Abstract:

For more than two decades, one of the hot topics in education has been its collaboration with the labour market. Several concepts and models have been worked out and implemented, and some good practices have been described. In many countries, the HEIs' aim to cooperate with the enterprises is the national requirement, which is also linked with the funding quotas. Nevertheless, one of the leading collaboration areas - employees' training (lifelong learning courses taken from the HEIs) still needs to be developed a lot, in content and amount, to keep up with the enterprises' quickly changing economic environment and changing needs.

The authors carried out a small-scale enterprise survey in the Baltics and Finland to investigate and understand the main trends and factors that lead the companies' decision-making in the LLL area and collaboration with HEIs. This article aims to clarify the enterprises' expectations and obstacles in LLL collaboration with HEIs to improve and direct further cooperation efforts. It gives recommendations for the HEIs to foster and enhance meaningful partnerships with the enterprises. The results indicate the constant miscommunication in partnership and still existing myths, which lead to (or somewhat hinder) smooth cooperation.

Keywords:

PPP, academia-enterprises collaboration, triple and quadruple helix.