Abstract:

Entrepreneurs, managers, and other kinds of people are often confronting problems which they are not able to solve by themselves. They could miss the skills needed to do some work, have not enough time, or just run out of ideas.

One of the methods how to get new perspective, outside the box thinking, some expert work, or any other support is to use consulting services. However not everyone can afford commercial consulting services.

Student consulting is definitely affordable for almost any individual or organisation. It is an interesting possibility to get high quality work for a reasonable price, whereas this is far not the only convincing reason to be thinking about hiring students as consultants. Student consulting is a great example of university-industry collaboration, still with a significant potential being not used.

In the first part of this paper we define meaningfulness of student consulting from many perspectives. We concentrate on educational and practical usefulness for the students, but also on the benefits for other parties involved.

Further we describe several European organisations from the field of student consulting and discuss their good practice examples. This is the main focus of our paper. We conclude the paper by trying to define an effectively working model of student consulting organisation applicable at any university or other higher educational institutions.

Keywords:

Consulting, student consulting, student advising, education by practice, education.