Part-time schedule, balanced workload and dynamic teaching : the entire programme is organized on a part-time basis to encourage students already involved in a professional situation to join. At the Institute of Labour Sciences, the teaching methods used have always made extensive use of many different kinds of training methods which put students firmly at the centre of their own learning, whilst taking account of theoretical and practical perspectives : individual and group work, reading, case studies, observations and empirical analyses etc. This requires special attention to be paid to the workload since an excessive amount of work and examinations may prevent students from actively taking responsibility for their learning, especially if they are trying to combine their studies with a job. Each semester, the academic secretary, together with student representatives and the Institute office, has the task of coordinating the overall workload.
Multidisciplinary approach : the multidisciplinary nature of the training is not only reflected in courses relating to different disciplines, but also in the way that the disciplines are integrated together in the Introduction to Labour Sciences course and the Multidisciplinary Seminar on Labour Issues, both of which require real involvement from students by attending lectures, giving group presentations, field work and so on. This requires students to acquire and demonstrate the ability to analyse a set of themes by using approaches from various disciplines.
Final piece of work and methodology : the dissertation is a key element in each student’s progression. It is an important piece of individual work supervised by an academic and assessed both as a piece of writing and orally before a board of examiners. Previous experience suggests that some students find writing a dissertation difficult or even very difficult. In response to this, the new Master programme offers more training in the different forms of methodology, with a sequence of 15 credits entitled Labour Problems and the dissertation seminar (2 credits).