Building the bridge between business and education is a key success factor for the development of innovation and securing access to talent. One of the main reasons for this is the preparation of young generations for the market needs of skills and competences. It is crucial for them to develop such transversal skills as:
• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Creativity and innovative thinking
• Problem-solving
• Communication
• Presentation
• Critical thinking
• Collaboration
Collaboration with businesses – small, large and medium provides to opportunity for students to get hands-on experience, solve real business problems, generate ideas to contribute to managers and employees which gives them the feeling to be part of a real work and organization outside of the classroom. This enhances their motivation, self-esteem and confidence that they are prepared for the job market.
It is also of paramount importance to provide the adequate and successful career development by the very first step of helping students choose their career path and field for development, studies and work in future. Collaboration between schools and businesses in the VET field is a common practice due to the nature of studies and the curriculum. However, for the general education schools it is not so common to work together with managers, entrepreneurs, business owners. It could be a key success factor to help businesses solve the problem with shortage of talent in the next few years. In order to solve this problem, it is not enough to respond to the current situation. Rather, there need to be a preparation and provision of workforce for the future – three to five years when the needs will be different and the skills shortage – even higher.
Thus, any model for collaboration of businesses of different size and schools is becoming an important move and initiative to be on the edge and growth for future development and innovation of the business. It builds trust and stronger collaboration for bridging the gap between education and business.
