Project QAREER: Quality Assurance of Career Services in Higher Education
UNIR takes part in QAREER: Quality Assurance of Career Services in Higher Education, (Erasmus+ Programme, Grant Agreement: 2015-1-RO01-KA203-014972), a European project that will propose a management system for quality in university career services for students.
The project incorporates international experts in university quality and career counselling services for students from four countries. UNIR´s participation contributes to the development of case studies, panel reviews and validation workshops where the best initiatives will be implemented to ensure the quality of these supports.
Funding programme and consortium
QAREER is funded by ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Commission, under Key Action 2 Capacity building in the field of Higher Education. The project has a duration of 2 years (2016-2018) and counts on the cooperation of UNIR and five European partners.
Project scope
Recent studies confirm that more than 80% of students are more concerned about their employment future rather than for their academic development. A future unemployment and lack of adequate guidance, contribute to demotivation at a rate close to 30% drop. On the other hand, candidates’ searchers confirm that approximately 27% of the selection processes are deserts due to lack of appropriate profiles.
It is clear that should make a greater effort to approximate the university reality the labour market and their needs.
The QAREER project mainly aims to collect the different perspectives of the actors involved (secondary education institutions, students, employers, career guidance professionals) to define quality standards applicable to the process.
To do this, the following will be addressed:
1- Collect data and indicators regarding the quality of career guidance services and quality of employability associated
2- Develop case studies to establish quality criteria and subsequent validation through expert panels
3- Develop a guide to implement the proposed standards for various institutions
3- Develop a platform that supports all project information as part of the disclosure thereof
4- Organizing various workshops with participants for validating standards to reach a greater number of actors involved.
Research phases
The Project lasted 24 months and ends on Sept 30, 2017. In the two years of project development, we carried out first an investigation on the perception of the quality of career services in European Higher Education Institutions by students, career professionals, university staff and companies. Based on the results of this phase, summarised in Intellectual Output 1, we produced a first version of the Intellectual Output 2 – Guidelines to implement Quality Assurance in Career Services in Higher Education. The reference framework for quality assurance was discussed internally in each partner Higher Education institution in the Integration phase (Intellectual Output 3).
At UNIR. The COIE as well as our students, external companies representatives and UNIR teaching staff were actively involved. The integration excersice led to an internal roadmap in each institution for the improvement of their career services. Feedback was also provide to the project in terms of improvement of the guidelines. This phase was led by UNIR Research. The results of the integration phase fed the Intellectual Output 4 – Validated Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Career Services in Higher Education Institutions.
The Validated Guidelines, available in English, Spanish, Italian and Polish, represent a reference framework for all interested Higher Education institutions to benchmark the quality of their career services and reflect on possible improvements. They have been so designed to fit to different realities (traditional/online; public/private universities) but of course they can be further modified to meet the specific needs of each insitution.
In case you are interested to know more about the results you can contact Stefania Aceto at stefania.aceto@unir.net.
For a support in the implementation of the guidelines at your institutions, you can contacts our experts through our Qareer Platform (Intellectual Output 5).
Time span: 2016-2018
Funding type: European public