Empowerment Mechanisms and Practical Pathways of Enterprise Attachment Programs for University Counselors in Promoting Employment-Oriented Education: A Perspective of Ideological and Political Education

Employment-oriented education is an integral part of ideological and political education in Chinese universities and a key link in fulfilling the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education. At present, graduate employment is under pressure from both aggregate supply and structural mismatch, and students’ attitudes toward career choice are changing in visible ways. In practice, employment work often gives more weight to job placement than to value guidance, and more to job-hunting skills than to long-term career development, which falls short of the character-building mission of ideological and political education. Counselors are the backbone of students’ day-to-day ideological and political education, and their own understanding of the occupational world directly conditions how effective employment-oriented education can be. Sending counselors to enterprises for temporary on-the-job attachments is an institutional experiment that aims to bridge the cognitive gap between campus and workplace and to strengthen counselors’ educational capacity. Drawing mainly on the enterprise attachment program at South China University of Technology, and on earlier explorations at Tianjin University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and other institutions, this paper examines the mechanisms through which enterprise attachments empower employment-oriented education at three levels, namely cognitive, competency-based and ecological, and proposes practical pathways in five areas: value guidance, top-level design, process management, outcome transformation and institutional support. The study argues that counselor enterprise attachments are not job training in the ordinary sense; they are an effective vehicle for embedding the value guidance of ideological and political education into the whole process of employment work, and they carry positive implications for building a development-oriented system of employment-oriented education.