“Entrepreneurship and diversity in education” conference presents new perspectives in the debates regarding the supply and production of education services.
How do we answer to discrepancy between the formal education and the labour market demands? This discrepancy is, many times, caused by the lack of financing the system, or the unprepared teachers. On the other and, the Center for Institutional Analysis and Development is sending an invitation to analyse a superior level: the organization itself of the supply and production of education.
Can a central planner, the position the Ministry of Education is occupying, to collect and interpret the complete information, and in real time, on the competence demand of all economic agents that are active on the market, to understand all education needs of each student and all values that each family wants to send to its children? And, after all this knowledge will be integrated, is it possible the formulation of an unique formula that will answer to this education demand, both in real-time and efficiently, can it be implemented in real-time, efficiently and uniform in all the country’s schools?
One of the answers should be first searched in entrepreneurial manifestations of education production. The diversity of organizational forms and partnerships that brings the schools, economic agents and the civil actors together is a good start. Any attempt of limiting the type and number of organizations that supply education, increasing the administrative costs or entering the market costs, will contribute to the separation of these groups and, as a result, to a growth in the unemployment rate of youth people.
The “Link to First Job” project is an example of educational initiative through which is increased the coordination between the supply of competences and the labour market demand, initiative that reunited high schools, economic agents and civil society organizations in order to create a new opportunity for orientation in career for the final year- students.
Over 400 high- school students from Galați and Vrancea were given support for finding easier answers to questions like: “What do I want to become after I graduate? Where do I want to work? What is the job that fits me best?” There have been organized over 60 group counselling workshops and over 40 study visits to local employers that were managing different economic activities from hospitals, to kindergartens and IT companies. An online platform was built comprising instruments for self-organizing in order to reach professional goals, interviews with specialists and personalities from different professional domains, informative articles about professions, webinars with topics as economic and financial education, time management, preparing for university admission and other soft competences.
The most important results are related to the fact that over 50 high- school students that participated in the project are now attending university or vocational schools, over 220 are still in high- school and over 20 youth people got a job, as a result of the project’s promoted measures and the support given by the local counsellors.
Through this conference, we also marked the end of the project implemented by CADI-Eleutheria Foundation in partnership with Romanian Training Institute, financed by the European Social Fund, through the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013, project carried out between 12nd May 2014 and 11st December 2015.
