October 7, 2025 | Pablo de Olavide University (Seville, Spain)
The ‘Dialogues: Higher Education and Employment‘ sessions have commenced this morning with the public activities of the Prodetur Chair in Socioeconomic Development of the Province of Seville. María Ángeles Huete and Rafael Merinero, co-directors of the Chair, together with Laura López de la Cruz, Vice-Rector for Institutional Relations, Continuing Education, and Foundations, have presented a programme focused on the methodology required for monitoring the employability of university students and on strategies to enhance it.
«Generating knowledge and actions that enable greater employability for students is one of the objectives of the Prodetur Chair», stated María Ángeles Huete, who recalled that a significant proportion of students at the Olavide come from the metropolitan area and the province of Seville.
For her part, Laura López de la Cruz highlighted the role of public and private entities «in developing projects from the University that translate into tangible actions improving society», in reference to their key contribution through chairs and continuing education via university microcredentials.
The ‘Dialogues: Higher Education and Employment’ programme has commenced with a roundtable dedicated to the EUROGRADUATE project—in whose forthcoming 2026 edition Spain will participate—and to the methodologies employed, combining registries and surveys at both European and territorial levels as well as on campuses, in the analysis of university employability.
«Training is never superfluous; it is increasingly necessary, so we should not speak of overqualification», stated Amapola Povedano, Director General of Employability and Entrepreneurship at the UPO.
Amapola herself recalled that young people who graduate from university have «greater and better employability». Povedano Díaz introduced the participants in the roundtable: Sandra Fachelli, academic director of the Olavide Employment Observatory; Juan Antonio Hernández, from the Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography; and Beatriz Dacosta, from the National Statistics Institute.
Sandra Fachelli described the work carried out at the Employment Observatory to adapt the EUROGRADUATE survey to the UPO, both in the translation of concepts and in cultural adaptation; this survey will be coordinated in 2026 by the European Higher Education Sector Observatory (EHESO). She thus revealed that the pilot project for Olavide has introduced innovations regarding social origin and the gender perspective. Fachelli called for collaboration between institutions across different territorial scopes, as «the expansion of samples from national and international surveys holds tremendous potential for studying employability in universities».
The sessions continue this afternoon with the roundtable ‘Labour Market Insertion: Employers and the Importance of University Internships’. The Prodetur Chair is funded by the Diputación de Sevilla, and the sessions are supported by the European project INCASI, International Network for Comparative Analysis of Social Inequalities.
Source: Office for the Transfer of Research Results, Diario Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Outreach