in a new challenge: selecting the suitable tools that allow us to make an ideal follow-up of the degree of development of the grade competences. In this sense, an adaptation of the matrix of "Importance-Performance" presented by Martilla and James in the 70's has proved to be a high value tool to capture the views of our students and graduates, so it offers a high potential to guide management team of a university center in decision-making.

This paper describes the use of this simple methodology in the strategic diagnosis phase and reveals its virtues to, on a very visual way, make comparisons of the valuations made by different groups.

Keywords:

Graduation Competences, Importance-Performance matrix.