Key Success Factors for the Integration of Industry and Education in Maritime and Foreign-related Business Majors in Chinese Universities

Abstract

Aims: This study examines the key success factors for integrating industry and education in maritime and foreign-related business majors at universities. It focuses on professional contexts such as cross-border commerce, shipping logistics and maritime-related services, highlighting the distinctive characteristics of these fields in terms of cross-border positioning, maritime relevance, international compliance and bilingual competence. Study Design: This study categorises the key success factors for industry-education integration into four groups: school-based factors, enterprise-based factors, school-enterprise coupling factors and external environmental factors. These groups are further divided into secondary indicators, including schools' organisational R&D capabilities, schools' reputation and authority, and teachers' practical abilities. Place and Duration of Study: This study focuses on maritime and foreign-related business majors at vocational colleges, applied undergraduate colleges and research universities in Shandong Province. Methodology: Using context analysis, the Delphi method and importance-performance analysis (IPA), the study systematically explores the key success factors and proposes targeted optimisation paths. Results: The results indicate that school-related factors, the organisational coordination ability of maritime/foreign-related enterprises, cross-border school-enterprise communication mechanisms and cross-cultural coupling are important and perform well. The compatibility of talent training programmes, collaboration in knowledge and technology innovation, the quantity and diversity of maritime/foreign-related job supply, the scale of maritime/foreign-related industry-education resources, cross-border information coupling and the atmosphere of industry-education integration are important, but their performance is unsatisfactory. Conclusion: The study therefore identifies areas that should be maintained, moderately adjusted, actively strengthened or prioritised for improvement. Its findings may support more targeted implementation of industry-education integration in maritime and foreign-related business majors.