Enhancing the Quality of University Career Services in Taiwan: Perceptions of University Alumni

An adequate supply of a high quality labor force is crucial for national economic and social well-being; consequently, nations worldwide have placed significant emphasis on university graduate employability. Nonetheless, in Taiwan, a mismatch between knowledge acquired in universities and competences required by the job market has dramatically encumbered the supply of a high quality labor force. Thus, this research endeavored to determine the major career services that should be offered in higher educational institutions to alleviate the aforementioned human resource problems. The analytic hierarchy process was adopted as the major instrument for calculating the relative importance of each career service task, and 169 university alumni working in four major career fields participated in this research. The results indicated that participants from different career fields and who graduated from different colleges at different times have very different opinions of job service requests; therefore, universities should seriously consider the differences among students and provide the necessary services for each student in line with his/her particular requests. Moreover, although almost all participants agreed that sharpening students' job-search and interview skills was crucial in assisting students to find their first jobs, this service was extremely insufficient in universities, and universities thus have to place particular emphasis on this task in the future.