Master’s Thesis in Computer Science by Lars Jørgen Fredheim at NTNU

Mobile Application for Graduate Employability Skills – A proof of concept

International Conferences e-Society and Mobile Learning 12- 14 March 2022 – ISBN: 978-989-8704-38-2 

Paper to be presented at Edulearn22 Conference / Abstract

DEVELOPMENT OF GRADUATE EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS WITH REGARDS TO DREAM JOB USING MOBILE APP

The educational journey of every student in the university is initiated with the ambition to achieve the best possible role in the field of their interest, which not only become their ultimate goal and what we call a “dream job”. To accomplish this target, students plan their academic journey so that they can achieve the best possible grades in academic assessments, to exhibit their knowledge and expertise within their field. The academic journey of students not only furnishes them with domain knowledge of the field but also different academic tasks like presentations, projects, workshops, group work etc also aims to equip students with another set of skills known as employability skills among employers. However, in the limelight of gaining domain-specific skills, the employability skills either remain unacknowledged or underdeveloped. It is seldomly realized that the lack of these employability skills sometimes becomes a barrier for students to achieve their dream job, despite being good at domain-specific skills.

In this paper, we aim to present a mobile application prototype that is intended to help students acknowledge the presence of these skills through the self-reflection process on their experiences and support students to understand the need and requirements of their dream job. Facilitating the self-reflection process of the student through the app would enable them to recognize what skills they have, and the dream job concept designed in the app would enable the students to analyse their present skills profile with the skill profile required for their dream job. The comparison of the two skill profiles would enable students to realize the skill gap that aims to stimulate skill development behaviour among them. The realization of the need for skill development is inevitable for motivating students to learn more. The learning resources integrated within the app support students’ skill development to achieve their dream job.

This project is supported by the ERASMUS+ program.