Finland - Jyvaskyla Region - Final Self-Evaluation Report.pdf

practices in the provision of education could be intensified by more closely connecting the educationalinstitutions of different levels.5.7 Conclusions: Critical points relating to the contribution of teaching and learning to regional labourmarket and skills1. The need for better labour market matching. The well-functioning anticipation mechanisms foroccupational skill requirements and educational needs in the region, for the purposes of predictingchanges in future skill requirements with respect to working life, are important. The main aim of theanticipation information is to help the educational institutions, firms and other employers, as well asregional and national authorities, to plan and successfully implement future activities and strategiesfor higher education. The need for regional anticipation derives from the specialization ofeducational institutions, on the one hand, and from overlapping activities and the requirement ofcost-effectiveness, on the other. The character of these mechanisms varies from quantitativeforecasts to questions of future qualifications. In Finnish regional policy, the Employment andEconomic Development Centres (TE-Centres) have adopted the main responsibility for regionalanticipation activities. Nowadays, one of the most important areas in TE-Centre foresight isanticipating changes in workers’ qualifications and skills. A key challenge in this area is to promotecooperation between educational institutions and companies. In the Jyväskylä region, the HEIs alsocarry out annual surveys on the integration of their graduates into the labour market. They gatherinformation about the employment rate of graduates, the region in which they are working/living,and whether the current job corresponds to the acquired skills of graduates. This allows the HEIs toevaluate how well their activities meet the regional and national needs of the labour market. Theactive scenario work of the Jyväskylä Polytechnic is also an important part in the anticipation ofthese regional needs.In the Jyväskylä region, and in the whole of Central Finland, the mismatching of jobs and jobseekers can be seen as a problem. In the higher education sector, this implies that graduates arecompelled to move to the other regions. The structures of HEIs are rather rigid, something thatinhibits their dynamic reactions to the labour markets. However, during the last decade, the HEIs inFinland have launched new kinds of learning modes to increase their capability of responding to thechanging educational needs. For instance, in the Jyväskylä region, retraining and upgradingqualifications (muuntokoulutus) are designed to meet the short-term needs, which may involveeducating a certain number of professionals for a specific industry. The Master’s Programmes of theUniversity and Master’s Degrees of the Polytechnic are, by their very nature, more permanent andoriented towards the long-term, but they are also flexible forms of education.2. Promoting regional employability of students. Promoting the regional recruitment of students.At the University of Jyväskylä and Jyväskylä Polytechnic, student recruitment is facilitated byproviding career services. The services include organizing recruitment events, gathering onlineinformation about vacant jobs, and providing consultation. At the University, a new kind of mode ofaction, called ”idea forum” (ideariihi), has been recently launched. It aims at providing ideas andsuggestions for solving some specific problems that firms have, by bringing a number of studentstogether and giving them a certain period of time to work actively with the problem. This is just asingle action to narrow the gap between the students and employers, but those kind of new measuresare needed in the region to enhance the regional employability of highly educated students as well asthe opportunities of the region’s firms to profit effectively from the skilled labour force. Theintegration of the increasing number of doctorates into the labour market is also a real challenge inthe Jyväskylä region. A relatively large number of small firms and a fairly low level of companies’R&D activities decrease the employment prospects of doctorates. Finding the mechanisms to createmore connections between doctoral candidates and small firms, which have a limited conception ofthe benefits that hiring a doctorate might bring along, is one of the key challenges of the future in theJyväskylä region.78