Family-friendly BME
Family-friendly, talent management and career development programmes - BME is committed to ensuring equal opportunities for its employees and students. The University helps its staff to maintain a work-life balance, organises health-friendly prevention programmes, strives to create a family-friendly working environment, and has set up a reintegration grant programme with professional mentoring to reintegrate lecturers and colleagues with young children back into work and research.
BME Family Friendly Community Space
The Family Friendly Community Space was established on the ground floor of Building E in autumn 2023 to provide a baby- and child-friendly space for parents with young children and involved with BME, who wish to continue their academic or professional activities and university studies while caring for their children, thus helping their gradual return to the University and the world of work. The multifunctional space offers a playroom, a separate room for nursing and nappy change as well as a tea kitchen.
The opening of the new space was accompanied by a day-long event called "Changing Shifts", where the citizens of BME could get acquainted with the family-friendly community space, participate in a series of health screenings in a special screening bus and a special interactive lecture series with work-life balance as its main topic.
Family Friendly Workplace and For Families Award
The University has won the 2023 For Families and Family Friendly Workplace Awards. By awarding these two titles, the awarding body recognised the measures and infrastructure investments made by BME in 2023 to give greater consideration to the employment aspects of colleagues with families.
Back to Science! reintegration grant and mentoring programme
The BME Talent Support Council supports lecturers and staff with young children, wishing to return to work through the "Back to Science!" grant by providing a regular monthly contribution combined with professional mentoring. The amount of the support is HUF 85,000 gross per month, and it takes the form of a grant. Successful applicants will receive this amount for 12 months.
University Career Planning Programme
The BME Talent Support Council launches tailor-made university career planning courses for doctoral students and young BME lecturers-researchers. With expert help, participants can create a concrete career and action plan to consciously build their future university career. Two trainers coach participants of the training in small group sessions (12-15 participants) and during individual consultations to help them become more effective in managing their university life and career.
BME Gender Equality Plan 2022-2025
BME attaches great importance to women's career choices in engineering and science, and encourages their involvement in academic life, research and publications. The publication „BME Gender Equality Plan 2022-2025” (BME GEP), which was adopted by the Senate of BME in December 2021 after lengthy preparations, is a testimony to this.
Our acknowledgments
In 2023, BME won the Family-Friendly Workplace Award and the accompanying HUF 2,000,000 grant, which the University spent on the development of the Family-Friendly Community Space.
The aim of the tender “Support for the Creation and Development of Family-Friendly Workplaces” (Code: CSP-CSBM-23) is to support programmes that create and develop family-friendly workplaces facilitating the reconciliation of work and private life, and the coordination of family, private and work obligations. The project aims to provide assistance in important areas of life: coordinating family life and creative work as fine as possible, a well-balanced workforce can work much more efficiently. It is useful for the employees, as their family life and work become more harmonic and their lives more balanced; and indirectly also for the society as a whole, as growing families and value-creating work are the two most important resources of the nation. Therefore, the tender aims to support those family-friendly workplace practices and policies, measures and developments that promote the reconciliation of work and family life. The winners are entitled to use the title “Family-Friendly Workplace” according to the conditions specified in the grant award document.
About the Certificate: The Family-Friendly Hungary Center is a non-profit public interest company that encourages the strengthening of families and the deepening of the family-friendly approach of Hungarian society. BME has held the Family-Friendly Workplace Brand Certificate since 2024.
Having the Family-Friendly Workplace certification brand, we represent family-friendly values by forming an alliance with fellow labor market actors. Workplaces applying to the programme are qualified according to the implementation of family-friendly perspectives within their organisation, while service providers are qualified according to the implementation of family-friendly perspectives outside their organisation. However, any organisation can apply in both categories. Obtaining the certification serves as credible proof of the organisation's commitment to family-friendly principles. The obtained certificate significantly increases the ability of workplaces to retain and attract labor, and in the case of service providers, it contributes greatly to the market success of the given service.