Abstract:

This communication assumes that the professional skills of the graduated in Library and Information Sciences and Technologies (LIST) are known from the point of view of both the students themselves and their professors and even of the potential employers, which are here materialized by the host entities of curricular traineeship of the Undergraduate degree in LIST.

These institutions have public and private nature and we can define them as follows: Microenterprise: employs less than 10 people and the annual turnover or annual balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 2 million; Small enterprise: employs less than 50 people and the annual turnover or annual balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 10 million; Medium-sized enterprise: employs less than 250 people and the annual turnover does not exceed EUR 50 million or the annual balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 43 million.

In addition to the business types referred to above, there are also host entities of traineeship, organizations of public nature who work exclusively on document and information management such as libraries and archives.

The starting point is the following question: Does the degree in LIST promote the acquisition of skills considered to be important and relevant for the professional performance? The general objective of this work is to assess among those that get closely involved with LIST, if this degree promotes the acquisition of important skills for these future information professionals, from three different perspetives: students, professors and the potential employers.

Regarding the methodology, it will be created a survey by questionnary, previously used and validated in another study (Arias-Coello; Simón-Blas; Simón-Martín (2014)). The questionnaire consists of four dimensions:
1-Information Management;
2-Communication and Interpersonal Relationship;
3-Mastery and application of information technologies;
4-Organization Management

Subdivided into 29 factors, that resulted in 29 questions. The scale of answer to be used includes values between 1 and 10, being 10 the highest value. The questionnaire will be made available electronically to the host institutions of traineeship (167), to the graduate students and to the full-time professors and it was previously initiated phone contact with the first ones and personal contact with the second and third ones, in order to raise awareness to fill the questionnaire.

The answer rate is expected to be satisfactory and the collected data will be exported later and worked statically in the SPSS.

It is expected that the results will allow to assess the opinions of different segments associated to the LIST degree and eventually identify the shortcomings in the curriculum of this Undergraduate degree and, thus, make recommendations for its adjustment, taking into account the perspectives of the participants interviewed.

Keywords:

Professional skills, Information Science, Traineeship.