Promoting University – Business Long-Term Collaboration through Vocational Education

Abstract

University-business cooperation for many years has been an increasingly important issue raised national policy level, as well as at higher education institutions itself. The fact that the learning environment and the labor market needs are continuously changing makes it challenging for both spheres to be perfectly synchronized. Regarding the public policies on education, vocational education has been a priority for the government in the last years, expressed also in several documents as educational strategy, Higher Education law and Strategy of Employment and Skills. This prioritization aims the creation of a system that at best meets the need of the labor market. The improvement of vocational education is seen as good path to fulfill the gap between university and labor market through improving professional skills, life skills development (soft skill) and an offer focused to business need. From a business standpoint, vocational education receives a great deal of attention and are demonstrated as a profitable long-term investment with a significant contribution to productivity growth. Cooperation with the university can be formal and / or informal. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the cooperation between Universities and Businesses in the business perspective, the methodology used is through descriptive analyze based on primary and secondary data collection. Based on the results we expect to contribute with suggestions for all business to encourage building strategic partnerships with universities. One of the main conclusions of the paper is that, when businesses are connected to universities, they have a ready-made pool of talent filled with exactly the type of people that they need and working with universities, they can guide students to develop the skills that they need to form a partnership.   Received: 23 September 2022 / Accepted: 28 November 2022 / Published: 20 December 2022