To facilitate implementation of the above priorities it is necessary to provide “life-long” integrated university education (Melnikas, 2008; Leydesdorff, 2004). “Life-long” integrated university education means that all the tools for specialist development are integrated into one single individualized process of university studies adapted to the development of every concrete specialist. This process has to include all stages of a specialist’s development during his/her career – from obtaining initial qualification to further qualification improvement.
An essential precondition for improvement of specialist development is creating and enhancing those links which are to ensure and expand interaction between educational systems and systems of professional activities. Absence of such links or their inefficient functioning is a serious obstacle for tangible improvement of specialists’ development.
Interaction of educational systems with systems of professional activities can be enhanced by various means. One of them is establishing and sustaining networks of special organizations with a prospect to integrate into them organizations whose functions include spreading specialists’ knowledge and advanced experience, received in the process of the development, across various professional fields (Steinmuller, 2002). Functions of such organizations would include:
• spread of advanced knowledge from educational systems to systems of professional activities: this spread of knowledge in the course of specialists’ development is an important prerequisite for creating a situation when professional systems start feeling the need for the knowledge and skills that future specialists are already receiving and training, but systems of professional activities are not yet aware of;
• generalization of the advanced knowledge and experience of systems of professional activities and its spread to
educational systems: it is an important prerequisite for ensuring that the advanced knowledge and experience, gained in practice, is immediately spread through educational systems and that specialists undergoing training receive and accumulate it without delay.
Such twofold functions could be fulfilled by different organizations of diverse structures and with a big variety of objectives and methods; various centers of innovations, special centers of innovations for public sector and for public management and administration, business incubators, science and technology parks and special consulting enterprises could be typical examples of such organizations. It is noteworthy that an important precondition for efficient operation of these organizations is rational specialization of each in systems of such organizations.
Quite a promising form of interaction between educational systems and professional systems is that of centers for spread of knowledge and advanced experience and networks of such centers. Such centers could be established in cooperation of universities with various business and public sector organizations. These centers would aim at attracting university staff and university students for research and practical project designing tasks, required by various business and public sectors; at the same time it would really implement the idea of interaction between specialist development systems and professional systems.
In conclusion of the above said it could be claimed that interaction of specialist development systems with professional systems should be viewed as an essential priority of public administration specialist development improvement