Bridging the gap between university studies and working life

The project targets the students and aims to improve their readiness to enter the working life and enhance equal employment opportunities. The project also improves motivation to study and proceed in studies. All these themes are interconnected. The project aims to enhance student´s equal possibilities to enter the work market already during their studies. Special attention is paid to the fields that do not directly lead to any specific profession.

The project partners are Aalto University, the University of Lapland, Lappeenranta University of Technology, the University of Oulu, Tampere University of Technology, and the University of Turku.

The partner universities together develop new models to integrate training and working life periods into university curricula. Working periods during the studies (e.g. summer jobs) will be more goal-oriented and the working experience will be evaluated from the learning by working point of view. Students would more often be granted credits for their work experience acquired during their studies. One of the aims of the project is that work experience would increasingly become acknowledged as study attainments. This way, students would be more likely to complete their degrees faster while benefiting from a relevant connection to working life.

The project aims to help the interaction between study programs and working life. It also wants to help the heads of study programmes to renew their curricula. The project activities help teachers to strengthen their know-how about working life and this way the project will give teachers more abilities in planning and implementing courses based on working life, making new contacts to working life, and supporting students in their career planning and employment. Employees and companies will be systematically integrated to participate in curricula and courses planning process.

The project will result as a set of best practices and models related to working life cooperation and working life expertize that can be utilized nationally and can be implemented in a number of study programs throughout the Finnish universities.

As such the project supports expertize exchange between the Finnish universities and makes it possible to develop nationwide cooperation models between the Finnish universities. It also creates new practices to integrate and cooperate between the universities and partners from the working life.

The deliverables of the project are in compliance with the universities’ strategies and the programme of the Finnish government, regional strategic programmes, and the regional Lapland programme (Lappi-sopimus). The project supports the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region and the Strategy for Northern Finland and the EU’s decade-long growth strategy Europe 2020 which aims at strengthening the EU’s competitiveness and employment.