The Practeam Model Regarding School To Active Life Transition. Students' Expectancies

The project "Practical training of economist's students. Inter-regional partnership in the labor market between universities and the business environment" focuses on student's transition from school to labor market. Concretely, it tries to highlight the general role of practical training - specifically the field related practical training set as a mandatory discipline in the curriculum, by identifying possibilities of interventions from supervisors. Starting with literature review regarding determinants of school to active life transition, the present contribution discusses the outline of the practical training set as a mandatory discipline in the curriculum. Within PRACTeam project the practical training itself is accompanied with a series of supplementary services (aptitude testing, counseling, career guidance, mentoring by a trained tutor, granting financial aid, awarding excellence over contests and internships). It represents an active partnership on the labor market meant to address directly students' expectations regarding practical training, work, and entrepreneurship. At least two main benefits may be derived from the training and tutoring. First, as a dual type model of transition from school to active life, allowing students to become insiders in the labor market. Secondly, changes in supervisor' patterns of interactions and behavior/attitudes toward work and employees may also occur, which in turn may improve the work. A pretest-posttest non-experimental design was applied for the PRACTeam evaluation. Using administered questionnaires and focus group method to students before and after they completed their practical stages we examined their attitudes and behavior towards elements of the dual model of transition. The paper concludes that a dual type model of transition from school to active life - that implies the education and practice occur simultaneously, successfully meets students' expectancies and may be functional for improving permeability between professional and academic knowledge.