Öğrencilerin İstihdam Edilebilirlik ve Bilgi Okuryazarlığı Becerileri: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Örneği

Abstract

Youth unemployment is an important problem in Turkey as it is in the whole World. Unemployment of university graduates negatively affects the national economy and causes both financial and psychological problems for the individual. In order to be employed, it is of great importance to have technical knowledge about the discipline of graduation as well as non-technical skills which are called employability skills. Employability skills are skills that are common to all areas of business that are necessary for the person to get employed, to be successful in their business, to make progress and to improve themselves. Employability skills include basic skills, thinking skills, personal skills, resource use skills, interpersonal skills, system and technology skills, foreign language skills and information (literacy) skills. Employability skills are largely overlap information literacy skills. This study aims to investigate the state of 2017-2018 academic year graduates of Hacettepe University with regard to their employability skills. Within the scope of the study, a questionnaire was applied to both students and faculty members on a stratified random sampling strategy to determine the importance of the employability skills and the competence of the students. 362 students and 168 faculty members participated in this study. Research findings indicate different achievement/competence levels of the students’ employability skills. Students are least successful in foreign language skills. The findings also indicate that there is a difference between the importance given to employability skills and achievement assessments, and the level of importance given to the skills is higher than the success assessment, and the success evaluations of the faculty members are lower than the students’ self-assessments. It is also understood from the findings that the importance given to the students’ employability skills and some of the success self-evaluation changes according to demographic characteristics such as gender, discipline and academic success. In addition to that large proportion of the students think that they gain their employability skills at the university.