Digital Empowerment: The Evolutionary Logic and Practical Shift of Industry-Education Integration Organizational Forms

The integration of production and education is the only way for vocational education to achieve high-quality development and adapt to the process of modernization in the Chinese context. Currently, the “specialty docking industry” in vocational education is no longer simply a supply and demand match; instead, it requires the construction of a deep cooperation ecosystem for production-education integration. The “Outline for the Construction of a Strong Educational Nation (2024-2035)” also proposes the “shaping of a new form of diverse schooling and production-education integration.”

For a long time, under the guidance of the “docking theory,” vocational colleges have adjusted their specialty layouts to meet market demands, which has alleviated the structural contradictions in talent training to some extent. However, starting from the demand for high-quality development, this linear matching is difficult to support the deep advancement of production-education integration. On the one hand, the current industrial technology iteration cycle has significantly shortened, with new business formats and new occupations constantly emerging, while the specialty setting and curriculum development in colleges still have a long cyclical nature. If colleges adjust their training programs based on current industrial demands, the industry needs may have changed by the time students graduate, resulting in a passive catch-up docking that makes it difficult to achieve synchronous resonance between talent training and industrial development. On the other hand, under the traditional docking model, enterprises and colleges are two independent entities, making it difficult for enterprises to deeply participate in key processes such as curriculum development and teaching evaluation, while the teaching resources of colleges also find it hard to truly integrate into the enterprise production process, with both sides adhering to their organizational boundaries, making it difficult to form a collaborative effort in talent cultivation. Additionally, the “docking theory” implies a value orientation that views education as a tool to meet industrial demands, overly emphasizing the vocational attributes of talent training while neglecting the role of vocational education in promoting comprehensive human development and the inheritance of technical culture. Thus, it can be seen that “docking,” as a primary form of the production-education relationship, has become difficult to meet the inherent requirements of high-quality development.

The proposal of the “symbiosis theory” promotes the breakthrough of production-education integration from the traditional linear matching model to building a complex ecosystem characterized by harmonious symbiosis, dynamic evolution, and the organic integration of multiple subjects. The so-called “symbiosis” centers on vocational colleges and industrial entities being bound by common interests, relying on resource sharing and complementary advantages to form a stable ecological relationship of mutual dependence and collaborative evolution. This theory also brings profound changes to production-education integration from the perspectives of subject relationships, resource allocation, and institutional logic.

Production-education entities break down organizational boundaries to achieve deep embedding. Under this model, colleges and enterprises completely break through physical and organizational boundaries, constructing a mutually permeable linkage relationship. Enterprise technical personnel deeply participate in teaching links such as talent cultivation and curriculum design, while college teachers regularly enter the front lines of enterprises to engage in technology research and production practice; enterprise production equipment is simultaneously transformed into practical training teaching carriers, and college training bases also serve the function of training enterprise employees; industry technical standards and job specifications are directly integrated into the teaching system, and the research and innovation achievements of colleges feed back into the technical upgrading of enterprises, giving rise to new organizational forms such as mixed-ownership industrial colleges, thus moving school-enterprise cooperation from shallow docking to deep integration.

Resource allocation achieves bidirectional flow and interconnection, enhancing utilization efficiency. The production-education symbiosis ecosystem breaks the limitations of one-way resource flow, achieving the optimization and integration of various resources and collaborative efficiency improvements. Resources such as policy support from the government, standard-leading resources from industry associations, intellectual research resources from colleges, capital and equipment resources from enterprises, and cultural education resources from society efficiently circulate and are precisely allocated within the system, maximizing resource utilization efficiency.

Institutional logic focuses on value symbiosis, stimulating internal motivation. The core of harmonious symbiosis between production and education is to achieve the unity of educational value and economic value. This concept reshapes the institutional logic of production-education integration, on the one hand, integrating the cultivation of craftsmanship spirit into production practices, allowing students to develop professional qualities through real labor; on the other hand, incorporating enterprise technical tackling, product research and development, and job demands into teaching links, making talent cultivation in colleges more aligned with the actual industrial development. This model of value unity breaks free from the short-term and utilitarian limitations of traditional school-enterprise cooperation, injecting endogenous motivation for sustainable development into production-education integration.

Promoting the shift from shallow docking to deep symbiosis in production-education integration requires both relying on institutional innovation to strengthen foundational guarantees and continuously optimizing paths based on practical exploration to comprehensively improve the symbiotic ecosystem.

Strengthening institutional innovation and solidifying the foundational guarantee is a core measure to address cooperation pain points such as unclear property rights and imbalanced interests, and it is also a key support for establishing a long-term development foundation for production-education integration. On the one hand, it is necessary to accelerate the improvement of the property rights system, refine supporting laws and regulations, and clarify the legal status of educational entities and property ownership; on the other hand, a mechanism for balancing interests should be established, making good use of government policy inclinations and market pricing methods to ensure the legal benefits of both schools and enterprises, promoting them to become a community that shares risks and benefits, fully stimulating the endogenous motivation for cooperative symbiosis.

Optimizing the governance structure of colleges is an important lever for maintaining the production-education symbiosis ecosystem. It is essential to actively involve representatives from industry enterprises to participate deeply in the top-level decision-making and daily operational management of colleges, breaking down the drawbacks of traditional closed and rigid educational systems, while also guiding enterprises to view colleges as core partners in talent cultivation and technological innovation, establishing regular communication and docking platforms to precisely match supply and demand needs, enhancing the adaptability and flexibility of the production-education symbiosis ecosystem, and ensuring the smooth and efficient operation of the entire system.

Building distinctive symbiotic carriers based on multiple levels can further broaden the development scenarios of production-education symbiosis. At the regional level, industry parks can be relied upon to form municipal production-education joint bodies, promoting vocational colleges to be situated close to industrial clusters, reducing cooperation barriers, strengthening resource interconnection, and constructing regional production-education integration ecosystems; at the industry level, leading enterprises can spearhead the establishment of industry production-education integration communities, closely tying key links in the industrial chain, and coordinating talent cultivation and technological research and development efforts to achieve precise matching between talent supply and industry demands; at the college level, deepening the quality reform of industrial colleges, granting them autonomous management rights in specialty setting and curriculum development, breaking the constraints of traditional educational systems, and fully unleashing educational vitality.

The relationship between vocational education and industrial development is shifting from mere docking adaptation to harmonious symbiosis. Only by making industrial development the intrinsic subject of vocational education and establishing a new cooperative relationship of mutual growth between production and education can vocational education truly undertake the era’s mission of cultivating high-quality technical and skilled talents, providing solid talent support and intellectual assurance for the construction of modernization in the Chinese context.

(Ding Yongxiang, Cheng Meiling, Yantai Vocational College)

Source: Guangming.com