University of Groningen graduates highly valued by labour market

A degree certificate from the University of Groningen is of great value to graduates looking for a job with one of the major enterprises. That has been revealed by the 2012 Global Employability Survey published on 24 October by the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

The University of Groningen is in 81st place in the survey. That means the University is the second Dutch university on this ranking list of 150 universities in America, Asia and Europe, after the Erasmus University Rotterdam (69th place).

The research for the list was conducted by two firms specialized in HRM work, the French consultancy bureau Emerging and the German research institute Trendence. Both questioned several thousand staff and management of companies in twenty countries where they keep note of which universities supply them with the ideal young candidates.

American universities like Harvard, Yale and MIT have very high scores, as do Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. Chinese universities such as Peking University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are referred to in the research as ‘emerging’. In recent years they have been making significant progress towards the upper regions.

The research reveals that major enterprises attach a lot of importance to soft skills, for example being able to deal with cultural differences, communication skills, the ability to work in teams and creativity. According to President of the Board of the University of Groningen Sibrand Poppema, studying at his university provides an excellent grounding: ‘And in the future the University of Groningen will concentrate even more on providing its students with a broad, international training, as well as pay more attention to entrepreneurship.’

See: 2012 Global Employability Survey and New York Times