Programme your future: Educational pool for universities

Training young people with the skills and competences required by market players is key to fostering market growth in IT and other sectors, especially where the desired growth is linked to the efficiency-enhancing use of digital technologies.

Academic education is often criticised for not following the rapidly changing technological developments, especially in the IT sector. The average age of teachers in Hungarian IT training is high, and a large percentage of teachers do not work on the market, they only teach. The IT sector, on the other hand, needs up-to-date market knowledge. The aim of the educational pool initiative is to ensure that the knowledge acquired by university students during university hours is truly up-to-date, practical, and from the industry, so that after graduation they have the skills and knowledge that market players need.

Programme your future

The aim of the large-scale Hungarian national project ‘Programme your future!’ is to increase the number of graduates in the IT field in the coming years, thereby contributing to reducing the current shortage of qualified IT staff. This is becoming increasingly important from a national economic point of view. The project’s main task is to improve the labour supply and support the development and training of IT competences in higher education, in order to ensure that the training system provides marketable knowledge that meets the needs of economic operators. Ultimately, the project is working to make university students familiar with the technologies used by ICT companies. This is supported by the Operational Programme using ESF funds. IVSZ is responsible, among other things, for the concept of the so-called Teaching pool and the implementation of the service.

Why is this a good practice?

The aim of the programme component is to extend existing and new cooperation between higher education institutions and ICT companies operating in their environment, and to involve market professionals of companies in the practical training of universities. A priority objective is to integrate the practical knowledge and experience of companies into IT higher education training programmes in order to provide students with practical technological, market and business knowledge and competences in addition to theoretical knowledge during the training. This project element supports the development of cooperation between the two parties and provides practical support for concrete educational cooperation.

The biggest advantage of the teaching pool activity for companies is that they can bring real market knowledge to the universities, which will later be required from the employees in practice. In addition, it can significantly facilitate recruitment, as these courses provide a platform for them to meet students, to identify talented students, who can later be employed by their company either as trainees or as full-time employees.

The pool is also important for universities, as there is a general feedback that universities lack competent teaching staff due to a lack of practical knowledge or capacity.

The main areas of focus are:

• Agility
• Devops
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Native cloud
• Data science
• Testing security
• Low-code platforms
• Embedded system technologies
• 5G

How does it work concretely?

An intermediary company was selected to implement the teaching pool service. Universities may determine their tutoring needs at the beginning of the academic year. For example, they have an AI course, but they don’t have an instructor. The university may send a request for a lecturer to the intermediary company implementing the service (the company was selected as a result of a procurement procedure). The university can have a specific ideal trainer in mind, whom it would like to invite (but cannot pay him), or it can turn to this intermediary company without a specific person (in this case only the fact of the tutor’s demand is fixed). If the university had a target person, the Mediator hires and invites the person, concludes a contract with him/her, supports the process until the completion of the training and pays a fee to the instructor. If the university does not have a person in mind, the Intermediary searches among the former teachers already used within the service (teacher pool), or if there is no person matching the specified search criteria, it searches the database of an IT company for a suitable person. Invited guest speakers become members of the pool immediately after the first teaching session. The resulting database (pool) is the property of the project. For GDPR reasons, the list of trainers (nor the list of companies where external trainers work) is not public, only information about the types of trainings implemented and the focus areas of the trainings is published.

So far, this pool has been implemented 4 times (4 public procurements for 1-1 academic year).

A control point has also been introduced to ensure the quality of the rigorous processes of trainer placement. The need to involve a guest lecturer from the market crystallises at universities sufficiently early, before the start of the academic semester, at which point they must submit their tutoring needs. Once the lecturer has been selected, the lecturers and the university must jointly submit the topic description of the planned course to a “body” (3 members) that will check whether the course covers eligible areas (areas where there is currently a lack of knowledge in the labour market). A topic description may be rejected if it does not provide market knowledge (e.g. Introduction to Computing Fundamentals) or if the topic is not requested/requested by market participants. Of the members of the Board of Trustees, 2 are IT specialists and 1 is a labour market expert. Each expert shall state his or her own position, reasons and shall decide by consensus. The “Board” examines each topic description.

Instructor needs may include an instructor to develop both hard and soft skills. For example, an IT life course to develop soft skills was supported, presenting project management methodologies and practices. IT companies complain a lot that recent graduates do not have the appropriate soft skills, e.g. project-based thinking.

After accepting the topic description, the trainer prepares for the course and delivers the lecture. This can be a single lesson or an entire course. After the training, the placement company completes the administration process and pays the instructor. The project shall also make the corresponding payment to the intermediary at regular intervals.