S4F - Skills for the Future? The Value and Effectiveness of Competency-Based Higher Education

This project aims to develop novel empirical estimates of the prevalence and value of transferable competencies among university graduates in Portugal. It will look at how that value has been changing as a result of the transformation of the world of work. The project findings will inform the debate on the challenges of moving towards a competency-based approach to the organization of higher education (HE). The project applies a supply-transition-demand framework to measure the degree of (mis)match between HE competency profiles and those demanded at work. It will provide empirical estimates of: i) the (mis)match between HE learning outcomes and skill demand; ii) the value of generic competencies in avoiding unemployment; iii) the returns to different types of competencies in early career years; and iv) will develop a new experimental method to measure generic competencies among graduates and evaluate their return in the labour market.