Job-related requirements and competences of educational science graduates

Abstract

All over the world, universities have to cope with the mission to promote the employability of their graduates, implying that competences should be trained which are relevant for the professional experience. In this context, it is of special interest where graduates work and what they are doing at work. In this study we focus on educational science graduates (N = 1565) and compare them to graduates of other study programmes (N = 10,224). Using data of the German DZHW graduate panel 2005 (N = 11,789), we address the questions (1) in which fields graduates of educational science work, (2) whether a theoretical-based four-dimensional internal structure of graduates’ job-related requirements and competences can be confirmed, (3) what kind of self-rated requirements educational science graduates experience at work, and (4) which self-rated levels of competences they possess, compared to other graduates. The analyses show that most graduates of educational science find an appropriate job in a clearly educational setting and that generic competences (systematic, social, and personal competences) are rated as more important than knowledge processing.

Keywords:

• Educational science graduates
• employability
• self-rated job-related requirements and competences
• curriculum development
• academic quality management

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the project team of the DZHW graduate panel 2005 for making the data available, Hilde Schaeper (DZHW) for giving helpful advice concerning the data analysis as well as the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for funding the manuscript preparation within the research programme ‘Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education’ (01PK11015B). The manuscript has been proofread by a native speaker.