- Continuing education is the door that leads to the specialisation that is increasingly necessary to adapt to the new social and business realities
- To strengthen and better focus on continuing education, the UVic has created the Postgraduate School, which takes over from the International Centre for Continuing Education.
- The new offer will include more flexible methodology that will boost multimodality and the presence of online training, and will have the support of the Validation and Accreditation Unit, which will ensure the quality of the training programmes.
- It is vital to strengthen the Postgraduate School at this time for two reasons: the coming demographic decline and the need for 80% of current professionals to retrain in the next five years. Therefore, “the possibilities for growth in this area will be enormous,” said the director of the School, Eduard Prats.
It has been many years since lifelong learning ceased to be something that people did to satisfy their personal interests. Now, it is a pressing need to stay active in an economic world that changes at breakneck speed. From the moment a professional enters the job market, continuing education is the door to the specialisation that is increasingly necessary to adapt to the new social and business realities.
In universities, continuing education is no longer just another way to increase the number of students and thus to obtain more income. It now makes an indispensable contribution to serving citizens by increasing the country’s competitiveness and combating the growing obsolescence of its professionals, regardless of their sector.
Continuous training, a university service for citizens to increase the competitiveness of the country and combat the obsolescence of its professionals
To strengthen and better focus on continuing education, the UVic has created the Postgraduate School, which takes over from the International Centre for Continuing Education. As a result of this change, the new school is on a par with the continuing education centres in other Spanish universities. At the same time, it is the cornerstone of a future centre that must bring together all the continuing education schools of UVic-UCC’s federated centres.
The Postgraduate School is on a par with the continuing education centres of other universities and is the cornerstone of the future continuing education centre of the UVic-UCC federation
Strengthen relations with the surrounding area
The director of the new Postgraduate School, Eduard Prats, is very clear that "UVic has a very important strength as it is a young university and recognized in the rankings," and that what is required now "is to move forward to mark a strategy that allows us to close the gaps that we believe the social and business fabric needs to fill, in the areas in which UVic is a benchmark." He also affirmed that following market needs has so far been a satisfactory strategy "because it has brought us to where we are now, thanks to programmes and solid agreements with leading people and institutions in their fields," but that "it is important to move forward, to make a determined commitment to strengthening the relationship with the business fabric in our environment, and to finding out what type of training the companies and organizations in our natural area of influence need."
"Strengthening the relationship with the business fabric in the surrounding area is one of the main commitments of the new Postgraduate School"
A new methodology based on multimodality
One of the new features of the Postgraduate School’s training offer is that it will be much more dynamic and flexible in every way. Firstly, because it will take place throughout the year, breaking the seasonality that long-term programmes traditionally have, which usually coincide with the start of the academic year. In addition, one training programme could include synchronous and asynchronous sessions, self-corrected assessments and projects that require tutoring. Programmes could be completely online or taught in multimodal format.
Dynamism, flexibility and a boost for multimodality are three of the aspects that will define the new training
It is to be expected that online training will play a prominent role in the programmes promoted by the School, whether they are master’s degree, postgraduate, diploma, specialisation or tailor-made courses. Online training can be introduced at different levels. Some courses will have little presence of online activities. Other training programmes will be offered entirely online, for example, the postgraduate course in Psychosocial and Spiritual Care for People in Situations of Advanced Illness, which has made the leap from face-to-face to online, or the postgraduate course in Place Branding and Strategic Territory Management, which have been digital from the start. "In this way we will be able to reach a much wider target audience, and this will allow us to break barriers and arouse the interest of many more professionals throughout the country," says Prats.
Another new feature is the multimodal programmes that combine online sessions with practical face-to-face sessions. Examples are the master’s degree in Sports Management and Marketing, in which the face-to-face sessions include visits to companies, facilities and sporting events.
With a view to the first quarter of 2023 and following this strategy, the School will launch a fully online specialisation course in Pharmaceutical Marketing and Business Transformation of the Pharmaceutical Sector, which will bring together a group of leading professors in this field and will offer a comprehensive view of the sector, in addition to the knowledge required to build a marketing strategy that takes all stakeholders into account.
Improvement of internal processes
The Postgraduate School is supported by the Validation and Accreditation Unit, which is led by the rector's delegate for Continuing Education, Josep Ayats. This unit ensures that all the studies offered, both those promoted on UVic campuses and those promoted by all the federated entities and affiliated centres of the UVic-UCC, meet the same quality standards.
The Postgraduate School will seek new dynamics with faculties and services to promote new training proposals
In accordance with this guarantee of quality for all the training offered, the School aims to generate new dynamics to promote the newly created training proposals of university faculties and services, which will be evaluated from a strategic and qualitative perspective to be able to incorporate them into the academic offer. Some of these proposals are short training courses linked to long-term programmes "and which will serve as a taster to be able to convince future students of master's degree, postgraduate and specialisation courses," said the director of the School.
A strategic commitment for the future
For Eduard Prats, focusing on enhancing the University’s continuous training makes a lot of sense right now, for two reasons in particular. The first reason is that we are facing a demographic decline that could reduce the influx of students to bachelor’s degree courses. However, according to him, "we will possibly suffer less than other institutions because our size means that we are close to the student body and guarantee a good employability rate."
"In the current context, the opportunities to increase continuing education are enormous," stated Eduard Prats
The second reason is that it is estimated that 80% of professionals who are currently working will have to retrain within five years and, therefore, "the opportunities to increase continuing education will be enormous," he stated. In this respect, the Ministry of Universities has long been calling on the university system to take advantage of the opportunity to become a leading space for the development of this type of training. "We are able to do this well if we are skilled in creating an offer that responds to the real needs of the market. And we are ready for the challenge!", he concluded.