Soft skills – the ability to manage yourself, manage others, and the tasks you perform – are increasingly seen as essential for success in the labour market. Traditionally, soft skills have been considered transversal competences, i.e., competences required in a wide range of occupations and activities. However, there is little evidence to assess the extent to which this is true. This article presents evidence of the degree of transferability and transversality of soft skills in the labour market using data from 1.7 million online job offers in Catalonia. This data covers a broad segment of the labour market and captures the demand for different skills from companies with a high level of granularity. Our results indicate that soft skills are not highly transversal, except for a small subset of broadly demanded and transferable skills. Our results point to the need to stop treating the terms soft skills and transversal skills as synonyms. On the contrary, soft skills should be considered specific skills, the need for which and their relevance vary significantly between different occupations and sectors. Identifying these specific competence needs and prioritizing their teaching will be essential to building an effective and prepared workforce.

The analysis of previous industrial revolutions has shown that the consequences of technological innovations on employment depend on the degree of complementarity between new technologies and workers. So far, this complementarity has clearly benefited the most qualified workers (skill-biased technological change); however, in the current context, recent developments in generative artificial intelligence could change this situation. This article aims to briefly present the current state of affairs regarding this subject based on a bibliographic review of recent academic works. The main conclusion is that the available evidence on the effects of artificial intelligence on employment does not show any significant variation in relation to previous technological changes. However, if AI-based technologies continue to develop and adapt to new tasks, we can expect their effects to be much more disruptive than in the past, although it is too early to tell. In any case, it is essential that educational systems are flexible enough to cope with these changes and respond adequately to the new needs of the labour market.

Digitization (action by which analogue processes, procedures, and objects are converted to digital format) can lead to the internal transformation of companies’ business models, strategies, processes, and procedures, which we generally call digital transformation.

This digital transformation, or the ability to carry it out, could be seen as a competitive advantage. If we take the banking sector as an example and, within it, we differentiate purely digital players and compare them to traditional players, we could conclude that the competitive advantage is not just about digitization and digital transformation of the former, but a much broader positioning that encompasses the company’s attitude towards innovation – called innovation orientation –, of which one of its results would be, for example, digitization and subsequent digital transformation.

This article aims to identify the key characteristics of purely digital players when compared to their traditional competitors in relation to innovation orientation and what differential characteristics have helped them achieve that level of digitization and digital transformation – understood as a result of such innovation orientation – successfully.

After the increase in teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have seen the potential of this way of working and wish to initiate or advance its implementation in a planned way. To this end, it may be useful to develop the capacity of their managers or professionals to be smart working agents, in order to promote the implementation of a form of flexible teleworking that makes good use of technological tools and that favours the best working conditions. After defining smart working, this article presents a competency framework for the role of a smart working agent focused on three key competencies: understanding the context, facilitating implementation, and leading in a digital environment.

Due to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and its Economic and Business Studies, three professors in the field of Finance from the institute perform an analysis of the evolution of the financial function and a projection of future scenarios in order to identify challenges and opportunities. Joan Llobet introduces the topic based on an academic vision that has adapted to the substantial changes that have occurred and which takes on the challenge of facing the changes still to come. On the other hand is the article by Jorge M. Uribe, a compilation of the most important events of the past 25 years in order to understand how the financial field is currently structured. Through his experience, we will see how concrete aspects evolve (valuation of assets, quantitative risk management, etc.) in order to profile what they are like today. Finally, Àngels Fitó describes the current context of the financial field, establishing its conditioning factors and future direction.

Although Wikipedia is an information source used extensively by students at all academic levels, it is hard to find higher education courses in which Wikipedia has a formal role in the learning process. Using the principal results of the Wiki4HE project as its foundation, this article briefly describes key factors that influence the decisions of academic staff regarding the use of Wikipedia in their teaching. In addition to technological factors relating to the user-friendliness and utility of the work platform this encyclopaedia provides, it also examines the academic and professional factors that have a greater influence: the perceived quality of Wikipedia, its social image, the 2.0 profile of academic staff and their collaborative attitudes, and institutional recognition of this resource.

The article has two main objectives: the first is to highlight the importance of the opinions academic colleagues have of Wikipedia, and the influence this has on decisions to use the encyclopaedia actively in teaching; the second is to show how this decision could be affected by access to a guide to good practice, one that systematically brought together the experiences of other academic staff and enabled an improvement in Wikipedia's social image.

UOC lecturer Albert Sangrà is considered a leading international expert on the use of information and communication technologies in education and training. In this interview, he reflects on key aspects of e-learning, including its conceptual foundation, modalities and influence on traditional campus-based universities. Dr Sangrà also addresses topical issues in this area, such as the development of massive open online courses (MOOC), development and assessment of competences in virtual environments, application of e-learning in companies, and collaboration between business and universities. The main conclusion drawn in the interview is that institutions that opt to focus on e-learning, whether or not they are universities, should do so in a strategic way. They also need to understand that e-learning is not just a matter of content development: it requires a specific teaching methodology and long-term planning. Also, despite the distance that has grown between companies and universities recently, he thinks they have no choice but to work together in this area.

This paper is part of the study on the validity, after a decade, of the transversal competences included in the design of the new degrees of the EHEA. It is based on a survey conducted among students, graduates and employers and on depth interviews with four CEOs of head hunters companies involved in the area of administration and management. The main resulting views are: there is a general consensus in considering the evaluation of all transversal competences as the axis of selection processes. Experts agree with considering both the teamwork and the development of international skills as predominant. They also show skepticism about the role of universities in the development of these abilities. Finally, they were particularly receptive to the importance of online learning, not only because of its advantages in terms of accessibility and compatibility with the profession, but also because it includes the development of skills, such as autonomy, the ability to critically analyze information, to organize work and for time management

Business simulations or business games are increasingly used in classrooms around the world. This paper presents some concepts related to the growing use of gamification in the
classroom and proposes a terminology to help ensure their dissemination in a clear manner. The main advantages of the use of serious games in a teaching environment are presented in the results of an investigation that permanently studies the impact of the use of business simulations in the skills of the participants. The main advantages of the use of serious games in an educational environment are the ability to extend and deepen the knowledge acquired by participants through problem solving and decision making in real time, without affecting decisions or any critical key resources, and give more confidence to the participants to make critical decisions in the future. In the coming years, we will see an extension of the process of gamification and the use of simulators in teaching environments.