Our in-depth needs analysis seeks to develop a detailed professional profile for graduates of linguistics and language-related courses, with the associated learning objectives (knowledge, skills and competences), typical tasks and responsibilities. Preliminary findings already point to the necessity for language and linguistics students to develop a new skill set and a new mind frame to meet the societal and professional challenges lying ahead.

Against this backdrop, our needs analysis is divided into two parts. The first one comprises a series of surveys aiming to map competences and skills currently covered in BA and MA programmes in languages and linguistics, as well as market demands targeting graduates in these fields. Activities carried out within this part consist, on the one hand, of surveys of existing languages/linguistics curricula offered by European higher education institutions, and a systematic review of the literature on the integration of digital and analytical skills in humanities courses. On the other hand, it includes a corpus-based analysis of job posts on LinkedIn and similar online employment-oriented platforms, and the administration of targeted surveys to representatives of companies that hire linguists/language specialists in the partner countries. In the second part, follow-up focus group interviews with selected stakeholders aim at further refining and clarifying the insights obtained, particularly as concerns future-proofing higher and continuing education in the domain of language/linguistics.

Our needs analysis targets three groups of beneficiaries. For one, language and linguistics students who look to expand on or update their skillset will benefit from a clearer understanding of the expectations of the world of work, which translates into knowing what they should learn, but also knowing how to apply existing knowledge, skills and competences to novel work requirements. Then, employers from digital and data intensive sectors, who currently fail to identify language and linguistics graduates as a target talent pool for their business, will benefit from the co-construction and dissemination of a specific job profile with associated competences, skills and knowledge. Finally, the perception of academic interlocutors (lecturers, degree coordinators, heads of schools), who often show resistance toward scientific content in a humanities curriculum, is bound to be affected by solidly collected data about the employment potential for language and linguistics students in digital sectors, and by international best practices in this field. 

While the benefits of research-based teaching are increasingly being recognised, its practical aspects still need to be elaborated.For this intellectual output, the UPSKILLS partners are documenting the steps needed for incorporating ongoing research into teaching, focusing not only on academic and industry-based research, but also on the integration of research infrastructures into teaching. In this regard, our guidelines seek to address a wide array of issues ranging from didactic (how to define students’ assignments in order to maximise acquisition of new skills while avoiding non-educative labour) to practical (how to use appropriate research infrastructure).

More specifically, this intellectual output includes syllabi and descriptions of revamped modules in language-related subjects, which are designed to combine research questions and data analysis from actual research (including data collection) with the dedicated learning objectives and content developed under intellectual output 3. Each module is  organised around a research problem, where the students will acquire and actively apply analytic skills on actual data; depending then on the nature of the problem, certain modules will involve students’ engagement with the acquisition of data (corpus-building, corpus research, experimentation), while others will target a particular conceptual domain (e.g. morphological paradigms).

This intellectual output seeks to assist teaching staff in offering more meaningful assignments, which will evolve together with the topics and standards of ongoing research, as well as students in gaining experience and skills more in tune with the contemporary work requirements. In this respect, students will be able to experience the authentic collaborative research process – from the data-gathering to the analysis phase – before graduating and taking up an actual job.