The Supporting System on the Implementation of a Brand-Building Program in Higher Education

The context of the paper is, on the one hand, growing trend of portfolio-based competency development in higher education, especially focusing on assessing students’ progression, promoting self-evaluation, reflective thinking, career planning, self-directed and collaborative learning strategies [1, 3, 10]. Under the umbrella of portfolio-based higher education, brand building programs play important role in this process [2]. On the other hand, brand building programs can develop self-management skills at individual and system levels as well. At individual level, brand building promotes students in higher education to develop competencies, which are based on the labour market needs in order to reduce the skill gap and promote reskilling. The purpose of the paper is to introduce some results of the implementation of a 4-year myBrand Program, especially focusing on the supporting system of the implementation. myBrand Program in Budapest Metropolitan University is a career-focused education initiative that focuses on practice-oriented education and the skills needed in the workplace promoting the successful future careers of students and successful placement in the labour market in the world of work. myBrand program is linked to the University’s new, “creative university” identity. This paper introduces some parts of the supporting system on program implementation: MyBrand portfolio workshops and trainings, Teachers’ Day and Club, mentoring program, basic competence matrix, myBrand teaching handbook, METU Learn curricula, Online Knowledge Hub. The support system being developed is based on qualitative research on implementation of myBrand Program, namely content analysis and 14 in-depth interviews. At the conclusion part, I will share some future scenarios and dilemmas on the results and experience of implementation of brand building program.