In the last fifty years, transitions from university to work have become more difficult for young people, as reflected by longer periods of unemployment, job mismatches, and diversified pathways (Allen & vanDer Velden, 2007). The content of the learning objectives connected to the education and training systems, is changing, thus reflecting specific global priorities. A conclusive example is indicator 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals – according to which, by 2030, all graduates will acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to promote sustainable development. These strongly suggest that education and training systems should equip learners with skills such as problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking and communication. The focus on these "21st century goals" is visible in education, in general, and curriculum reforms, in particular, and has been promoted by global discussions about the changing needs of work and society as a whole.

These tendencies imposed a consistent debate, with philosophical nuances, related to the identity, roles and missions of the contemporary university. In this context, the controversies generated between utilitarian approaches and those with a more critical orientation were numerous and sometimes intense, generating resistance or producing transformations of principles. The central point of the debates was, explicitly or implicitly, the influence that the labor market should have on the mission of higher education and, of course, on its development agenda for a certain social and economic context (Rego et al, 2022). Such a controversy, in a post-industrial era and a growing knowledge economy, imposes answers to the question regarding the association between higher education and graduate employability (OECD, World Economic Forum, etc.). It should come as no surprise that the European Union, through the Bologna process, has prioritized both the competence-centered approach and employability in its higher education policies, supporting a line of research whose basic premise is to provide the theoretical basis and, wherever possible, to empirically validate the employability skills of university graduates (Rego & al, 2022).

The main concept is the term "21st century skills", that denotes a combination of skills that are important in a modern society and workforce, (Ercikan & Oliveri, 2016). The terms "transferable" (UNESCO, 2012) or "transversal" skills encompass some of the same skills that can be applied in multiple situations, as opposed to technical professional skills that are specific to certain occupations. In a world facing rapid technological and social change, this transversality/transferability is seen as increasingly important, as facilitating transition towards work (Kearns, 2001). 

In our research project, we aim at doing a mapping exercise and understand the way transversal competencies are conceptualized in the curricular documents of three bachelor study programs, in the University of Bucharest, a public, large university from Eastern Europe: educational sciences / pedagogy, teacher training education and physics. In this sense, we identify the transversal skills already present in the study programs, but also those that are omitted, by referring to a competence framework developed by the research team based on a rigorous analysis of the literature. Our main research questions were: what sets of transversal competencies are in use in the curricular documents analyzed; what  transversal competencies are present in different study programs and disciplines; what issues can we identify by analyzing transversal competencies, that are relevant to higher education and could be explored in next phases of our research. The finality of our study is curricular and practice change through the integration of transversal skills in the programs in the field of education and sciences, but also contribution to the international debate regarding transversal skills,  as  Hart et al (2021) emphasized that the concept is still understood in different and contradictory ways. 

We designed a study, developed in multiple phases. First, we reviewed the scientific literature, but also the national and international policy documents in the domain (OCDE, 1997; EC, 2018; Sala et al, 2020; OECD, 2019; Hart et al, 2021; UNESCO, 2015). Second, we did a qualitative curricular analysis, with the aim of mapping transversal competencies. A third and maybe a fourth phase will be developed to further investigate the issue of transversal competencies including benchmarking, using surveys and interviews for students and university professors. Both analyses had their specific results and were further used together. Based on the literature review of the policy documents we developed a transversal competencies framework - Mind the gap, that we further used in the qualitative content analyses of the university curriculum. At the same time, we have to take into consideration that doing this type of research has its critical points. Sumision & Goodfellow (2004) mentioned the theoretical characteristics of the concept of "transversal competence" - vague character, lack of methodological rigor in the development of the multitude of lists of competences or the lack of evidence showing the transferable nature of the respective skills - or to the relationship between the formation process of these skills and the context in which they are formed. Our research project addressed the first criticism, by rigorously reviewing existing competencies frameworks and integrating them with the results from our own analyses. For the curricular analysis, we employed the syllabi documents from three bachelor study programs, in a large public university from Eastern Europe: Educational Sciences with the Pedagogy/ Educational sciences programme - 46 syllabi, Pedagogy of primary and preschool education - 50 syllabi, and Physics with the Physics specialization - 34 syllabi. Each syllabi corresponds to a specific discipline of study. The analysis covered disciplines from three years of study. The documents - syllabi - allowed the analysis of transversal skills that are mentioned explicitly in the document. For the analyses, we used the MaxQDA program. We carried out an inductive-deductive coding of each competence, using general categories, which in turn we organized using the Mind the Gap taxonomy, previously developed. This stage was followed by a deductive approach, testing the proposed taxonomy, theoretically grounded in order to be able to validate or develop its structure based on concrete data. Thus we pursued an approach that would not be constrained by already existing taxonomies in order to capture specificities or new elements.

By analyzing the syllabi, we conceptualized 31 transversal competencies that we further organized into five general domains: personal and self-management competencies; social and communication competencies; digital competencies; learning and innovation competencies; life and career competencies. All these were further analyzed in relation to each study programme, discipline, study year or number of credits. The analysis gives us an image of: the five domains of competence; the intersection of study programmes regarding transversal competencies, but also the specifics of each programme; the extent to which the transversal competencies appear in each programme and the number of disciplines that aim to form different transversal competences; analysis of the weight of domain of competencies by years of study. The analysis carried out allowed us to understand the diverse way transversal competencies are conceptualized and comparing this with other ways of describing and defining them, present at the international and European level. In this way, a number of competencies were enriched, in relation to what we had originally proposed in our framework. For example, in the field of skills for life and career, the analysis added what we called "involvement in institutional development, advocacy, lobbying" or "the practitioner involved in public policies" or ethics / responsibility and tolerance, interculturality. In the area of ​​digital skills, our analysis emphasized information and data literacy skills, with a focus on knowledge and information management. In the next phase of the research we plan to refine the competence framework, undertake a benchmarking process that would allow a means to support their development and evaluation in different faculties from our university while using surveys and interviews with students and academic staff from the programmes of study, to produce more detailed data about the way transversal skills are understood, but also indirect auto-evaluations regarding students' level of transversal skills.

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