Improving Collaboration Between an Educational Institution and Companies

Abstract

I was commissioned by Career Centre to research a collaboration framework with companies. Research is done through finding the needs and demands of the companies to improve Career Centre’s own practises. Therefore, understanding the cultures and trends within different companies gives better insight on how to create a lucrative value proposition for the individual companies involved. The research problem can be summarized in the following question: “How can collaboration value be optimized with potential companies?” With the supportive questions: “What are the activities needed to improve the cooperation between Career Centre and companies?”, “How to improve Career Centre communication with companies?”.

Theoretical research was done including books and articles. The four C model was chosen as the collaboration framework for Career Centre to explore how beneficial it could be in resolving the research problem. The four C model refers to communication, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. An understanding of the four C model helps the organization in strategic planning, time management and increase joint venture rates. In short, the four C model has sequential stages to develop partnership advancement of common interest. Theoretical research is followed by semi-structured interviews prepared with themed questions list to selected companies as a qualitative research method.

Research reveals that companies consider Career Centre as a potential long-term partner, as they are seen as a potential player in connecting students with companies. However, communication channels between companies and Career Centre prove to be lacking as many companies do not exactly know much about their services. Thus, suggestions for improvements to communication and relationships with companies’ key personnel for elevated collaboration are defined along with feedback from companies.

More research that could be done for this thesis topic such as trying out other framework or model applications. Furthermore, deepening of this research would be to select and implement the various model frameworks, collect data for analysing and review of the results. Ultimately the goal is to find frameworks that could be of advantage for Career Centre to achieve seamless collaboration with companies. In addition, this research also indirectly benefits the university students not only the Career Centre and companies.