Abstract:

People are very different, but regarding their work engagement, inner motivation towards professional self-realization they are behaving very similar. There is no difference in their behavior whether if he or she is a person looking for adequate best-place-to-work or he / she is a manager taking care about workforce policy and continuous people-pipe-line.

Based on this phenomenon our article is focused on research of University-Industry Collaboration, sustainable Work Employability of engineering graduates.

Analysis and comparison came from two key perspectives:
(1) Undergraduate engineering education with the focus on engineering curricula and student – centered environment, teaching style, level of didactical competencies of teachers:
(2) Corporate culture and values / beliefs, employees development programs and successors planning procedures which represents opportunities or obstacles for engineering graduates entering the market place regarding their sustainable continuous professional development.

The comparison was carried out on a basis of research on one side in Slovak Technical University (STU) and on other side in multinational producer of clay blocks, facing brinks and clay roof tiles located in Czech and Slovak republic. This company consists of 12 manufactories, HQ departments and Share Services center and is a member of Clay Building Materials Europe (CBME) cluster, which is a part of an international supplier of innovative building material and infrastructure solutions.

The research done at STU was focused on students at last year of studies. On-line questionnaire was used as the method for collecting data with the aim to identity their satisfaction with the role of teachers and educational practices regarding their intellectual and personal development to successfully enter the labor market.

The research inside the company was intended to find out company's readiness to employ STU graduates in accordance with corporate values and to involve them into HR development program called “The Roadmap for future corporate manager”.

The intention was to structure recommendations into three areas:
(a) For STU – systemic changes towards student-centered educational environment redesign of curricula to allow obtaining sustainability competences at University. Development program for university teachers had been design with focus to integrate mentoring and coaching into active – teaching methods to better prepare engineering students for confronting sustainable issues.
(b) For company – proposals for changes in company’s initial and further training programs and precisely integration corporate values into recruitment processes and selection interview procedure to get the most appropriate candidates from the labor market.
(c) For STU-Company collaboration – recommendations of very specific common activities, which will enable build strong, lasting relationship for supporting, elevating and protecting the interests of both organizations.

Keywords:

Sustainable Work Employability, Engineering Education, Student-Centered Learning, University-Company Collaboration, Best-Place-to-Work.