site.btaSome Economic Sectors More Active than Others in Cooperating with Universities

112 ECONOMY - UNIVERSITIES - BUSINESSES - INTERACTION

Some Economic Sectors
More Active than Others
in Cooperating with Universities


Sofia, January 10 (BTA) - The most active sectors in terms of cooperation between businesses and higher education establishments are information technology, the extracting and manufacturing industries, the chemical industry, mechanical engineering and metallurgy. The other sectors of the Bulgarian economy still lack good initiatives in this respect, Tomcho Tomov, head of the National Competency Assessment Centre with the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA), told a BTA-hosted discussion on Thursday.

Tomov cited data from a BIA survey conducted in 2018 among some 1,000 small, medium-sized and large enterprises in Bulgaria. One of the problems, he said, is that employers do not provide feedback about the quality of higher education. There is a university rating system but it registers the employment and career success of persons with university degrees, not the level of their competency and satisfaction.

In many countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia the government co-funds the transfer of knowledge, particularly where small enterprises are concerned, Tomov went on to note. It is often said that business owners do not want to invest in education, but the truth is that they give money when they can get the kind of staff they want, he commented.

He called for legal regulation of business investments in education and for protection against related risks. There are companies which provide scholarships to students and donate equipment and learning aids to universities, but such good practices are still limited in scale, he said.

According to Tomov, Bulgarian universities have been left out of the lifelong learning system.

Rozalina Kozleva, founder of the Education Support Foundation, presented scholarships to talented students who are socially disadvantaged but have achieved high academic results at Bulgarian universities. The 2,000-leva scholarships are for various vocational domains for the 2018/2019 academic year. The money has been provided by small companies, some of which will also secure internships for the students. LY/VE

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