In the context of modern trends in the field of higher education in Kazakhstan, as well as the global trend of globalization, the issues of quality management of university education, its competitiveness are of particular importance and relevance.
Educational institutions are forced to develop and implement in their practice a marketing system that most effectively allows you to plan, organize and control the efforts of an educational institution to implement its activities.
In the current conditions, strategically thinking administrations and many institutions try to use modern management technologies that increase the potential of universities, their ability to win the fight for applicants, grant programs, and orders from production. One of these technologies is the technology of image work or image-making, which is a system of procedures and operations aimed at forming and spreading an attractive image of the university.
Successful image promotion makes the university attractive to consumers of its products, whether they are applicants, scientific institutions or enterprises of any field. At the same time, the image is one of the most effective ways of reengineering the university environment, ensuring the build-up and mobilization of internal resources in order to improve the quality of vocational education.
In the modern scientific literature, the concept of “image” is interpreted as a set of values, thanks to which an object becomes known and “with the help of which people describe it in a certain way, remember it, relate to it”, i.e., a system of people’s ideas about an object. And, therefore, the image of the university is a general idea consisting of a set of beliefs and feelings that consumers (real and potential) of educational goods and services have about the educational organization.
Traditionally, the components of the image of the University there are: educational services of the University ( professions, the quality of teaching, the prestige of diplomas, cost of services, employment opportunities); the teaching staff of the University (socio-demographic characteristics, General knowledge, competence); founder/leaders of the University (socio-demographic characteristics, psychological characteristics); students ( style of life, the General cultural level); the socio-psychological characteristics of University (organizational culture, socio-psychological climate of the team); the visual characteristics of the University (architecture, interior design, branding, appearance of personnel); social characteristics of the University (social aspects of the activities of the University).
The image of the university consists of many internal and external components. The opinion about each component of the image of the university, in turn, influences the formation of the image of the organization as a whole. However, to build an adequate strategy for managing the image of the university, it is necessary to know which of them are of priority importance, which components of the image of the university act simultaneously as criteria for choosing this organization.