Replicating enterprise environment using Office 365 to enhance graduates’ employability

Abstract

The need of faster insertion of graduates into labor market and enhancing professional and soft skills of graduates required by employees, conduct to new learning method necessity. Starting from stated foreseen of Europe 2020 strategy, creativity, entrepreneurship and intensive use of ICT should be enhanced soon to all academic levels. Also, the entrepreneurs require that graduates to have strong organizational knowledge, to quickly integrate into company’ business processes. The traditional assessment of students implies an individual form, team assessment being avoided to be sure of each individual contribution. Also, the future Industry 4.0 implementations will ask for interdisciplinary skills regarding ICT use and specific digital workflows. The proposed enterprise environment replication uses ERP as backbone of IT infrastructure and Office 365 as business workflow tool management. The experience in using ERP as laboratory IT infrastructure for multiple subjects of academic curriculum of the same academic program showed that graduates could focus on internal business process and documents flow rather than learning how to use the software. The Office 365 is used to experience internal workflow of companies, implemented on existent tenants. To enhance the entrepreneurship and innovation, the learning method is completed with simulated enterprise specific activities.