Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics is an international business school in Lisbon, Portugal. There are more than 2000 students in pre-experience undergraduate (UG) and master (MSc) programs, aged between 17 and 27. There are also executive education programs (including MSc) for experienced professionals.
As a business school, the school has early recognized the importance of practical application of technical and personal skills in class. Personal and career management skills have been a mandatory part of the pre-experience programs since the early 00s. The Careers & Talent team is responsible for the delivery of these skill development programs – Learn in Action (UG) and Career Accelerator Lab (MSc).
We adopted a common language on essential skills that is simple, but comprehensive, and can be shared among our different stakeholders – students, trainers, academics and employers. The Skills Builder Benchmark platform gave us a ready to use measurement tool that will allow us not only to self-assess students, but also to measure and communicate progress, impacting value perception. The visuals and materials prepared by Skills Builder allowed us to communicate essential skills in an impactful and varied way, throughout different programs and activities.
We developed our own skills model that has now been adapted as an overall
skills model, including Skills Builder Universal Framework elements for personal
Skills. We created a new visual inspiration incorporating essential skills that define our own career management skills. We devised multiple ways to communicate essential skills including inclusion in welcome emails and online and in person events, newsletters, notice boards, the counseling room, our moodle site, visual posters and digital boards around learning spaces. Our open day also included skills building activities for prospective high school students. All students attended a range of welcome activities including a short presentation introducing career support and the skill development program, before starting their degree programs. Essential skills are also included in the Student Handbook and the Intranet careers Link In Action page.
All programs include some essential skills as part of the learning goals
for each course. Some courses have individual and group projects to practice. Students are able to apply essential skills throughout a variety of experiences, offered by the school, in
and outside the program including student clubs and associations, volunteering, internships, events with employers and peer tutors.
We will continue standardizing language among all stakeholders. We want to move from overall skill focus to using more skill steps from the Universal Framework in more classes, with professors. We also include skills in our validation process and develop our communication strategy further. In the Career Accelerator Lab Executive education program we want to complete implementation of Benchmark as part of the executive offer and promote the skills model further. We will continue to spread the Skills Builder language among more trainers and professors. We will also develop a workshop of Teamwork to help with teamwork class projects. Next year we intend to start the Benchmark Platform promotion before students arrive and in preparation for workshop choice for wider impact. We also want to develop a peer assessment. In our Executive education programs we want to complete the implementation of Skills Builder Benchmark as part of executive offer and promote the skills model.
