Being Professional

From studying to the professional world

We gain great satisfaction in the fact that in every lecture you learn more about your passion, but we take even more pleasure from the fact that you can put what you know into practice and show the world how professional you are. At the CEU Cardenal Herrera University, our goal is to enable our students to graduate in possession of a complete professional profile, based on values, competences and attitudes. This will help to ensure that your entry into the labour market is a resounding success.

In addition, we can provide you with documentary evidence of what makes you different: a personalized certificate to complement your CV to help you make the leap into the professional world while standing out from the other candidates.

What employability means for us

Employability has been defined by the European Commission as a “combination of factors which allow individuals to get a job, stay employed and progress during their career” (European Commission, 2011). This combination of factors represents a key part of the strategy of the CEU Cardenal Herrera University, as this lies behind our desire to ensure our students and alumni have a complete professional profile, based on values, competences and attitudes.

We seek to boost our graduates’ employability by cultivating the value of being different, which, when combined with sound knowledge, will enable them to develop the right competences. These competences will allow our graduates to find a job, continue to grow and finally become distinguished and prestigious professionals within their field. They will be professionals with the skills to be able to drive their career forward, to reinvent the kind of job they have, and even to create employment. .

For this purpose, we provide our students with opportunities to undertake voluntary external practical training, enabling them to gain their first taste of a working environment, to establish contact with real companies, to experience companies’ selection and training processes, and to develop their soft skills. With the commitment of the University and those involved, our students and graduates are more competitive and have a greater chance of success in the job market.

Certificate of Competences

One of our innovations has been to create a new resource for our students to help them stand out from other graduates, find their first job, continue to grow professionally and, if they wish, start their own business. To do this, we have determined a unique set of competences which we believe can differentiate an excellent professional from a good one.

We know that the difference between having studied Medicine, Architecture or Veterinary Medicine and being a doctor, architect or veterinarian are the skills that the latter possess. Therefore, we have set ourselves the goal of ensuring our graduates obtain the full range of competences that they need to be the professionals they have always wanted to be.

On graduation, our students can receive a personalized Certificate from the University, which will record the complete set of competences that they have acquired while at the University.

You can see a sample version of the Certificate of Competences here:

The Certificate of Competences is structured as follows:

The skills specific to the study program
Fundamental skills
- Languages and internationalization
- Information and IT
- Research
Occupational social skills
- Practical training: compulsory and voluntary
- Experience at the University
  - Collaboration grants
  - Student interns
  - Internal facilities: clinics, radio, music production, television production, newspaper, school, pharmaceutical practical room, animal husbandry unit, professional services, etc.
Soft skills developed at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University)
- Volunteering and ethical commitment
- University life
- Personal skills
  - Self-awareness and personal development
  - Interpersonal and social skills
  - Adaptation to and integration into teams
  - Planning for the future and innovation

Go beyond your CV: the Certificate will be of great value to those that know that knowledge is useful, but know-how, willpower and ability is even better.

Catalogue of Competences

Students can develop their range of competences year on year during their Bachelor’s Degree. For this reason, each academic year has its own Catalogue of Competences which are verifiable by the University. Students can periodically check their draft Certificate to ensure that it records all the Competences they have acquired.

Catalogues

2015-2016

2016-2017

2017-2018

How to obtain your Certificate of Competences

Complete your Bachelor’s Degree Studies at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University. The Certificate is exclusive to our students.
Request your Certificate via the student intranet. Bachelor’s Degree students can do this via the virtual Secretary’s Office (Secretaría Virtual) on the intranet. The University will undertake all the necessary checks and then create the personalized document for the student, which will be emailed to them. To facilitate this process, it is important that students check their draft Certificate each year to ensure that it records all the competences that they have acquired.

Job bank and career guidance

Go to your Career Center >>

We can help you draw up your CV and enhance your candidacy during selection processes. Make an appointment with empleo@uchceu.es

We help to build your own future

Being an entrepreneur is an attitude. If you have the desire to take your destiny into your own hands and have the idea of creating your own company at the back of your mind, our CEU Emprende department can help you design and develop your project. After all, when you finish your studies you have two options: either you work for someone, or you design your future your way.

Objectives

Being an entrepreneur is an attitude. And you can learn how to be an entrepreneur.

We can help you plan and develop your project – and to launch it.

CEU Emprende seeks to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of our students and alumni. Even before any business ideas crystallize, we try to develop their creativity, thinking, innovation and other skills that they will need to bring real value to any organization and develop their own projects.

CEU Emprende trains and supports future entrepreneurs.

Each Faculty has an Entrepreneurial Tutor who you can speak to.

The objectives of CEU Emprende are:

To encourage and enhance business creativity
To help students and alumni develop their personal projects
To enable them to gain the skills and abilities possessed by successful entrepreneurs
To create and launch real business projects
To help students make contact with experts and active businesspeople who can provide advice for these projects

In short, we wish to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of our students.

coordinator Cristina Ventura
ceuemprende@uchceu.es

Finding work before graduation

She’s currently in the 4th year of our dual degree in Business Administration and Marketing, the final stage of her time at CEU. An enriching challenge, undoubtedly, but the best is yet to come: once she graduates, she will join Deloitte. Her name is Cristina Velilla and she has told us how it all happened: "I was interested in doing a placement at one of the Big Four and saw that Deloitte offered the opportunity to join their Deloitte Summer Experience, to enjoy a week learning how they do things in Madrid, so I applied. I was one of the 100 Spanish students selected, out of the 16,000 that applied. Once there, we attended classes on auditing, risks, financial systems – whatever we were most interested in – and then we had to resolve case studies in groups. During the classes, there were two or three HR people assessing us. In September I received an email from Deloitte offering me an interview. It went well and now I can join their team as soon as I finish my studies at CEU."

As part of her complementary training at the University, Cristina undertook placements in the UK, and in Spain, in the financial department of the bank BBVA. She also smiled as she remembered another part of her time at CEU: "Last year I took part in an international marketing competition called Markstrat, which is organized by several universities. I was lucky enough to represent CEU, with the support of my lecturers.”

A journalist and an entrepreneur

Pilar studied journalism at CEU and now she’s known as "the low-cost queen" – La Reina del Low Cost is the name of her blog, which has more than 7,500 followers. And she has five times more followers on Facebook!

As well as writing for her La Reina del Low Cost blog, Pilar is also a reporter and presenter on Toma nota, a program on the Decasa TV channel. “There’s no easy path to doing what you love as a job. You have to strive to find your niche and work hard for it,” she says.

“When I told my parents that I was going to study Journalism,” she says on her blog, “they spent two years trying to convince me to study Law or Business. Then came the 'Fotolog era', then Tuenti and then Facebook... And they spent all day telling me to leave my computer alone and start studying.”

Today, Pilar earns her living from her own journalism and the content she generates on social media. There’s only one conclusion to take from this: fight for your dreams, in spite of all the obstacles and naysayers. Start up your own business and carve out your own story.

Now, Pilar is constantly on the move, shuttling between Alicante and Madrid and onto Barcelona. In a few months she will embark on a new adventure in Cancún.