Miguel Hernández University (UMH) of Elche hosted on April 11th and 12th 2019 the second meeting of the European project ULISSE – Understanding, Learning and Improving Soft Skills for Employability.
During the conference, the partners defined the final list of soft skills to be included in the “Soft Skills Lexicon” (IO1), as a result of the analysis of more than 1.500 job vacancies, 51 papers, 10.517 abstracts from Scopus, 5 thematic Reports and 15 structured Competences Databases.
The next step of the project is now defining the most demanded competences from the market and this will be done through an analysis of the job vacancies collected by the University Career Services participating in the project, with the help of the Technimeter®, the tool for data-mining adopted by Erre Quadro.
Along with this, the University partners will start an in-deep investigation on a sample of companies, conducting both a number of interviews and on-line questionnaires, aimed at defining what they really mean when they look for a specific skill. In fact, the partners believe that employers demand that their employees possess the technical skills required to do their job, but they also need a variety of soft skills that often involve a series of competitive advantages. Therefore, the success of students and graduates in the job market increasingly depends on having hybrid skills; that is, both technical and personal and social.
The final step of this activity will be the creation of a number of training materials aimed at filling the educational gaps identified through the previous activities.
The cooperation during the two days of the meeting was excellent. The group photo, with all those smiles, is there to certify this J