Category: Uncategorised

  • Building Bridges: Enhancing employability through practically-based higher education

    Building Bridges: Enhancing employability through practically-based higher education

    In the last few weeks we have heard the worrying news that the number of young people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training (NEET) in the UK is close to one million. This is almost 300,000 higher than the same period in 2021 when the UK was contending with the scarred job market after Covid-19.

    The reasons for this trend are multi-faceted, including factors such as mental health issues and insecure and poor employment opportunities. However, in the face of a difficult and competitive job market, universities have their role to play in bridging this divide between higher education and the workplace.

    The need for innovative approaches to bridge this divide by enhancing graduate employability and addressing employer demands for work-ready graduates has never been more pressing. Recent research by the Edge Foundation, in collaboration with UCL’s Institute of Education, sheds light on the transformative potential of practically-based higher education models.

    The research took a case study approach using qualitative methods, looking at two post-92 higher education institutions in England, which included collecting empirical data using semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders from the two universities, including members of the senior leadership teams, teaching staff, other professionals and students. In this blog, I will go on to discuss some of the key findings from this research, including some of the challenges and opportunities for universities.

    Supporting employability through collaboration

    The creation of new staff roles has been pivotal in driving the employability agenda. These roles focus on developing opportunities such as placements, mentorships, and employer engagement, while traditional academic roles are evolving to integrate practical, work-focused elements. This holistic approach ensures that curricula are not only theoretical but also aligned with real-world applications.

    Industry partnerships play a crucial role in this effort. By involving industry advisors in curriculum design and creating spaces for students to engage directly with professionals through projects and networking, universities are building a meaningful ecosystem that bridges theory and practice. These collaborations enhance students’ employability and foster sustainable partnerships between education and industry.

    Creating effective learning spaces

    Diversifying learning spaces, both formal and informal, is important to ensure that students are not only taught subject-specific expertise but also equipped with the skills to effectively apply such knowledge in real-world contexts. From practical lab work and virtual simulations to client-facing projects and digital tools, these approaches provide students with hands-on, career-relevant skills. Broader assessment methods – like portfolio work, project-based evaluations, and even film development – align better with employer expectations, allowing students to showcase critical thinking, creativity and applied knowledge.

    Students highlighted how these methods built their confidence – often cited as a key attribute for career success. Exposure to professionals through guest lectures, career fairs and mentorship programmes was particularly impactful in empowering students to navigate the complexities of their future careers.

    In the case study universities, confidence building and the development of transferable skills were further integrated into the curriculum through interpreting and tailoring practice to the sector that is relevant to individual students. Therefore, all courses were developed and updated in line with students’ ‘pathway to professionalism’.

    Yet this is manifested differently for different disciplines to ensure it is relevant and closely links the theory to practice. For example, in the business school at one of the case study universities, students establish a LinkedIn profile and begin to form professional networks through it whilst at university.

    By contrast, the professional landscape exists very differently in arts and media, with professional networks being established in different ways. Students in arts are taught the skill of networking in person and conversational skills. Activities in this discipline have included practice dinner parties with the aim to collect others’ business cards. The activities in these two examples are vastly different, but both help build the social capital of the student, which has the most currency for their industry.

    The challenges and opportunities ahead

    While we witnessed in our case study universities a promising shift towards a practical and collaborative model, challenges remain. Employer engagement, for example, can be fragmented when universities rely on individual academic links without coordinated efforts. Listening to employers as equal partners and ensuring mutual benefit is critical for sustained collaboration.

    Universities must also balance top-down initiatives with bottom-up innovation, ensuring that work placements and experiences are meaningful and adaptable. Structured dialogue and collaboration between all stakeholders—students, educators and industry partners—are vital to refining these opportunities.

    A vision for the future

    As the job market evolves, the traditional academic model must adapt to meet the demands of employers and the aspirations of students. Practically-based HE models offer a pathway to achieving this balance, ensuring that graduates are not only knowledgeable but also work-ready. In today’s dynamic and rapidly changing workplace, employability is no longer confined to the domain of careers service teams. Instead, it has become a strategic priority embedded across all disciplines and interwoven into teaching and learning. The findings shed light on how universities are reimagining employability as a broader part of their agenda, through fostering collaborations and creating innovative pathways between academia and the workplace.

    Furthermore, this research explores how universities can integrate theory and practice to better prepare graduates for the workforce. By fostering collaboration between academia and industry, these models not only enhance employability but also empower students with the confidence and skills needed to thrive in a dynamic job market. As students pursue diverse goals through their education, universities are tasked with striking a balance between career-focused preparation and academic enrichment. By embedding employability throughout the curriculum and fostering collaboration across industries, higher education institutions can empower students with the skills, confidence, and connections they need to succeed.

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  • Brand or Bust: How Universities Can Thrive in the Face of Crisis

    Brand or Bust: How Universities Can Thrive in the Face of Crisis

    Today’s weekend reading is by Zeenat Fayaz, Director of Brand & Strategy at The Brand Education, and Brian MacDonald, Chief Creative Officer and a co-founder at Zillion.

    Pandemics, enrolment cliffs, budgets, student mental health, social media disinformation: higher education in crisis, globally, and it sometimes feels like crises are the new normal. This article explores these challenges in three key markets – the US, the UK and Canada – and proposes a change in the way universities think about communications to overcome such hardships.

    The Challenge

    Universities develop institutional strategies for growth and sometimes invest in brand strategies for perception management. However, when crisis communications are not integrated into these strategies, they can become distractions from them. Often when crises arise, neither institutional nor brand strategies are equipped to address them effectively. Nor does addressing them support either strategy.

    With crises seemingly becoming more frequent, this is an unsustainable model – the longer crises continue, the longer the distraction from institutional and brand strategies.

    The Opportunity: From Survive to Thrive

    With crisis management becoming a continual need, universities need a crisis strategy that doesn’t indefinitely distract from institutional and brand initiatives – one that allows universities to address all the audiences of the crisis with messages and media relevant to each. If this sounds like a brand, that’s because it is! We propose a new approach, a “thrive mode,” in which brand strategy elevated to equal status with institutional strategy, and crisis management is integrated into both.

    This approach transforms crises from distractions into opportunities to clarify the institution’s distinctive position and enhance its reputation.

    Survive versus Thrive: A Deeper Look

    Survive mode is a reactive approach to crises, treating each as a unique, temporary problem. It focuses on short-term damage control with transactional communication, often disconnected from overall institutional and brand strategies. Success in this mode is merely the survival of the institution and its brand reputation.

    Thrive mode, conversely, is proactive, viewing crises as opportunities to reinforce institutional and brand strategies. It aims for long-term reputation enhancement through brand-based communication that leverages institutional expertise and core values. Success is defined as emerging from crises with an enhanced reputation and stakeholder understanding, measurable by existing brand performance indicators.

    The change from survive to thrive offers numerous advantages. It allows for pre-crisis planning and offers efficiency by integrating with existing strategies. It allows for quicker, more coherent responses that align with overall brand and institutional messaging using existing brand communication tools. It involves broader stakeholder groups and leverages institutional expertise to provide a more valued response, resulting in trust and enhanced reputation beyond the immediate crisis.

    Case Studies: Putting Thrive Mode Into Action

    Survive mode has been displayed across headlines and news sites around the world since the inception of encampments and campus protests around the world since the advent of the Israel/Gaza conflict. Numerous university presidents provided testimony in front of Congressional hearings that reflected badly on their institutions. And the universities did survive, albeit with varying degrees of damaged brands, dismissed presidents, irate donors and declining applications.

    With thrive mode responses, instead of preparing, as in some cases, to offer legal testimony, consider the many different outcomes that could have been achieved by placing university experts in Middle Eastern studies, philosophy and ethics, comparative religions, history, or many other relevant fields at centre stage. Thrive mode would have prompted a response about higher education’s and individual institutions’ leadership in education on Middle Eastern issues, or how they are preparing students to participate in civil discussion and achieve breakthroughs in understanding. Such discussions would have haloed positively on these institutions by reinforcing their brand values with audiences outside the university, and by clarifying their roles in supporting dialogue, tolerance and understanding.

    Issues around academic freedom have been increasingly roiling universities in the UK, with the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) recording declines in each of the last nine years. The assessments measure interference by politicians, externally appointed management, and activists. Numerous crises have arisen involving scholarly censorship, the mainstreaming of racism and transphobia, and the stifling of academic pursuits that do not demonstrate profitable impact. The universities’ responses focused much negative attention on higher education, as a whole, and individual universities, in particular, in government, news media, and public opinion. And the responses allowed these negative stories to effectively lead the conversation, placing the universities in a reactive position. Survive mode squandered the opportunity to highlight universities’ research successes and student outcomes as well as to demonstrate leadership on important topics.

    Thrive-mode responses could have allowed institutions to talk about important discoveries that would not be possible under recent restrictions on academic freedom. About alumni who have made important contributions to the economy or society who would not qualify for student support today. About the universities’ missions and their historical relationships to government and society. About brand values that the universities rely on to drive their results. These responses would allow the universities to participate in, guide, and lead these conversations, putting their brands in positions to make an impact on important external audiences.

    With ongoing budget crises and newly imposed restrictions on the number of foreign student visas, universities in the UK and Canada are in uncharted territory. It’s not merely threatening many institutions with declines in funding, hard choices, and in some cases closure, but potentially reforming the entire higher education landscape. In a leaderless crisis where nobody knows what it will look like in the end, acting on coordinated institutional, brand, and crisis strategies effectively demonstrates leadership: with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and most importantly with the government. The opportunity is to talk about the budget crisis as a new lens through which to view the institutional strategy. A budget crisis does not change objectives like entering The Russell Group or becoming Canada’s premiere STEM educator. It may change the process of how an institution gets there – the timeline for milestones, the need for partners, the establishment of fundraising goals, etc. And brand strategy lays out ways to discuss how the crisis will affect its implementation with key audiences. This is what thriving looks like in the face of this crisis: opening and leading important conversations with governments, reassuring parents and inspiring students.

    Conclusion

    As Warren Buffett noted, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” In today’s media environment, a brand can be severely damaged in seconds. By integrating crisis management into overall institutional and brand strategies, universities can transform crises from threats into opportunities for growth and reputation enhancement. While crises may be inevitable, this framework offers a path for universities not just to survive, but to thrive in challenging times..

    Zeenat Fayaz is Director of Brand & Strategy at The Brand Education. Zeenat’s experience working with QS and THE gives her unique insight into the way institutions are evaluated and ranked. Today, Zeenat helps top-tier universities understand the power of branding and use this to enhance their global reputations. You can find Zeenat on LinkedIn here.

    And Brian MacDonald is the Chief Creative Officer and a co-founder at Zillion. He has worked on strategic, creative, and branding projects for dozens of universities in the US, Canada, and overseas. His work focuses on how branding can drive institutional revenue, and his work has raised more than $6 billion for his clients. You can find Brian on LinkedIn here.

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