Creating insight among students on working life competences through problems based learning

Jobs and their content evolve with such a space that anticipation of future skills requirements is extremely challenging. Many formerly purely technical occupations are expected to show a new demand for creative and interpersonal skills. A wide range of occupations will require a higher degree of cognitive abilities, such as creativity, logical reasoning and problem sensitivity, as part of their core skill set. These skills belong to the category of so-called Transversal Competences or Entrepreneurial Skills, typically considered as not specifically related to a particular job, task, academic discipline or area of knowledge but as skills that are needed in a wide variety of situations and work settings as well as for successfully adapting to changes and leading meaningful and productive lives. The paper presents a study that aimed at identifying transversal competences and entrepreneurial skills of nurses. Qualitative interviews were used for interviewing employers. A framework on entrepreneurial skills (EntreComp Framework) was applied for the interviews to help the informants and assure the quality of the interviews. The interviewers were nursing students and did the work as a part of their lesson at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. The 19 informants were private, public and third sector organizations employing nurses in Southern Finland. Each interview was realized by two interviewers, one concentrating on the interviewee and the other assuring an audio-visual recording. The students asked about the most and less essential working life competences for nurses and the incidence and easiness of detection of them among job applicants. The new competences nurses will need in the future were also asked among with the affecting factors. The recordings were analyzed by the two teachers who supervised the student work. The students edited the tapes for developing videos presenting working life options of nurses. At the beginning of the study, the students familiarized themselves with entrepreneurship competences based on the chosen framework and discussed the meanings from a nurse's perspective. The execution of the interviews was thoroughly planned in project workshops during the semester, where students practiced how to make and edit a video-interview. At the end of the study, all 15 video-interviews were presented in a seminar where students, lecturers, working life partners and V-Tours-project-team were invited. The learning process enabled the students to get a deep insight into the vast opportunities offered to nurses and expectations of the employers regarding entrepreneurial skills. This eye-opening learning model encouraged the students to identify their skills and promote them for recruitment by personal branding