Don’t just take a job, create a job

CBS launches new course for jobless graduates

Unemployment, benefits and job search seminars are part of the lives of many newly graduated academics. The Danish government wishes to remedy the situation, and the universities therefore offer unemployed students an extra semester, where they will get the competences demanded by the corporate sector.

Direct contact with employers

On 15 March 2010, CBS is introducing the course 'Erhvervsinnovation’ (corporate innovation). According to Associate Professor and Course Coordinator Henrik Herlau, it is no use offering students yet another semester focused on architecture, Danish or the like, which they already have experience with from their studies. Instead, they are to get direct contact to their future employers.

- The course ensures that the graduates will not be surprised when they move into the corporate sector and to their horror discover that the problems are not at all like in the textbooks. Their professionalism is tested, and at the same time they provide businesses with the knowledge needed to make it through the crisis and the increasing international competitiveness, says Henrik Herlau.

From employee to job creator

He believes that the road to a job is paved with theory transformed into practical experience – a method that has proved very successful on previous occasions. He emphasises that the course is not an entrepreneurial course where the traditional entrepreneurial recipe is followed, i.e. a good idea and a ready business plan.

- Times of crisis are not ideal for new innovations. The corporate sector needs employees that are able to manage the innovation already taking place in the businesses, and this is what the graduates need to exploit. They have to create their jobs, not just take the jobs, says Henrik Herlau.

Apprenticeship graduates

The course offers the students group work where the graduates do not act as consultants. Instead they focus on the tasks that the businesses do not have the knowledge/resources for, but which are needed in order to make decisions. The students are taught practical management of and participation in innovation processes.

- This competency is in high demand. Through a kind of apprenticeship, the student gets the qualifications to document practical competences as regards transforming the interdisciplinarity of the university into practice through disciplined management. The former students are prepared for the ‘real world’, says Henrik Herlau, and he emphasises that, in the long run, the result of this approach is often increased recruitment in the corporate sector.

Read the entire press release in the attached document (in Danish only)