CHEMP Visitor: Jean-Jacques Paul
Professor Jean-Jacques Paul recently visited CHEMP for 1 month as part of our Erasmus Mundus Program (a European Commission mobility program). He is the Director of IREDU, a reserach centre specialising in the economics and sociology of education, at the University of Bourgogne/CNRS, Dijon, France.
During his stay, Jean-Jacques presented a seminar on the Reflex Project - an EU funded sixth framework project about to be completed on the "Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society" (more information external link). To access his powerpoint presentation click here (PDF 740KB). A short introduction and abstract are also provided below.
Introduction
As Europe and the rest of the world move towards a knowledge society, there appears to be a need for a new kind of worker: the flexible professional. A major European research project recently has been completed investigating what this actually means. The project (called REFLEX) focuses on three questions: (1) which competencies are required by higher education graduates in order to function adequately in the knowledge society? (2) what role is played by higher education institutions in helping graduates to develop these competencies? (3) what tensions arise as graduates, higher education institutions, employers and other key players each strive to meet their own objectives, and how can these tensions be resolved?
Abstract
The term knowledge society has been coined to indicate not only the expansion of participation in higher education or of knowledge-intensive or high-technology sectors of the economy, but rather a situation in which the characteristics of work organisations across the board change under influence of the increasing importance of knowledge. Since some scholars cast some doubts about the extension of the knowledge and innovation society and about the changes it can impose on the labour market for graduates, it appears important to identify to what extent knowledge and innovation activities are disseminated among graduates and to what extent they determine their work environment.
In that respect, six main questions will be addressed: 1) What does innovation mean? 2) Which firms are likely to be more innovative 3) What role HE graduates play 4) Are they equipped to do this? 5) Which are the occupations more related to innovation and are innovative skills rewarded? 6) Does it appear an innovation elite and what are their characteristics?
The data utilized come from the European REFLEX project, which has been carried out in fourteen different countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. The major part of the project consists of a large scale survey held among some 50,000 graduates who graduated in 2000 from higher education in these fourteen countries. The data collection took place in the spring of 2005, i.e. some 5 years after leaving higher education. The questionnaire focused on educational experiences before and during higher education, the transition to the labour market, characteristics of the first job, characteristics of the occupational and labour market career up to the present, characteristics of the current job, characteristics of the current organisation, assessment of required and acquired skills, evaluation of the educational program, work orientations, and some socio-biographical information.