Students’ perception of competences development in an undergraduate university environment R. Gallo-Martínez*, M.C. Alarcón-del-Amo* * Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Abstract: The pressure for universities to generate employable graduates requires the implementation of different ways of managing the learning process. Course programmes have thus been adapted to the new framework where skills and competences development are to be the resulting outcomes of students’ stay at university. On-going evaluation systems, in combination with the selection of specific activities, help professors plan for the achievement of this objective. The study carried out in a group of 3 rd year Marketing students of Business and Management shows that students identify different activities as both adequate for and effective in competences development. The authors conclude that embedding competences development in course programming is a useful and helpful tool for course management that is well accepted and valued by students. Keywords: Learning process; competences development; course programming Introduction Professionals at all levels of education, whether primary, secondary or terciary (higher) education, living in increasingly knowledge-based societies such as the European Union member countries, do not question the need to help students develop skills and competences allowing them to adequately enter the labor market (EACEA, 2014), which is to say, education, specially higher education, should increase graduates employability (EACEA, 2012). However, employability is not only a necessary goal of higher education; it is also a “complex concept encompassing many definitions and approaches” (EACEA, 2014, p. 61). In fact, there seem to be two main approaches to help graduates achieve the adequate degree of employability: the employment-centred approach, which is related to increasing “graduates chances of finding employment soon after graduation” (EACEA, 2014, p. 63). Universities develop and implement programmes addressed towards helping students entry into the labor market; including practical training in study programmes, developing seminars about specific issues such as preparing C.V. and job interviews, creating placement offices, etc. (EACEA, 2014). The other approach is the competences-centred one, where the role of higher education is “to develop the skills and competences of graduates necessary to find a job” (EACEA, 2014, p. 64), furthermore, “students’ knowledge, skills and competences are expressed as the learning outcomes of the education process” (EACEA, 2010, p. 22). A learning outcome is understood to be a statement “of what a learner is expected to know, understand and/or be able to demonstrate at the end of a period of learning” (Adam, 2006), learning outcomes “chief advantage is the clarity and precision they bring to any curriculum development process” (Adam, 2006). The competences-centred approach requires that education professionals, in this case higher/terciary education professors, understand their job to be student centred. Not a small challenge. According to the Eurydice Report: The European Higher Education Area in 2012 “genuine student-centred learning is (…) difficult to integrate into everyday higher education reality. It should comprise actions that ensure that students learn how to think critically, participate in all kinds of academic life and are given more 1st International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’15 Universitat Politècnica de València, València, 2015 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd15.2015.371 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 34