To enhance employability in higher education - a real connection to labour market

School of Technology and Management of Lamego develops since 2009 a project to reinforce its connections to the real needs of labour market. in this way, we developed until now three areas: multidisciplinarity volunteering work teams, collaborative training of students and the cooperation with several organizations to improve their sutainability through strategic methodologies.with those methodologies we tried to improve our students' employability, as well as to dialogue permanently with companies and other organizations to understand what they need from their human resources to be more competitive. wuth this article we intend to present the results accomplished until now and to present the project for the next e years, as well as to find out other higher education institutions of different regions or coutries that are interested in this project.

The Academic-enterprise experiences framework as a guide for design education

The establishment of support platforms for the development of a new culture in design education, in order to achieve both research exploitation and its results, as an approach to the industrial community, challenges higher education institutions to rethink their functioning, divided between investigation on their own initiative or on demand, and its usefulness / practical application. At the same time, through design education, how can they be the engine that aggregates all these frequently antagonistic interests? Polytechnic institutes are predisposed to collaboration and interdisciplinarity. In our course of Technology and Design of Furniture, the availability of a production unit, testing laboratories, and expertise in engineering, design and marketing, encourage the development of a holistic project. In order to develop such knowledge, we adapt three important ways of thinking in designing interactions influenced by the traditional approach, namely, 1) identifying and understanding a design problem, i.e. a market need, 2) defining the design process and knowing what can be used for design education, i.e. opportunities for design education, and 3) sustainability of this framework and design projects' alignment with education in the same field. We explain our approach by arguing from the academicenterprise experiences perspective. This concept is proposed as a way to achieve those three ways of thinking in design education. Then, a set of interaction attributes is defined to explain how engineering and product design education can enhance meaningful relations with manufacturers, stakeholders and society in general. A final discussion is presented with the implications and benefits of this approach. The results suggest that through academic-enterprise partnerships in design, several goals such as students' motivation, product design innovation and potential for knowledge transfer to industries can be achieved.