Employability skills:a structural equation model at the faculty of education

Abstract

In the face of the fourth industrial revolution, where the conception of the employability of students goes beyond the acquisition of a particular job, this research deepens the assessment of the university student about the development of skills for employability that occurs during their university education. In addition, it includes a construct validation of the competencies scale presented by the CFA and possible differences are analyzed according to the three Spanish universities analyzed: University of Murcia, University of Granada and University of A Coruña. With this objective, 830 final year students in the faculty of education of these universities participated by completing the Cuestionario de Orientación e Inserción Laboral (COIL). For the analysis of the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used through the statistical program SPSS v23 and the AMOS program to carry out the Structural Equation Model. The results show optimal model fit indexes, which guarantee the suitability of this model with the empirical data. In addition, it is verified that there exists a common tendency among all students of the faculty of education relative to the medium-low development of competencies for employability, but with significant competency differences varying among each university. Based on these results, it is necessary to seek synergies of communication and cooperation among the job markets, the social agents, and the university, and to do it both locally and nationally in order to find the balance and transfer required by the EHEA in the fourth industrial revolution.