Industry and Higher Education

This special issue of Industry and Higher Education is devoted to a selection of papers from the Fifth International Conference on ‘New Horizons in Industry, Business and Education’ (NHIBE 2007) held on the island of Rhodes, Greece, in August 2007. In this introductory paper the author provides an overview of the conference, summarizes the most important presentations and offers his reflections on the conference outcomes. The key objective of NHIBE 2007 was to identify the impact of new technologies on education, business and industry. The major topics were: educational strategies; career counselling; new educational methods; industry and education; entrepreneurship; corporate finance and governance; and business strategies. Special attention was drawn to the innovative approaches and experiences developed in education in an effort to adapt teaching methods to the new technological era. Furthermore, business strategies and worldwide educational strategies were emphasized.

Engineering organizations are increasingly under pressure to perform more efficiently with fewer people. To manage this, organizations need to understand what skills, knowledge and behaviours they need from engineers who have to practise in a global information society. Engineering educators, in collaboration with employers, therefore now need to think of how to place competencies for engineers in this new context. A model for preparing the educators and employers to face this challenge is proposed. This takes into account the change in mindset required to address the development of competencies for engineers when often the approach has to be context-driven to address global working. The model is based on developing a methodology by which a set of learning outcomes supported by aims and objectives may best be achieved. These learning outcomes are informed by the consideration of international frameworks and agreements which specify engineering professional competencies together with the corresponding graduate attributes. The core concept of the model is discussed and related to specific outcomes for educator and employer to facilitate and students to achieve. While consideration is given to what competencies are needed for tomorrow's engineering education, it is concluded that more relevant is the need to reconsider existing competencies in the context of engineers in global practice. This will require educators to be more responsive and prepared to support the development and evolution of competencies that are sustainable and robust in global sociological, political and economic systems. Central to the success of the model is the need to establish a learning equilibrium between on-campus and work-based experiential studies using globally-based industries.

The rationale underpinning UK higher education (HE) has changed significantly over the last 20 years. Government policy dictates that 50% of 18–30 year-olds should be in HE by the year 2010. Students enter HE almost solely for the exchange value of the qualification and the expectation of enhanced career prospects in business and industry. This paper argues that UK HE is not responding to the drivers for change demanded by the key stakeholders and as a result advances in business and industry are compromised by the inadequacies of graduates. The current HE system has evolved steadily into its current form, but in the last two decades there have been radical changes in the demands of stakeholders. These changes were identified by Sporn at the European level as: ‘three major challenges: expansion, diversification, and massification’. Higher education systems have not been sufficiently reactive to these step changes. The paper sets out a current view of HE based on evidence collected through participant observation and data from key stakeholders. It highlights deficiencies in HE which impact adversely on business and industry and have been created by inherited structures. Some of these proposed deficiencies have been identified as the funding of HE, the tension between research and teaching, the separation of vocational and non-vocational disciplines, the radical advances in ICT, the demands of key stakeholders and the inability to foster creativity and innovation in the curriculum. The author offers a discussion framework to initiate a discourse on how best HE can meet the needs of business and industry more effectively over the next twenty years.

This article is concerned with professional needs emerging from the French labour market and their implications in terms of university training. The authors carry out their analysis by looking at the implications for sustainable development. In particular, the paper emphasizes how educational programmes can be built to provide sustainable employability for students. University vocational programmes are conceived using the skills-based approach, considering such programmes as an intersection between knowledge and activities in terms of skills. After having set out in detail their analytical framework (definition of sustainable development, the skills approach and the notion of sustainable employability), the authors provide a methodology for addressing the links between job activities, skills and training schemes. This methodology consists of several steps: first, they identify job sectors and levels of management; second, they translate jobs into key skills; third, they build educational programmes based on these key skills. The paper emphasizes the multidimensionality of the approach and its contribution to our understanding of the relationship between the missions of universities, professional needs and individuals' professional paths.

VALEURTECH is a pilot project under the European Commission's Leonardo II programme. It includes 35 partners from higher education institutions and professional organizations in eight European countries and has the major objectives: of (a) setting up a homogeneous ‘labelling’ process, such as a diploma supplement, based on a common reference system for skills and a harmonized assessment procedure, so that experience acquired in a professional situation abroad becomes explicit and more easily assessed; and (b) setting up a database which will give students useful information to prepare themselves for their professional placement in one of the partner countries' firms. To achieve these objectives, a questionnaire was organized for firms to identify the relevance and weight of each skill. More precisely, the questionnaire focused on the composition of the professional profile (qualifications and capabilities) that the students should have in three industrial sectors: informatics, civil engineering and manufacturing. This paper concentrates on the informatics and manufacturing sectors. The results are assessed using hierarchical clustering analysis to compare the answers in seven European countries.

Work-based learning is generated, controlled and used within a community of practice and brings new understanding to pedagogical principles as the role of worker becomes also that of learner. This paper presents a series of opportunities of this type of learning, which even enables students to work at a distance, using open-learning techniques, as self-managed learners in their work-related context. The author analyses the legitimacy of work-based knowledge in a higher education setting: this is crucial in understanding the differences and similarities both within the field of work-based learning itself and between work-based learning and more conventional educational programmes. Finally, a method of facilitating and managing such work- based learning in universities is presented.

This paper examines empowerment as a strategy, from the resource-based perspective, for the development of Greek tertiary education. As the literature suggests, empowerment enables individuals to make decisions and simultaneously take responsibility for their actions. Moreover, it increases the quality of research and teaching procedures as well as amplifying educators' and students' satisfaction and performance. In this respect, the paper uses the well-known Whetten and Cameron questionnaire for empowerment in a survey conducted among students studying in the B, D, F and H semesters at a Greek university operating in Thessaloniki. The principal component factor analysis of a sample 395 students revealed the existence of four dimensions of student empowerment: meaning/self-efficacy, self-determination, trust and personal control. After discussion of the findings, a number of recommended tactics and policies concerning the enhancement of student empowerment conclude the paper.

Academic research is increasingly interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and international. In this context, creating and maintaining the balance in the nexus between research, teaching and learning and industry interaction is central to the operation and reputation of a university-level institute. In seeking sustainability, the perennial contradiction between encouraging and expecting all academics to engage in research or some other scholarship and the need to support leading researchers working in internationally recognized research clusters must be resolved. Research reputations are built on peer-reviewed publications, citations, competitive funding achieved and postgraduate completions. The leading universities are not known for research excellence in more than a handful of niche disciplines, so creating a research-informed environment where many are carrying out research, a few are excelling, but all receive support, is an unavoidable challenge for a senior management team. Faculty structures are important components in meeting this challenge. Heads of Research and proactive Faculty Research Boards have critical roles to play. R&D centres benefit from belonging in or across faculties, but individual researchers must have scope to build teams that can grow to form centres of excellence or be part of research clusters with partners having complementary strengths. External rigorous and periodic reviews of research are important in placing research in national and international contexts and ensuring that focus and direction are maintained. Institutional research strategies are paramount and should set out how a research environment and infrastructure can be developed and how impediments to research activity are removed. Setting targets for key metrics that are demanding but achievable will expose shortcomings in any strategy or its application. Policies and actions for building and supporting research activity are described, along with the strategies and structures that frame them. Each higher education institute is unique, but some effective measures are universally applicable.

Graduate education platforms have received general acclaim as key components in the future structural development of third-level and fourth-level education in Europe. In Ireland the Higher Education Authority (HEA) has endorsed the restructuring of postgraduate education to incorporate the training of research students in key generic and transferable skills. This provides enhanced suitability for employment of research students in industry and the professions, rather than the educational sector. In addition, graduate programmes must provide improved structured support for research supervisors including training, particularly in respect of mentoring skills. This paper examines the challenges associated with the identification and implementation of an appropriate graduate platform model for a large, internationally recognized Institute of Technology, which offers a spectrum of academic programmes. The pros and cons of two models – a structured, institute-wide, non-discipline-specific platform and multiple, discipline-specific platforms – are highlighted. The difficulties attached to establishing comprehensive training programmes for students and staff with an underlying cross-disciplinary, inter-institutional framework are examined. Models currently being adapted by other Irish institutions are also critiqued. Finally, the ability of these educational models to meet the requirements of the industrial and professional sectors is explored. The question of whether graduate-level platforms have been created as higher education's proposed solution to a non-academic employment problem is also discussed.