The implementation of the European Space for Higher Education in 2009 provides the opportunity to universities to adapt and reduce the gap between their degrees contents and the labour market’s demand.

The Bologna Declaration (1999) fixes what competences students have to develop and achieve to get their degrees for all European higher education system. Each university can specify and choose those competences that best fits with the labour market where the graduate students will apply for a job.

In order to better design the new degrees, the Group of Educational Innovation in Learning Tools in Businesses Management (GIDEA) from the University of Barcelona (UB) is realizing a survey to a sample of representative companies of Catalan market to know what competences companies expect and need from graduate students of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration.

The survey was send to 40 companies and by now 27 companies have answered it. A second mailing has been done. The companies from the sample are representative companies of the Catalan market, operating in Barcelona and they contract a great number of students from the faculty to work with them during the degree or as graduate students.

The questionnaire is divided into 2 types of competences according to the Tuning Project (2000): generic and specific. The interviewees were asked to value each competence using a Likert scale 1-5. A total of 34 generic and 23 specific competences were valued. For generic competences, two general degrees were valued: business and economy and for specific competences, 6 degrees: general economy, business administration, finances and assurance, commercialization and marketing, accounting and fiscality and real estate studies.

The results from the initial descriptive analysis show what degrees are best valued by companies in the sample and what competences are more demand from organizations. The mean by generics is higher for business than for economy, with a difference of 10 percentage points. Taking into account the specific competences, the degree with a higher punctuation is business administration and the second is commercialization and marketing.

The best valued generic competences are in instrumentals the capacity for planning and management and for analysis and synthesis, in personals are team work and ethical commitment and in systemic are capacity to adapt to new situations and initiative and entrepreneurial spirit. For specific competences, in transversal the most important are ability to manage time in changing circumstances and capacity for interpret and adapt to environment evolution. In functional the most important are the ability to interpret accounting and financial information to decision making and using cost information to plan, control and decision making.

The study is still on process, but the preliminary results allow faculty managers knowing what companies are demanding from graduate students and are using this information to design the new degrees. Once all questionnaires will be received, the results will be compared with other Spanish studies in order to find synergies to best prepare the student to succeed in the labour market.