"They cannot answer basic questions," he says. "Our success rate for hiring young graduates is one out of five." It's always a challenge for new graduates to find that first job, but experts say it is worse in this country than elsewhere. Companies, short on qualified staff, do not want to hire graduates because they often lack essential skills. And schools are not helping: Insiders like Kout say study programs are too detached from professional reality and that graduates require a lot of training.

But a change could be on its way.

These days, more universities are availing themselves of a special European Union Structural Funds program that helps bring professionals into the classroom to teach — an effort to bridge the gap between the text book and the real world.

First steps

Structural Funds are monies the EU gives to new member states in order to help their economies catch up with the rest of the union.

To see how the funds translate into helping a school, look no further than Liberec Technical University's Mechatronics department, which focuses on informational technology, among other things.

The department recently got about 8 million Kč ($335,993) from the EU and is using that to pay industry experts to lecture in its classrooms and help its graduates overcome the gap dividing a lecture hall from a real job. The funds also help give companies a role in curriculum development, something they have long sought.

The department's efforts will involve 16 experts from several companies, including carmaker Škoda Auto, e4t electronics for transportation, Cadence Innovation, Modelárna Liaz and Lenam.

"Usually employers know specifically what they want from their employees and have to provide additional training to newly employed fresh graduates.

This project is designed to bridge this gap," says Antonín Potěšil, the main coordinator of the initiative at the university, which will target about 100 students of the department.

He said the effort will also help students because they can get a clearer picture of the technology that is in use on the job, which is often more advanced than what the university can offer.

That fact has in the past created problems when graduates get jobs and have to adjust to computer or lab equipment they have never used.

Škoda Auto, the main partner of the project at Liberec, is enthusiastic about the opportunity to take part in the teaching process.

"Schools are showing more will for cooperation," says Jaromír Koloc, the company's coordinator of the Coaching and Marketing to Universities department.

He added, however, that projects like this one are still rare.

Potěšil said that Škoda Auto has been cooperating with the department for a long time, but industry experts were not involved in the teaching process.

"People know each other and communicate with each other, but it was mainly on the personal level," Potěšil says.

Up to now the university has mainly been doing research projects upon orders from companies.

Koloc says that projects like this one are the first signs of a trend that companies would like to see.

"We have years-long cooperation with universities and are trying to purposefully influence them to change their curriculums. For example to send students for internships in our company," he said.

Financial help

The Liberec example — which, experts say, other universities are paying attention to — is just one of 164 different projects that make use of EU funds, which the Education Ministry dole out during application stages.

The ministry has already had one call for project applications, is in the middle of a second and is considering a third in the near future.

"Announcing the third call for proposals will depend on the number and quality of projects submitted during this round," says Kateřina Pösingerová, head of the Structural Funds department at the Education Ministry.

According to the ministry's Web site, 69 of the projects getting EU money are concerned with the development of teaching programs.

So far, the ministry has handed out 112 million Kč to finance projects.

Lubomíra Černá, a spokeswoman for the ministry, says that the ministry supports closer cooperation between schools and the business sector, but it is up to each particular university to come up with initiatives for such cooperation.