The study asked over two thousand businesses around Spain how they rated the skills and knowledge of recently-graduated employees, depending on the university and field they completed their studies in.
15 june 2016
Did you graduate in Economics or Business Administration through the University of Valencia, or are you currently undertaking bachelor or postgraduate studies in the Faculty of Economics? If that’s the case, good news: your future boss probably already likes you better than his other employees.
The Everis Foundation interviewed recruiters from 2.155 businesses with 10 or more employees, and asked them for their opinion on the nearly 15 thousand recent graduates they had all hired in the past five years, out of 82 Spanish universities (both public and private). These employees were divided into 5 categories depending on their field of studies: Business Administration, Economics and Law; Humanities and other Social Sciences; Science and Engineering; Computing and ICT; and Health and Wellbeing.
For the first category, the University of Valencia and, by extension, the Faculty of Economics shine the brightest: the average rating for our graduates was 8.04 out of 10, .14 points higher than the runner-up. Recruiters were asked how well graduates adapted to their new position, and what was lacking from their previous formation.
The study highlights the education offered at the Faculty of Economics for its “honesty and ethical compromise” and their graduates’ ability “to work in multicultural and multidisciplinary settings”.
Not only that, but the study discovered some other intriguing facts about the transition between bachelor studies and the job market. On a national level, an education in Business Administration leads to the most jobs out of any other graduate degree: 12% of all contracts signed in the past five years to recent graduates came from this area. The related report published in El Mundo signals the “transversal” nature of Business Administration studies as a factor of its success on the job market.
Conversely, the study exposes some other less desirable traits of Spanish graduates. Most notably, Everis found that over 70% of the employees that were rated had completed their studies in a university located in the same region as their employer. Recent graduates prove thus an old characteristic of the Spanish job market: very low and limited geographical mobility. The experts interviewed by El Mundo also stress that many graduates lack skills to “work in international contexts”, as well sub-par foreign language levels.
In that sense, the International Master’s Degree in Business Administration is the exception to the rule: we operate on a global scale, encouraging our students to expand their horizons and seek work outside their comfort zone. We also expect and help to develop in our students an above-average understanding of the English language. Find out more here.
