A NEW SYSTEMIC APPROACH TO DETERMINE THE WEIGHT OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE TYPES IN EMPLOYABILITY EXPLANATION

Abstract

Employability represents an indicator which reflects the ability of graduates of higher education to engage on labor market and involves factors from professional, technical and behavior fields. In this context, the professional competences determine a unitary and dynamic assembly of knowledge and competences that an employer is pursuing from an employee. Most of present approaches consider this concept either from an individual prospective, related to the individuals capability to get a job, or from an organizatory one, which takes into account the motivator climate through which the employers propose to entice and retain good employees. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify the general professional skills that contribute to increasing the employability of Romanian higher education graduates from the perspective of the employers in the field of engineering. In the analysis of this study we propose a new systemic approach based on a statistic procedure for the optimization of "professional competences - employability" relationship, from employer standpoint. In this connection, a questionnaire destined to employers from technic/IT field (large companies and organizations with more than 250 employees) was drawn up, to identify the scores on different professional competences and to determine the most important of them by using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method. The application of this method was done after a descriptive statistical analysis of data to determine the suitability of the PCA method. The results are being shown off and compared with those from the specialized literature, and conclusions are issued from both the standpoint of professional competences - employability relationships, and for the practical software procedure utilized.