Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award

Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award is a trophy awarded to the employer who has hired the largest number of graduates of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering lately.

Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award Laureates Gallery

Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award 2018             INCAS

Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award 2017             Aerostar SA

Best Aerospace Engineering Employer Award 2016             Blue Air

Competition Rules

The rules and the mechanism of this competition were approved in the Faculty Executive Bureau session on 22 March 2017 (as modified in the sessions dated 13 September 2017 and 12 December 2018). They are the following:

1. In the alumni database of the faculty the jury counts how many graduates of bachelor, master and doctorate work at each employer until a specific date of the year (31 August). In this process the alumni are involved, to validate the information from the database and to update it.
2. An index is calculated to favour recent employments, in a moving window of 4 years.
3. In the calculation of the index, weights are given for each type of diploma, as follows: 1 for engineers, 2 for master graduates and 4 for doctors in aerospace engineering.
4. A graduate who was already employed at the time of graduation counts as an employment, as a graduate who is hired after the graduation. This way, we privilege those employers who effectively support their employees to continue their studies. For instance, an engineer employee who has graduated the master program in the meantime, counts with the weight of 3 (1 because he was hired 3 years ago as engineer, and 2 because at the time of his master graduation, he was already an employee).
5. After ranking, the jury offers the employer the opportunity to accept the trophy in a ceremony, at the opening of the university year. The employer will be invited to participate, with those alumni who got hired.
6. The moment when the trophy is presented is a special one. It brings both image capital for all parties (university, faculty, employer), and also motivational capital. Thus, the young freshmen see real young people who has professionally succeeded by graduating this faculty. The representative of the employer receives the trophy and the floor to address the audience, after which the young alumni are invited to speak.
7. The trophy ceremony could have media coverage, with more positive outcomes.

The pros and the positive media features of the competition are the following:

• The university and the faculty openly demonstrate their commitment to secure work places for graduates (this is a fact, but is not accurately perceived as such by the students, the prospects, and the society in general). The efforts made are often not obvious.
• The idea that the graduates can not find work is circulated. The competition decisively contradicts this stereotype. In any case, engineers can find work. There are more employers who implicitly compete for this trophy, hiring more graduates.
• It is a proof that there is still an industry, with important employers (in spite of a skeptical perception which infests mass media and social networks sometimes). New employers might be brought in the media spotlight. The Romanian dynamics in the industrial domain is and will stay positive, especially in the aeronautic industry, air transport and astronautics.
• Freshmen and students clearly see a professional road ahead, an example, and they network with their older peers. The motivational benefit is certain.
• The graduates see themselves in the spotlight at the faculty they graduated, growing their feeling of belonging to the Alma Mater academic community, the pride to be a Politechnist and Aerospace Alumnus, and starts a virtuous circle of involvement in the life of the university and of the faculty.
• The relationship with alumni is intensified and amplified, also maintenance of the alumni database is eased, more interest is generated for the alumni to register in it.
• In today’s circumstances, when employers dedicate budgets to get favourability in the market place, looking to attract young people of good professional quality, such a trophy could turn into a image hit for them, and in a couple of years could get their special attention.
• The fact that the invited employers have this opportunity at the trophy award ceremony to speak their mind has the virtue to attenuate frustrations that persist sometimes, that professors do not mind the opinions of the employers. Generally, the employers are dissatisfied that graduates are not ready to perform, and they have to spend time to train the new hires, forgetting that the role of the university is mainly formative and less informative, and forgetting that the final stage in the education of an engineer is the junior engineering stage. Those employers who got the trophy will have their voice heard louder, which would bias those opinions toward favourability to the university and to the faculty.
• In the industry, the visibility of the university and the faculty grows. Thus, the university as national leader of the technical upper education, exerts a role of a referee in a competition for a prize, with objective, incontestable, transparent and clear rules, which should eliminate any suspicion and should legitimate this role.
• The visibility of some employers grows in the academic community and the potential to close direct agreements and partnerships grows.

In the Faculty Executive Bureau of 13 September 2017 it was decided that the reference date to be 31 August instead of 31 December (Art. 1), to make relevant those most recent employments in the same year. Also at Art. 5 the ceremony date was set firmly at the opening of the university year. In the old version it was optional (”usually at the opening”).

In the Faculty Executive Bureau on 12 December 2018 it was changed the method to collect data in the Alumni database. Instead of questionnaires sent to employers, the number accounted for will be the number of Junior members of the Asociația Alumni Politehnica Aerospace Engineering, who supply themselves the data where are they being employed, by adherence to the organization). We mention that Junior members (5 years since graduation) are not paying any fee. Due to the GDPR, employers are no longer able to provide these information to the Faculty. In the same time, the time frame of 4 years has been extended to 5 years, to make the Junior membership equivalent to the count of the number of employees.