Aligning sustainable development principles and sectoral education

Abstract

The competitive environment for new graduates to acquire a well-paid and satisfying job position and the long-standing gap between recent university graduates and business requirements as to the skills of these graduates, lead to the creation of a Sectoral Education Program model, involving seven different courses with various learning methods ranging from guest speakers, industry analyses and case studies to company practicum projects. The Sectoral Education Program model is a mandatory part of the curriculum for business students and electives for all other students university wide. Emphasized by the launch of sustainable development goals and trying to find complementary and comprehensive examples of innovative tools for private sector–university partnerships, this continuously developing model accepted one of the foci of the program as sustainable development and devised solutions that embed the teaching of sustainable development principles aligning them with concerns of business. In the embedded approach, the curriculum regarding local sectoral expertise, the crosscutting issues for all sectors from population dynamics, resource scarcity to climate change and even big data are being discussed. Over the three semesters of teaching local sectoral expertise in the light of crosscutting issues, students’ feedbacks have been recorded. Main results show that for university students the phrase sustainability is being overused but still the connotation to the real-world cannot be established. By embedding sustainable development principles directly aligned with the concerns of business sectors, majority of the students think that this know-how would be a skill for them in their future prospects.