NEWARK, N.J. — NAVAIR was honored with the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) Top Government Partner Award at a recognition and awards ceremony at NJIT’s Campus Center atrium in Newark, NJ on April 8. The event was hosted by NJIT’s Career Development Services (CDS) and invited many of NJIT’s recruitment partners to attend and receive awards.

“It was an honor to be recognized,” said Michele Huk, Director of Business Operations at NAVAIR’s Lakehurst site, who received the award on behalf of NAVAIR. The award was presented to Huk by Basil Baltzis, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at NJIT.

Presently, 44 NJIT graduates are full-time employees of NAVAIR, said Huk. Thirty of those have been hired in the past six years —evidence of the flourishing relationship between the organizations.

NAVAIR and NJIT share a long history of recruiting, explained Huk. "It (the award) solidifies our strong partnership with NJIT to build a pipeline of future hires," said Huk, who first began recruiting at NJIT in 2007 when she joined NAVAIR's Workforce Development Team as a team lead. She went on to say that “…it is a testament of all the hard work and effort both NAVAIR and NJIT put forth to support existing Educational Partnership Agreement (EPA), University Capstone Program and recruitment efforts.”

In 2012, NAVAIR and NJIT signed an EPA. The partnership provides both organizations with access to talent and state-of-the-art technological resources. NAVAIR’s University Capstone Program, another area of partnership between NAVAIR and NJIT, also promotes the sharing of talent and resources between organizations as it provides students with the opportunity to work on actual engineering projects and present their findings to NAVAIR representatives.

Additionally, NAVAIR participates in several of NJIT’s recruitment activities including career fairs, on-campus interviewing and posting opportunities on NJIT’s online job listing system. NAVAIR and NJIT are also entertaining the possibility of entering into a cooperative education (co-op) relationship, said Huk. A co-op program would allow students to work at NAVAIR in lieu of classroom learning so that they may gain hands-on experience working on real-time engineering projects.

In addition to the presentation of awards, the day-time event was also peppered with presentations on recruitment best practices by NJIT recruitment partners and employers of NJIT students.