Employability
Traditionally, the academia provides education based on science and tested practice. But more is required today: Being a good team member, to communicate well, resolve conflicts, plan a career. At Karlstad Business School we call it Professional Skills®. It involves transferring knowledge from head to hand.
Professional Skills is both a course and a mind set. We value the cooperation with industry, organisations and public services highly. Partnerships are reciprocally beneficial. Students and future employers met – education, research and professional life are equally enriched. The students meet guest lecturers, employers at breakfast meetings, go for study visits and learn the dynamics of team work, communications skills, leadership and management from both professionals and their academic leaders.
"Poster exhibition as part of the examination"
It was almost like a research conference at Karlstad Business School, when students from the course Advanced Service Management showed their work in a poster exhibition. The students showed their posters to teachers, researhcers and doctoral students, who were asked to give points on theoretical relevance, design and creativity among other things. The course covers 15 ECTS cr at second cycle level. The students discuss and analyze theoretical concepts in the field of service innovation and how these are used in research and business. Service, customer, value creation, product- and service logic and service innovation are discussed. The students learn models on how to describe, categorize and analyze value creation through services and how the customers and stakeholders themselves create value.
And the experience of producing and showing posters was new and exciting to the students. Evelina Erlandsson and Linus Haaja were positive to the challenge:
- This was a new and exciting way to show our work. Theory and method is one think, but the real challenge was to design the model for a real business. Truly exciting!
Course coordinator was Carolina Camén, senior lecturer in Business Administration and researcher at CTF, Service Research Center
This article was first published at the Swedish website for Karlstad Business School 2017-04-03