From school-company collaboration on educating students to a structured career development system

In this contribution we look at our experiences as a large regional ICT company with educational initiatives for various target groups. In the introduction we present an analysis of acquired ICT skills within the company and their mapping onto various clusters of commercial activities in ICT. Next, we consider a broader context of available target groups and their preferences of methods, collaboration styles and expected career steps. In today's fast evolving ICT sector the range of target groups relevant for an ICT company grows and more of them are important when planning and realizing their business growth scenarios. In the next section we present specific examples of the above-mentioned activities and justify the need of creating a portfolio of educational, supportive and marketing “events” to boost interest in ICT career. The core of our paper is a new model of long-term co-operation between a company and a young person (student or pupil) that draws upon the philosophy of customer relationship management (CRM). We argue that systematic, long-term co-operation with a job candidates is critical for digital business success and it will require suitable portfolio of “tools” that includes various activities, educational and marketing events across multiple phases of the career preparation lifecycle.