Career outcomes of graduates 2004 - a career guidance tool

Abstract

Employability on graduation and over the long term is, understandably, the major priority for the vast majority of our University students. Over the past two decades or so the University has increasingly offered a wide spectrum of higher education courses that have provided students with the necessary tools enabling them to develop their employability skills, to heighten their own awareness of these skills and to improve their ability to articulate them. These skills, once acquired, of course need to be honed throughout one’s working life, being put into practice not only in job searching and during interviews but also in personal development planning and in making the most of work experience opportunities. There is no doubt that a student’s life long learning capability and therefore his/her employability are enhanced through their university experience. The core mission of our University continues to be the creation of an open space of higher learning within a life-long perspective. This is based on equity of access and should be seen as an opportunity for individual development, allowing all those capable of benefiting from higher education to integrate better into the global knowledge society. The impact of the effects of widening participation in higher education, with a twelve fold increase in the number of students that have graduated in the last twenty years, from 216 in 1985 to 2591 this year, may now be appreciated by all. Today, perhaps as never before, it has become imperative for careful and informed career guidance to be provided for students seeking access into our institutions of higher education. A few years back the University had approached the Employment and Training Corporation (ETC) offering it office space to enable its officers to provide advice to our students on campus. Unfortunately, although agreement had been reached, the ETC was not in a position to spare the personnel required to run this service. Likewise, it has been University policy to seek to strengthen existing links and to create new bridges with the world of work. The University has repeatedly and publicly requested industry to let it know what its needs are going to be in the immediate and long term. Attempts have been made to instil a pro-industry attitude at the University. Better communications with all interested parties, including the Malta Federation of Industry, the Malta Chamber of Commerce and Malta Enterprise are continuously being sought. Empirical work on economic growth has consistently shown that improvement in human capital is a major contributor towards productivity gains. Our society is fast approaching the point at which the economy, so far still based, to a certain extent, on traditional capital and labour production, gives way to an economy mainly based on the production and sale of knowledge and services. The knowledge–based economy has brought into sharper focus the reality that productivity improvements and education are directly interrelated. The University is an institution whose ‘production’ is based precisely on knowledge and should therefore come to occupy a strategic role of even greater significance. The University graduates tracer study which the Students Advisory Services has drawn up in collaboration with the University Centre for Labour Studies with the help of Euroguidance Malta provides us with invaluable information as to what is happening to our new graduates when they seek to join the world of work. All stake holders in the field should now be in a better position to plan their future career guidance services whilst at the same time seeking to anticipate the future needs of the country, putting in place those mechanisms necessary to train future graduates needed to satisfy these requirements. All those who have collaborated in this study are to be warmly congratulated.