UPSKILLS Project Aimed at Enhancing the Employability of Graduates from Linguistics and Language-Related Courses Successfully Completed
UPSKILLS (UPgrading the SKIlls of Linguistics and Language Students), an Erasmus+ partnership project, successfully drew to an end on 31 August 2023. This three-year project, launched in September 2020, sought to identify and tackle the gaps and mismatches in skills for linguistics and language students. To reach this aim, consortium members from eight partner institutions, including CLARIN, worked towards a new curriculum component, which targets developing technical and transferable skills needed for industry and academic research among undergraduate students of language-related subjects.
The development of this new study component revolved around the production of four intellectual outputs:
- An in-depth needs analysis to produce a detailed professional profile description for the relevant graduates, with the associated learning objectives (knowledge, skills and competences), typical tasks and responsibilities.
- Identifying best practices and guidelines for integrating research, research infrastructure and industry-based research into teaching.
- The adaptation of existing and/or creation of new learning content, aimed at developing the technical and transferable skills of students of language-related disciplines.
- The integration of educational games into the learning content in the interest of enhancing student engagement.
All the project deliverables are available on the UPSKILLS website, while the learning content can be accessed on our dedicated Moodle platform.
Since the project’s ultimate goal was to ensure that students in language-related disciplines have better job prospects and transition smoothly into the world of work, creating a better workforce for industry and research, the project strove to engage the relevant students, academics and industrial stakeholders alike. To this end, six multiplier events and three training events were organised. The project culminated in a five-day summer school held at the Petnica Science Centre, Serbia, in July 2023. This summer school brought together 32 students and 17 trainers from various academic institutions, as well as CLARIN . It engaged the students through hands-on and research-oriented lectures and workshops.
CLARIN contributed to the first three intellectual outputs by helping survey the curricula of linguistics and language-related degrees in Europe, compiling a guide for teachers showing how to leverage the CLARIN infrastructure central services in teaching and developing two learning content blocks on Moodle, namely Introduction to Language Data: Standards and Repositories and Automatic Speech Recognition and Forced Alignment. In addition, CLARIN organised a workshop for lecturers to discuss and exchange best practices related to integrating research-based teaching, use of research infrastructures and industry-based research into the linguistic curricula.
Do you want to learn more?
Please see the CLARIN Learning Hub for a complete overview of the CLARIN's contribution to the UPSKILLS project and relevant links. If you want to reuse the UPSKILLS learning and teaching materials in your university curricula, training or workshop, please email Iulianna van der Lek at training [at] clarin.eu (training[at]clarin[dot]eu).
For more information about the project deliverables, please visit the UPSKILLS website.