Working life perspective

The programme is useful and prepares students for an ever-changing working life.

The programme offers enough breadth to allow doctoral students to sufficiently prepare themselves for both an academic career and a career outside academia. As mentioned in the self-evaluation, architecture is by nature transdisciplinary, strongly connected to practice and always pushed forward by the demands of society. Several doctoral projects deal with societal problems and needs such as healthcare architecture and senior housing. Several of the doctoral students have ongoing positions outside academia and some are also publicly funded and therefore fit into the category of applied research. A number of the teachers and professors are active in professional practices and develop and maintain good contacts with different actors within research, development and practice. Several of the doctoral students also have a background in practice or in teaching.

Articles are published in different types of non-academic publications such as daily newspapers and industry specific magazines.

The higher education institution offers courses that are important for a professional career, such as courses in communication, teaching, project planning, leadership and entrepreneurship.

The programme's design and teaching/learning activities are systematically followed up to ensure that it is useful and prepares for working life. The results of the follow-up are translated, when necessary, into actions for quality improvement, and feedback is given to relevant stakeholders.

The follow-up system in place to ensure that the doctoral students achieve the qualitative targets of the programme also ensures that the doctoral students are prepared for working life. The assessment panel, however, notes the following weaknesses relating to the systematic follow-up. The self-evaluation mentions the ResArc survey of alumni doctoral students carried out in 2014. This survey was rather general, and the statistics quoted do not seem to refer specifically to results from the higher education institution but rather to ResArc as a whole. It is not clear how progress of alumni from the higher education institution is followed up and if the higher education institution considers the alumni experience or uses it to inform its approach. According to the operational and strategic staff interviews, organising alumni activities on a more formal level is not prioritised and the assessment panel sees this as a potential area of improvement in the systematic work on follow-up.

The assessment panel emphasises the good example of the Generic and Transferrable Skills courses on working life preparation, which deserves special notice and could act as an example for other third-cycle programmes.

In the overall assessment, the working life perspective is deemed to be satisfactory.