Employability: Smart learning in extracurricular activities for developing college graduates' competencies

Abstract

Nowadays, employers expect college graduates (or simply “graduates”) to be for ready in taking up challenges when they enter into their careers. Most competencies that employers are looking for cannot be learned but can be developed by participating in extracurricular activities. However, planning on participation in extracurricular activities is difficult, given the lack of measurement standards together with their unstructured and non-systematic nature. To provide a smarter way for activity organisers, advisers and students to plan for extracurricular activities, our university has launched the central repository on student development activities system and codified the information about participation in extracurricular activities in a quantified and systematic way. This paper has collected data from three consecutive years from the system, the employers' feedback data and the academic performance data of placement students in the Department of Computer Science. Participation level, with logarithm transformation, had a positive and significant relationship with academic performance. Moreover, the competency developed by most students had a positive relationship with job performance in the placement year of 2019/2020. In this article, we discuss contributions, limitations and future directions.