As China’s industrial structure continues to upgrade, the market’s demands for technical and skilled talents are steadily rising. Employers now place not only high value on students’ practical skills but also increasingly emphasize their professional attitude, professional ethics, and innovative capabilities—essentially the “craftsman spirit” advocated in the new era. As the primary arena for cultivating technical and skilled talents, higher vocational colleges must leverage an educational model that integrates industry with education and fosters collaboration between schools and enterprises to embed the craftsman spirit throughout the entire process of talent cultivation. In recent years, domestic higher vocational colleges have actively responded to national vocational education reform policies by continuously advancing initiatives such as joint establishment of practical training bases with enterprises, pilot programs for the modern apprenticeship system, and customized training classes, thereby accumulating substantial practical experience in cultivating the craftsman spirit. However, from the perspective of overall educational outcomes, the cultivation of the craftsman spirit among higher vocational students still faces several practical challenges at this stage, including insufficient depth of school-enterprise collaborative education, an incomplete framework for cultivating these competencies, a weak linkage between teaching and practice, and outdated assessment and evaluation methods. Based on this analysis, this paper examines the current state of craftsman spirit cultivation in higher vocational colleges, identifies the prominent issues and underlying causes within the implementation process, and proposes improvement strategies focusing on areas such as school-enterprise collaboration mechanisms, curriculum and teaching reforms, faculty development, diversified evaluation systems, and the cultivation of an educational culture, with the aim of further enhancing the quality of craftsman talent cultivation in higher vocational colleges and supplying high-quality technical and skilled professionals to local industries.