Samenvatting

Educational programs in general have to be able to adequately adapt and implement changes when required. Generally, due to either changing demands from the working field or when the quality of the program needs to be amended, the study program needs to be further optimized.
The central theme of this report is career preparation and how this is organized. European Studies as a study program has a very generalist approach which could contribute to a vaguely defined working field and thus possibly confused students about their future careers. In continuance, the various career preparing facilities and staff within The Hague University as well as within the European Studies program should be effectively contributing to the preparation of a European Studies student's career.
On behalf of the European Studies management team explorative research has been conducted in order to answer the main research question: "How could the career preparation of ES4 students at The Hague University be (further) optimized by the European Studies management team?"
In order to answer this main research question, first of all, desk research through literature and internet sources has been executed to gather information on basic theory regarding career preparation and to gather information about the current situation of all the stakeholders involved in career preparation. These stakeholders are divided into three main levels: on central level ('hogeschool breed'), on program level (regarding ES), and on student level (ES students and ES alumni). All of their roles in and possible contributions to career preparation will be examined.
Secondly, field research through in-depth interviews has been executed to gather feedback on the information found through desk research and to gain insight on perspectives of both representatives of the stakeholders and of ES students and ES alumni. The research results have been analyzed in a gap analysis and the following could be concluded.
Based on the theory on motivation key features for a student to become motivated are clearly defined final goals, a structured path set out to achieve these goals, and that a clear overview of this process is provided. Various stakeholders involved in the career preparation are charged with providing the student with these key features, preferably in the right and complete order. It is, however, interesting to discover that the majority of the stakeholders are occupied with solely one feature instead of all three. To clarify, one stakeholder could be focused on providing a structured path without defining final goals (content problem), while another stakeholder could be focused on a structured path without providing a clear overview of the process (coordination problem). Though sometimes effective, it is not always clear how the various stakeholders are connected to each other while they are all concerned with career preparation. On top of that, the outcomes of their efforts are not sufficiently visible to students (communication problem). The conclusions per stakeholder are further explained in section 5.1.
The most important recommendations for the ES management team would be to create a career guideline for students, offer a separate course devoted to career preparation, implement LinkedIn into the ES program, and structure an alumni policy. The recommendations are further explained in section 5.2. and are categorized in the following order: what needs to be improved, what could be further improved, and what is going well.