SKILLS PROFILES AND EMPLOYABILITY OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND MARKETING GRADUATES OF UNIVERSIDAD CENTROAMERICANA-UCA EL SALVADOR

The increasing economic and financial globalization that has taken place during the first decades of the 21st century has brought about technological, social and economic changes and has introduced us to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The new employment needs of companies require more specialized and flexible professional and training profiles, adapted to the requirements of new communications, service provision and production technologies. These requirements pose one of the great challenges of university training today, ensuring the adequacy of the training received by professionals who leave their classrooms with the skills considered necessary by the new forms of work. For some years now, the number of companies complaining about the lack of workers with certain training profiles and about the shortcomings of university graduates in their profiles has been steadily increasing. This situation forces many companies to implement complementary training actions for recent graduates who are entering their first job. The problem indicates the need to continually update the training programs of the degrees that do not satisfy the needs of the companies, developing the competency profiles of their graduates to improve their employability in the labor market of higher education graduates. The aim of this paper is to define the skills profiles of university graduates in Business Administration and Marketing from the perspective of employers and graduates. From these, it will be possible to (1) determine the gap that exists between the skills profiles that companies need and hire and the skills profiles that university graduates possess; (2) obtain a classification of the skills based on the greater or lesser importance that companies give them to selecting and hiring university graduates; and (3) propose a measure of the employability of university graduates. Considering previous work and research (Tuning Europe, 2004; Tuning Latin America, 2007; Alfa Tuning Latin America, 2013; Vaquerano, Morales, Alvarado, Flores y Castro, 2017), two questionnaires were prepared and administered to define the skills profiles (13) of the two groups involved, students in their final academic year and recent graduates, and employers and managers of companies that hire university graduates. The results obtained indicate the skills of the profile that present greater and lesser gaps and which are considered more or less important by employers, and therefore, influence more or less in the employability of the university graduate. Keywords: Skills, Labour Market, Employability, Under-graduate Education.