2021 is a year of major organisational changes and more campaigns

Similarly to the autumn semester, Corvinus University of Budapest will hold online information sessions in the spring on the rebranding of the institution. On this occasion, the Head of Corporate and Institutional Relations Tamás Stukovszky, the Head of Legal Services of the Legal and Administrative Affairs Organisational Unit Barbara Bíró, and the Head of Communications Kata Apáti-Tóth gave presentations and answered questions from colleagues.

 
Corporate and Institutional Relations (abbreviated: ‘CIR’) is considered a young organisation within the Corvinus University of Budapest, whose primary task is to foster relations with the business and public sectors that can bring cooperation and opportunities for the university and its students. Tamás Stukovszky said that in addition to building relationships, they also help to develop non-degree education programmes and work on technology transfer: they want to transfer and sell the knowledge and research generated at the university to the business sector.

More tenders, another conference

Since last year, they have also taken on the role of Alumni community organisers, with plans to acquire software in 2021 to facilitate communication, and they will integrate their contacts from the Alumni network into a corporate CRM to enable CIR to manage these contacts more effectively than before.

They continuously monitor tender opportunities: According to Tamás Stukovszky, Corvinus will certainly have the opportunity to participate in R&D&I tenders as a consortium member, or even as a consortium leader. Corvinus has also been involved in the University’s Innovative Ecosystem project, for which it received an excellent rating from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office.

They are preparing a number of fundraising projects for 2021, but their opportunities are significantly affected by the progression of the epidemic. They would like to continue the Large Enterprise Conference that was launched last year, and would also like to organise a SME Conference targeting the top end of the market. They believe that in the long term there will be as much need for face-to-face job fairs as before, so they are planning a careers day in the autumn. Linked to this is their project to create an online platform for Corvinus students looking for jobs.

Following the presentation, a question was raised as to whether CIR has an international example to follow. Tamás Stukovszky said that they had done thorough market research before starting the work, thus they had seen examples to follow from a number of universities where the university works closely and effectively with corporate actors.

In conclusion, the head of the CIR stressed that they are always looking for ideas and suggestions from the university’s staff on how to build relationships with the corporate sector, and the easiest way to contact the team is via the e-mail address vik@uni-corvinus.hu.

Uniform competences and operation and Board of Trustees meetings

Head of Legal Services of the Legal and Administrative Affairs Organisational Unit Barbara Bíró highlighted the challenges of the past year and the period ahead, including the legal advisory tasks related to professional development, including the introduction of one-year master’s programmes, and stressed the legal issues to be addressed in the development of student services.

A project to review and rethink the competences of each level of leadership and, where appropriate, of each department along leadership-defined principles, started last year and will continue in 2021. As an example, she mentioned that these changes in the division of competences between the Board of Trustees, the Senate, the Presidential Board and the Heads of Department have already been drafted and published in the OOR.

The priority areas of the competences project are education and finance, where the key principles have already been formulated and will be implemented into the internal regulatory system of the University in the second phase of the project. One example highlighted by Barbara Bíró is in the area of education: the deans will be able to devote more time to professional development and will have fewer administrative tasks relating to students.

Another project for 2021 is to coordinate the meetings of the Board of Trustees and the University’s governing bodies, optimise the operational framework and harmonise the work of the Boards and the committees that prepare decisions, in order to make the process more efficient. The aim is to harmonise the subject matter and timing of the work of these bodies, to establish a standardised electronic documentation system and to reduce the number of meetings.

A major change will be the reform of document management at University level, which is also to start in 2021, and will include the receipt of mail, filing, electronic document management and archiving.

  

Employee intranet and more campaigns

The Head of Communications Kata Apáti-Tóth has set herself the goal of increasing the satisfaction rate with regard to internal communication. To this end, an intranet platform for employees will be created this year, the University website will be further developed and, depending on the epidemic situation, internal events will also receive more attention this year.

The Open Doors Day would give colleagues the opportunity to book an appointment with the heads of the institution to discuss their experiences and suggestions. Student and employee onboarding materials will be renewed and employee surveys will continue to be conducted on an ongoing basis to provide managers with an accurate picture and data on how satisfied students and lecturers are with the university.

A number of recruitment campaigns are also being prepared for 2021, including a doctoral campaign, a sequence selection campaign and an Erasmus additional application campaign, in addition to the usual central recruitment campaign, and they also want to make the Double Degree courses more attractive to students.

In September, a recruitment team was set up to reach out to students from the 125 Hungarian secondary schools, from which Corvinus receives the highest number of students each year. Their job is to build relationships with students from as early as grade 10.

The briefing was followed by a question on the reception of the new Corvinus logo and image launched last year, to which Kata Apáti-Tóth stated that the communications team has received both positive reactions and criticism, and will measure the acceptance and embeddedness of the new image this year.

Commenting on the relationship between the Közgazdász Online (Economist Online) blog and the University, the Head of Communications said that the editorial team is autonomous and independent, with students continuing to write and edit the content.

The question was also raised as to who colleagues should contact if they wish to publish something in the university newsletter? This can be done via the link below, with the communications team eagerly awaiting content for the Tuesday newsletter until 8am on Friday each week.

Questions have also been received about the University’s English language internal communication, because if the University wishes to attract more international students in the future, the communications team will have to adapt to this by providing multilingual information. Kata Apáti-Tóth said that they already have active English language communication in several areas: they have a weekly English language student newsletter, the mobile application is also available in English, they write an international blog, they have multilingual posts on social media, and their foreign staff receive monthly updates on the most important news of the previous weeks. For Hungarian colleagues, these activities are not visible on a daily basis because they are targeting their content to the right audience.

A recording of the project presentation of 11 March can be found HERE.