The main objective of the project is to improve the quality of education in technical schools in Europe by implementing a tool to analyse the skills gap of students studying in the following professions: construction technician, logistics technician, renewable energy technician. In order to achieve the objective, it was necessary to carry out an extensive international comparative study between students and graduates of the mentioned fields of study. The study was conducted in 2022 and involved 428 respondents – final or penultimate year students of technical schools, as well as new graduates of these types of schools. We structured the analysis of the survey results by asking questions, among others: about the characteristics of the respondents that differentiate the level of responses, about the level of the competence gap or about possible similarities in the assessment of different competence groups.
Our main observations:
A strongly differentiating characteristic is gender. It is possible to conclude that women are more critical of their preparation for entering the labour market and their ability to find and keep a job that is compatible with their field of study. In terms of assessing the importance of competencies (in 6 types of competencies out of 12), the differences in the scores given by men and women were statistically significant, with women’s mean scores being higher than men’s scores for all competencies. This means that women rate the importance of certain competencies higher than male respondents. The statistically significantly higher mean scores for questions assessing the labour market situation further suggest that women are more likely than men to notice potential risks in finding a job and the need for further education and training due to the inevitability of change.
Graduates are more critical of their preparation for entering the labour market than students. Graduates attach more importance to competences used in practice in the workplace, i.e. practical or IT skills, and also value the importance of openness to lifelong learning and resilience. When self-assessing the level of competences, it is surprising to find statistically significant differences in favour of students in the case of professional competences (practical skills) and personal competences (resilience competence). If we also add to this a more critical attitude expressed by graduates towards the difficulty of finding a job suitable for their education, we can assume that the higher scores given by students in the self-assessment of their level of competences or the situation on the labour market are probably due to a lack of awareness of the real needs and expectations of potential employers.
The feature that seemed to differentiate most was the country of study. For this characteristic, we found statistically significant differences in 10 of the 12 types of competences analysed, both in terms of the question on their importance and their level of self-assessment. In the case of both questions, we observed multiple statistically significant differences in the pairwise comparisons between countries in the plus for Bulgaria and the minus for Greece, but this situation requires deeper analysis.
We found differences in respondents’ assessments of the importance of different types of competencies and their self-assessment of their level. The lack of similarity between the rankings generated for the two topics analysed means that respondents consider other types of competencies as important for their employment after graduation and point to others as their strengths. The lack of similarity between the rankings was observed for the whole sample as well as for specific fields of study, demonstrating that respondents are aware of gaps in their skills in relation to labour market expectations.
The use of factor analysis confirmed the existence of certain patterns in respondents’ assessments of the different types of competences. The two clearly visible factors generated for the answers to the question on the importance of different types of competences show that respondents assess in a similar way the importance of competences belonging to the group of so-called universal skills (factor 1) and the importance of so-called hard skills (factor 2).
Read more about the project and its results, as well as the results of the survey carried out:
