Abstract:

The number of students who combine education with work increases in Ukrainian labor market from year to year. This tendency is an impetus to setting up of incubators for higher educational institutes. The incubators are structures where students can get practical experience in educational institutions.

Such structures are press offices in higher educational institutes. For example, the civic initiative of Institute of Journalism students. This initiative is a basis for systematic effective communication between students and teachers, University structural units, the media and the public.

The aim of the study is summarizing of experience of student initiatives as the first step to bachelor’s professional qualification in Advertising and Public Relations educational and professional program in Kyiv universities.

Professional competence development is related to immersing in professional activity context for future specialists. This includes implementing real tasks for the press office. Those tasks simulate future professional activities.

The aim of this student initiative activity is to interest potential employers in qualified staff selection among students of higher educational institutes.

The authors testify, that the promising avenue for promotion of graduating student employment is strengthen the role of practice-oriented forms of education in the higher educational system, including involving students in practical activities in the press office.

The article emphasizes the need to formation of student professional competences while working at the press office. Also, the article explains main concept of communication technologies and describes “occasional communication” technologies. It shows practical knowledge received in the process of PR-communication planning. Students practice communication with representatives of different groups in different levels for market and target audience researching. They also obtain specialists, professionals, opinion leaders for advertising and PR-products creation and promotion. They check target audience response to their work for effective communication.
From the second year of studying students do tasks, get practical knowledge and work off their cross-cutting skills: effective communication, team work, results-orientation, self-reliance, initiative.

Thus, students get into real media area and begin to create informational content for web-sites of higher educational institutes, social network accounts. They also post information about their higher educational institutes in the blogosphere and on the partner web-sites. Students organize and hold PR-events which form positive image of higher educational institutes and advertise the educational services.

As a result of their first practice experience, students make professional portfolios which show their achievements. These portfolios will allow them to be competitive specialists in the labor market in the future.

Student initiatives functioning in higher educational institutes recognize a problem of student training quality. Note that, based on the work in the press offices, students are invited to working practice, and later to work in the companies in the professional field. All this indicates that high-quality student training, business processes modeling during classes and taking part in the student media units are the factors which provide high-quality preparation of graduates.

Keywords:

Student initiative, education, skills, practice, press office.