Abstract:

At present, the competitiveness and employability of university graduates in the labour market is often emphasized in connection with the growing importance and emphasis put on evaluating the quality of higher education. The employment and employability of graduates and their readiness for the requirements demanded by the labour market and by practice are among the significant attributes of a comprehensive evaluation of the educational activities of each university. The labour market is constantly changing and evolving, and as the needs of employers change over time, the education system and thus university graduates, as bearers of higher education outcomes, must be able to respond adequately to these changes.

It is very important to realize that the employability of university graduates in the labour market must be supported and developed already during their university studies with students across all fields of study. Therefore, it is necessary to support the relevance of study as much as possible with regard to the needs of practice, i.e. with regard to the specific current requirements that employers place on university graduates when entering the labour market. The practice requires competent graduates, because they form a significant share of the economically active population, which is constantly declining due to the aging of the population. Older and more experienced workers are gradually leaving the professional world and this gap needs to be adequately filled. Generally speaking, school leavers are perceived as a risk group when entering the labour market, therefore, they should be given adequate attention and in various ways they must prepare for working life and their professional and key competences must be continuously developed and strengthened so that they are able to succeed in the ever-changing professional world.

The aim of the paper is to inform about the position of university graduates on the labour market and about the required competencies by practice, which they should have after graduation. The intention is to present important competences that are required by graduates in practice with regard to the branches they study for at a university. Furthermore, the paper focuses on specific examples of activities that are implemented at a particular Czech university, which can support the applicability of graduates at the beginning of their careers after graduation. It is mainly a fair of job opportunities for students and activities of the counselling centre, which are used to develop selected competences for the labour market. The paper also contains a description of the partial outputs of the pilot questionnaire survey, which deals with determining the required competences by practice when a graduate of a given university enters the labour market.

Keywords:

Competences, development, employability, employers, graduates, labour market, university.