EURASHE is a partner in the WEXHE project.
EU countries have experienced a substantial increase in graduate unemployment and a decrease of quality of their employment. European graduates report continuously that they are worried about their careers, while employers voice their concerns over increasing difficulties in finding graduates with matching skills.
Within this context, the WEXHE project responds to the concerns expressed by stakeholders on the shortcomings in the labour market orientation of HE, focusing on the balance between practical and theoretical learning in HE and to mismatches between the skills sets of graduates and the skills they require during early careers.
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In the WEXHE project, enterprises, associations and universities come together to identify and analyse current provision of work experience and entrepreneurship in HE in 7 different European countries.
The team will generate 84 case studies of good practice including all four types of study areas (hard-pure, e.g. natural sciences; soft-pure, e.g. humanities and social sciences; hard-applied, e.g. medicine and soft-applied, e.g. social work, covering internships/work placements, traineeships and entrepreneurship.
Working with practitioners, the project will create 12 replicable models for work experience and entrepreneurship, together with guidance on management, quality assurance, learning outcomes, funding and accreditation. These models will cover and support the 4 study areas and will be tailored to national contexts.
There will be a special emphasis on the Humanities for which the transition to the labour market is least transparent and the number of students is considerable.
The project team has identified three main goals to accomplish:
• to increase the capacity and competences of staff in universities and enterprises to provide high quality work experience and entrepreneurship,
• to support the accreditation of all kinds of work experience through ECTS and effective quality assurance,
• to ensure that the skills needs of employers are understood.The project will review existing policy development and support further policy development in this field.








