La inserción socio-laboral de los universitarios mediante proyectos profesionales y vitales compartidos

Abstract

In the continuously changing society that we live in, it is necessary to know how to navigate uncertainty; More and more people are plunged into transitions made up of intermittent trajectories in which long periods of unemployment are combined with underemployment or job insecurity, making it difficult for them to access the workforce and find stable and safe employment. The new employment scenario surpasses the traditional risk groups (women, vulnerable groups, young people without qualifications) and extends to the entire population, drawing an uncertain, ambiguous and highly changing labor map where being a holder of a university degree no longer represents a sine qua non guarantee and asymmetries in employment become a constant as a result of the repeated economic crises and the great structural transformation of the 21st century, where academic training and career guidance are needed at every stage of life. In the case at hand, regarding university students, the current employment context causes new processes of transition to a productive life that are characterized by job instability and uncertainty when seeking employment for a generation of young people who, despite their high levels of qualification and a great command of technology and languages, have little experience in the professional world. In this context, this dissertation carries out an in-depth and analytical reflection on securing employment for university students through a professional and personal project comprised of a compendium of 9 research articles and an intervention proposal in the form of a manual that advocates for quality career guidance throughout life. All these contributions that make up this research are intended to analyze and advance knowledge about the perceptions, beliefs, expectations and interests of university students who are close to completing their higher education and have doubts and concerns about the beginning of their careers or professional developments. It starts from a mixed methodological approach, with a greater quantitative domain and a non-experimental and transectional design, in which descriptive and correlational studies are interspersed depending on the article presented and its specific objectives. The total sample of participants is made up of 1,765 final year undergraduate students distributed in six institutions located across different countries: Spain with participants from the University of Murcia (UM), University of Granada (UGR) and University of Coruña (UDC), Argentina with the participation of the Universidad Católica de Córdoba (UCC), Italy, with the Università degli Studi di Padova (UPD) and the United States with a sample from the University of New Haven (UNH). All these participants give this dissertation an international and comparative perspective that broadens the vision of the phenomenon under study. The collection of information is carried out from the Questionnaire about Career Guidance and Entering the Workforce (QCGEW), an instrument designed ad hoc which a complete content and construct validation process is applied. The data collected is analyzed with the help of the statistical software SPSS, AMOS and Atlas.ti, depending on the nature of the data and the objectives proposed. Among the main results is the disparity of factors that affect the job seeking process, sometimes with similar effects among students from very distant universities. This is the case of satisfaction with the academic training received, the development of competencies or the strategies and expectations in the search for employment, coinciding with other elements or variables such as the importance given to the curriculum or the lack of career guidance to adapt to workforce requirements. On the other hand, future employment expectations at the end of initial academic training vary depending on the university of origin, in the same way that the profile of the graduate changes, with more work experience and active involvement in university life outside the Spanish context. As a conclusion to all these factors and characteristics analyzed, accompanied by the foundation and the employability model that is presented in the first few articles of the compendium, this dissertation ends with an intervention proposal under the title Orientación profesional en la incertidumbre. Un programa de inserción sociolaboral, which it intends to address, directly and realistically, career guidance among young university students in the personal and professional search that the transition to a productive life entails. A manual loaded with intentions that not only can benefit potential participants but can also be very useful for higher education institutions to debate, organize and develop career guidance strategies that facilitate a better fit between higher education and employment in the difficult path towards starting a career for university students.