TEACHING QUALITY, NEW LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES AND THE COMPETENCES DEMANDED ON THE JOB MARKET
Authors: Cojocariu Veneramihaela , Damian Iulia 
Published: February 2023

The university is a field of professional and human training and development for all those involved in the process, and its quality is closely correlated with the new learning technologies. Initially regarded only as mere auxiliaries of the didactic process, as levers for streamlining the instructive-educational process from all perspectives (from those related to the human and material resources to the spatial, temporal and financial ones!) they have nowadays become responsible for a new type of learning and academic management as well as for the entire reconstruction of the relation with the job market.
In the knowledge society there is no longer the question of whether the new technologies should be used but how, where and for what activity should they be applied with maximum performance. It is important that higher education institutions should provide students with the possibility of developing a solid set of transversal key-competences (the digital competence being one of them), since these are essential in obtaining other acquisitions, adjusting to various work environments and becoming active citizens. Also a priority for the academic environment is the developing of certain ways for evaluating and recording transversal competences, of skills and attitudes that are relevant for accessing the job market and for lifelong learning (Conclusions of the Council of Europe of May 11, 2010, regarding competences that support lifelong learning and initiative “New Competences for New Jobs”).
Lifelong learning and the mobility ensured by high quality professional education and training are essential to enable graduates to acquire their acquisitions that are relevant not only for the job market but also for social inclusion and active citizenship.
Concerned with the way in which our graduates experience these aspects of academic and post-academic life we have attempted, by means of a more extended study completed in December 2011, to identify a series of aspects of the process of training of specialists from the university undergraduate programs that may allow us, based on the feed-back, to improve the process itself.
The study that we propose started from the finding that there is, compulsorily and logically, a close connection between the quality of academic teaching, the level of graduates’ competences (implicitly meaning the contribution of the academic program to the forming of competences) and the level of competences required for graduates by the type of activity that they carry after graduation. If there is no doubt concerning these close correlations, our interest has been that of identifying to what extent these significant correlations between two or more of the 4 variables may exist.
The target group of our study consisted of a sample of 449 2009 graduates of “Vasile Alecsandri” University of Bac&#259;u. These were contacted by electronic mail and invited to take part in the study by the method of the on-line questionnaire, by automated generation and allotment of a code ensuring the respondent’s anonymity. The results obtained from the investigated graduates were processed by the program Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) that made it possible for us to resume the statistical data and to determine and analyze the correlations between the 4 variables mentioned above.