From April 23rd to 25th, the 2023 World Congress of the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics (WFCP) was held in Montreal, Canada. More than 100 vocational colleges from over 30 countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, competed for 9 Awards of Excellence. Wuxi Institute of Technology (WXIT) has won the Silver Award of Excellence in Tourism and Hotel Management due to its international professional development characteristics and talent cultivation achievements of “transnational and segmented joint training of talents, and deep integration and development of schools and enterprises”. WXIT has previously won the “Applied Research and Innovation” Award and the “Personal Lifetime Achievement” Award, which becomes the only vocational college in China to receive the WFCP Award of Excellence for three consecutive times.
WXIT attaches great importance to internationalization, focuses on building a diversified international education cooperation system, and has gradually formed the “introduction-creation-export” mode of cultivating talent for international cooperation in higher vocational education, which has empowered the development of professional characteristics. WXIT’s department of tourism and hotel management major has carried out transnational joint training programs with undergraduate colleges and universities in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Ministry of Higher Education of South Africa respectively. Through the implementation of the special training of “Chinese language + vocational skills”, the program has cultivated more than 150 high-quality skilled international talents with cross-cultural communication skills from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and South Africa, and has been selected as the “China-ASEAN flagship program of cooperation between one hundred vocational schools from China and one hundred vocational schools from ASEAN”. Based on the building of the “Learning in Wuxi” quality project of dual colleges and universities, WXIT has created seven bilingual online courses such as “Tourism Marketing” and “Banquet Management”, providing available and tailored online learning programs for international students, which has benefited more than 2,000 people during the Covid-19 epidemic. WXIT has cooperated deeply with international and domestic famous enterprises to build internship bases for international students, providing rich resources for overseas teachers’ training, and helping to improve the international competence of students. The winning of WFCP Award of Excellence fully affirms the innovative practice of WXIT in exploring the cultivation of compound talents, digital upgrading and transformation, and the integration of college and enterprises, and also shows the achievements of WXIT’s internationalized education to institutions around the world.
Founded in 1999, the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics (WFCP), comprising vocational education organizations, colleges and universities of applied technology in more than 60 countries and regions, is the largest and most influential multilateral organization in the world of vocational education and universities of applied technology, and is regarded as “the most authoritative organization in the field of vocational education in the world”. WFCP aims to support the promotion of the exchange of vocational education experiences and international cooperation among countries, share and popularize the best practice cases of vocational and technical education, and promote the development of global vocational and technical education.
