Abstract:

In 2015 World Economic Forum Project Team announced for an urgent call to action - the labor market increasingly demands skills like literacy and numeracy, needs competencies like collaboration, creativity and problem-solving, and character qualities like persistence, curiosity, and initiative. The role and importance of generic skills are growing rapidly business as well as in education.

Different researchers have pointed out that there is a lack of institutional and curriculum support and diversity of employers’, teachers’ and students’ attitudes and perceptions of generic competencies development.

Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences (EUAS) have started to create a complete model for improving generic skills role and study quality in EUAS curriculum. The model may serve as an example for other higher education institutions as well.

The generic skills are already playing a significant role in the EUAS curricula. Among the other things, also the Estonian higher education standard requires implementation of generic skills. Often, there is no mutual understanding of whether generic skills are even worthy of being separately taught and what kind of generic skills should be a separate school subject or topic and what deserve and need a whole module in higher education curricula. There is also the question of which generic skills should be obtained throughout the entire curriculum and which skills can be dismissed by institutions of higher education.

In 2016-2017 the authors formed a generic skills framework of 19 skills and collected students’ ratings and expectations the importance of generic skills in their working life.

In the current article, authors’ aim is to identify students’ perceptions about generic skills in EUAS curriculum.

The data were collected through a survey (in 2016-2017) and interviewing (in 2017). The sample of the survey includes 362 students of Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences (the average age of 30 years). 90% of the surveyed students worked, including 2/3 of the jobs related to the specialty taught. We have found the students’ expectations of studying generic skills in higher education are high, but a balance between generic and job-specific skills depends on the study specialization. The interviews with 15 students/alumni revealed how students assessed the importance of generic skills and their representation in curricula. Suggestions for development of generic skills in higher education were made by the interviewees.
The results can be used for curriculum development and faculty training in methodological skills development.

Keywords:

Generic skills, transferable skills, curriculum design development.