CareerMarket, a project under way at the Charles University's Natural Sciences Faculty since June, is designed to bridge a gap between the university and small and midsize businesses, matching fresh graduates with potential employers.

"Through this project we want to facilitate entering the job market for our students and provide high-quality workers to companies," said Dean of the Natural Sciences Faculty Pavel Kovář. "As Charles University's largest faculty, we would like to reach beyond our five-year curriculum."

CareerMarket is a not-for-profit project financed by the Labor Ministry and European Union's project PHARE 2003. The program's main goal is to find companies across the nation willing to enroll students in internship programs to explore topics in their theses that have practical results for the companies or to establish some other type of cooperation that would lead to future employment.

Working the networks

To date, CareerMarket has made contact with 80 companies with 50 or more employees requesting participation in its fledgling project. So far, one-quarter of the addressed companies agreed to cooperate.

"After [the revolution in] 1989 companies lost contacts with universities and now they are re-establishing them again," said Šolcová, coordinator of the project. "They realize that it is important to grow their future workers."

CareerMarket organizers are now negotiating with the university's Mathematics and Physics Faculty to extend the project. Šolcová added that cooperation between students and companies differs in each case.

"Some companies choose to assign a thesis and another to offer an internship," she said.

Finding a perfect match

Traditionally the nation's higher-education programs have been research-oriented and lacked any real connection with the commercial sphere. Companies and schools are now trying to build communication between the two.

"The number of students who want to pursue a scientific career is rather small," Kovář said. "The majority of graduates will find a career in the business sphere."

Companies, in turn, are interested in keeping skilled graduates at home, and ways to discourage them from seeking work abroad are very attractive to them.

"If we want to compete, we need to attract the best workers," said Jindřich Houžvička, representative of Turnov, north Bohemia–based Crytur, a producer of laser rods and components as well as scintillation materials, detectors and crystal-based precise optics and mechanics.

"Finding those people is problematic because many good graduates go to look for jobs abroad."

Crytur employs about 50 workers and invests up to 25 percent of its annual revenue into research and development.

The CareerMarket Web portal includes an electronic database of last year's students, as well as companies looking for employees.

Martin Weiser, a fifth-year student of biology, hails the project as a boost to his search for a career path.

"I would like to build a scientific career, but this market is very limited," he said, "so I would not decline an offer from the commercial sphere."