Enhancing the Quality of Services and Reputation Level in Technical Engineering Higher Education

Providing true quality services, better adapted to market requests in technical engineering higher education, poses a series of challenges for all Romanian and European universities. To overcome these issues, the first mandatory step is to conduct a thorough market research in order to identify the needs and the expectations of the stakeholders involved in the educational processes. Both former and present students and also companies, active on the labour market who will finally "buy" the qualified work force trained by each technical university, should be taken into account in gathering and processing the required data. For this to be accomplished, the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method has been adapted and applied in conducting a research that will constitute the first step in helping a technical university to identify the main issues that require improvements or immediate change, in order to be able to fulfil the present and future labour market requests and increase its reputation level at the same time.