Almost any country has several vocational education (VET) institutions which train programmers, welders, bakers, carpenters, social workers, etc. at the same time. With such a rich offer, perspective VET students typically have many questions when choosing a VET institution, curriculum, and future qualification. It is possible, of course, to use national ratings, assessments of recruiting agencies, consultations with HR managers and other methods of career guidance when choosing an educational path, but intuition suggests that this is an effective, but not the most innovative way. Actually, VET institutions themselves can solve this problem of identifying the "best education options" for their students, improving at the same time the employability of their graduates and their prestige.
The desire to integrate education of partner countries into the European educational area leads to an expansion of offers from colleges for identical or related qualifications, as shown by the WorldSkills Europe championships. At the same time, each educational institution seeks to highlight and preserve its “corporate identity”, as the basis for building a brand to increase recognition, competitiveness, and reputation. An important role in the process of development and promoting a positive image of an educational institution belongs to its graduates. The corporate identity they demonstrate in social and professional interactions is a key factor for their competitiveness, socialization in the professional community, career-building, goal setting and the implementation of life plans. Accordingly, contemporary pedagogical processes should be aimed at the development of portable skills of students, initially endowed with signs of corporate identity. The absence in the planned learning outcomes of skills “marked” by the peculiarities of corporate culture raises the risk of “erosion” of the unique professional and personal qualities, which are a kind of “markers” of graduates that distinguish them from representatives of other educational institutions, especially in terms of similar qualifications and professions.
The corporate culture of an organization has been always the main factor in the regulation of its life. Typically, educational organizations are treated as social systems and bureaucratic organizations (as in the works of M. Weber, T. Veblen, T. Parsons, K. Colin), and indeed systemic studies of educational institutions as a specific form of corporation appeared only in the 1960s. Unlike the corporate culture of commercial organizations, focused mainly on maximizing profits, the corporate culture of educational organizations has different focuses: disclosing the intellectual and creative potential of teachers and students, actualizing personal and professional abilities, developing relevant skills, improving the social and psychological climate. Consequently, when designing and implementing the pedagogical process, as well as to ensure its effectiveness and quality, it is necessary to focus on the ideological meaning embedded in the corporate culture and reflected in the content of its main structural elements: mission, values, norms and rules of behavior, traditions, and identity (including symbolism). The student's corporate identity is manifested through the transmission of a certain set of stable traits, which is determined by his/her worldview and patterns of social and professional behavior. Since the main “production process” of the VET institution is pedagogical, then corporate identity is formed mainly in the process of pedagogical interaction.
The most important question is then: how to enrich the achieved skills with a corporate identity, through a specific pedagogical interaction? The answer is both complex and simple. We can find an analogue of this action in marketing, and this is called "branding" – endowing a product with a corporate identity that gives an idea of who its manufacturer is. According to F. Kotler, the first definition of a brand sounded like "name, term, sign symbol (or a combination of these) that identifies the maker or seller of the product". By now, the emphasis in the concept of a brand has shifted towards its perception by the consumer, and a brand is defined as the intangible sum of product properties and a combination of the impressions it makes on consumers and the result of their experience in using the brand.
It follows from the above that the search for factors that stabilize the disequilibrium conditions of the pedagogical process and contribute to the development of the corporate identity of future graduates through the right skills acquisition is becoming relevant. In the author's opinion, the decisive factor may be the development of corporate identity at the levels of an educational organization (with focus on the curriculum) through the cognitive-emotional process of realizing oneself as a representative of a certain organization, with a certain degree of correspondence. Important components of corporate identity include acceptance by employees of organization's values, adherence to accepted norms, and super-role competence – the willingness to demonstrate super-role behavior. Super-role behavior is understood as the presence of an employee's intention to work above the norm. It means for a student to learn and know more than is suggested by the curriculum, to take an active part in the activities of the institution, to show initiative, to make responsive decisions and be purposeful.
From the above, we can conclude that the student's “corporate identity” is manifested through the translation of a certain set of stable traits, which is determined by specific worldview guidelines and patterns of social and professional behavior. This process can be ensured through targeted planning and implementation of the curriculum to achieve an appropriate set of soft and hard skills through pedagogical interaction. Whichever college is more successful in this challenge of managing curriculum and learning outcomes by means of corporate identity tools, will reap significant market advantages.
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