For early-career researchers (ECRs), building a digital research space can feel like another burden piled onto an already demanding schedule. The idea of online professional networking often evokes images of overwhelming social media feeds and self-promoting influencers.
Yet ECRs face a significant risk by solely relying on institutional platforms for their digital footprint: information portability. While university websites offer high visibility as trusted sources, most ECRs on short-term contracts lose web and email access as soon as their contracts expire. This often forces a hasty rebuild of their online presence precisely when they need to navigate critical career transitions.
Having worked with doctoral and postdoctoral candidates across Europe, common initial hesitations to establishing a digital research space include: uncertainty about how and where to start, discouragement from senior researchers who dismiss digital networks as not “real” work, fears of appearing boastful and/or the paralyzing grip of impostor syndrome. Understanding these hesitations, I emphasize in my coaching the ways that building a digital research space is a natural extension of ECRs’ professional growth.
Why a Strategic Digital Research Space Matters
A proactive, professional digital strategy offers several key advantages.
Enhancing visibility and discoverability: A well-curated, current, consistent and coherent digital presence significantly improves discoverability for peers, potential collaborators, future employers, funders, journal editors and the media.
Networking: Strategically using digital platforms transcends institutional and geographical boundaries, enabling connections with specific individuals, research groups and relevant industry contacts globally.
Showcasing expertise and impact: Your digital space allows you to present a holistic view of your contributions beyond publications, including skills, ongoing projects, presentations, teaching, outreach and broader impacts.
Meeting communication expectations: As research advances, particularly with public funding, the demand to communicate findings beyond academic circles increases. Funders, institutions and the public expect researchers to demonstrate broader impact and societal relevance and a strategic digital presence provides effective channels for these crucial communications.
Controlling your narrative: Actively shape your professional identity and how your expertise is perceived, rather than relying on fragmented institutional profiles or database entries.
Ensuring information portability and longevity: Platforms like LinkedIn, ORCID, Google Scholar or a personal website ensure your professional identity, network and achievements remain consistent, accessible and under your control throughout your career.
Getting Started: Choosing Your Digital Network Combination
The goal isn’t to be online everywhere, but to be online strategically. Select a platform combination and engagement style aligned with your specific objectives and target audience, considering the time you have available.
Different platforms serve distinct strategic aims and audiences at various research stages. Categorizing digital platforms into three subspaces helps map the landscape and can help you develop a more balanced presence across the research cycle.
First, identify the primary strategic goal(s): public dissemination, professional networking expansion or deeper engagement within your academic niche? Your answer will guide your platform selection, as you aim for eventual presence in each space.
Figure 1: Align your digital platform choices with your strategic goals and target audience.
Next, consider your audience spectrum. Effective research communication depends on understanding your target audience and their needs.
Scholarly discourse: At the outset of your career, specialized academic platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, institutional repositories and reference managers with social features (e.g., Mendeley) are key for engaging directly with peers. Foundational permanent identifiers like ORCID are crucial for tracking outputs across systems.
Professional network: As you seek to develop your career, LinkedIn, Google (including Google Scholar) and X (formerly Twitter) are vital hubs across academia, industry and related sectors.
Share for impact: TikTok, Facebook and Instagram excel for broader dissemination. Do adjust style and tone: While academics can process jargon and complex concepts, a broader audience will engage more in plain English.
A strong, time-efficient and pragmatic starting point is to create a free and unique researcher identifier number like an ORCID, develop a professional LinkedIn profile and engage with a relevant academic platform (this would be in addition to your presence on a university or lab website). Because the ORCID requires no upkeep and a LinkedIn profile can leverage existing institutional and biographical information, with this combination ECRs can quickly establish a solid foundation for gradual digital expansion over the medium term.
Make It Manageable: Time, Engagement and Content
Once the platform combination is in place, effective digital management requires balancing three core elements: time, engagement and content.
Figure 2. Key considerations for a sustainable digital networking strategy: balancing realistic time investment, meaningful engagement and appropriate content types.
Time Investment
Key message: Prioritize consistency over quantity.
Focused engagement: Allocate short, regular blocks (e.g., 15 to 30 minutes weekly) for specific activities like checking discussions, sharing updates or thoughtful commenting between periods of focused research.
Platform nuance: Invest strategically, recognizing that platforms have different tempos and life spans (e.g., a LinkedIn post typically has a longer life span than an X post).
Campaign bursts: Plan ahead to strategically increase activity around key events like publications or conferences, utilizing scheduling tools for automated posting.
Content cadence: Consistency beats constant noise, so plan a realistic posting schedule such as once a month.
Engagement
Key message: Focus on short but regular efforts.
Active participation: Move beyond passive consumption by commenting, sharing relevant work and asking insightful questions.
Build relationships: Genuine interaction fosters trust and meaningful connections.
Monitor your impact (optional): Use platform analytics to understand what resonates and refine your strategy.
Content Type
Key message: Your hard work should work hard online.
Written: Summaries, insights, blog posts, threads, articles.
Visual: Infographics, diagrams, cleared research images, presentation slides.
Multimedia: Short explanatory videos, audio clips, recorded talks.
Cross-post: Share content across all relevant platforms (e.g., post your YouTube video on LinkedIn and ResearchGate).
Overcoming Reluctance
If you’re hesitant, consider these starting points:
Start small, stay focused: Choose one or two platforms aligned with your top priority. Master these before expanding.
Embrace learning: Your initial digital content may not be perfect, but consistent practice leads to significant improvement. Give yourself permission to progress.
Integrate, don’t isolate: Weave digital engagement into your research workflow. Share insights from webinars or interesting papers with your network.
Give and take: Focus on offering value by sharing insights, asking stimulating questions and amplifying others’ work. Reciprocity fuels networking.
Set boundaries: Protect your deep work time. Schedule dedicated slots for digital engagement during lower-energy periods and manage notifications wisely.
Be patient: Recognize that building meaningful networks and visibility is a long-term career investment.
Your Digital Research Space: A Career Asset
A strategic digital research space is essential for navigating and succeeding in a modern research career. A thoughtful approach empowers you to control your professional narrative, build lasting networks, meet communication expectations and ensure your valuable contributions are both visible and portable.
Maura Hannon is based in Switzerland and has more than two decades of expertise in strategic communication and thought leadership positioning. She has worked extensively for the last 10 years with doctoral and postdoctoral candidates across Europe to help them build strategies that harness digital networks to enhance their research visibility and impact.
Sensemaking is an essential part of one’s personal knowledge mastery, so vital that it ought to be a regular practice for any human, particularly those who desire to be taken seriously and be able to add value in workplaces, communities, and societies. Sensemaking centers on a desire to solve problems and gets fueled by curiosity.
Jarche shares that there’s a whole spectrum of potential sensemaking approaches, everything from filtering information (making a list), or contributing to new information (writing a thesis). Sensemaking requires practice and vulnerability. We aren’t always going to get things right the first time we come to a conclusion.
Half-Baked Ideas
In introducing the idea of “half-baked ideas,” Jarche writes:
If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view.
As I reflect on my own ability to come up with half-baked ideas, it all depends on how controversial whatever idea I might be having at the time is as to whether I’m inclined to share it in a social space. I find myself thinking about what hashtags or even words might attract people looking for an internet fight, or wanting to troll a stranger.
If a half-baked idea I might share is related to teaching and learning, I am less concerned about who may desire to publicly disagree with something, but it it is about politics, I just don’t see the value in “thinking aloud,” in relation to what internet riff raff may decide to come at me, metaphorically speaking. Part of that is that I’m not an expert, while another aspect of this resistance is that I would rather do this kind of sensemaking offline. This is at least in terms of me trying out ideas about various policies, political candidates, and issues of the day.
Committing to Practice
I just launched a sensemaking practice involving books about teaching and learning. Usually, I read upwards of 95% of the authors’ books that I interview for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. However, I would like to both find other ways to surface my own learning from all that reading, along with cultivating a set of skills to get better at video.
The series is called Between the Lines: Books that Shape Teaching and Learning and I anticipate eventually getting up to producing an average of one video per week. I won’t hold myself to quite as high of expectations as I do for the podcast, since for that, I’ve been going strong, airing a podcast every single week since June 2014 and I don’t want to have that kind of self-imposed pressure for this experimentation, skill-building, and sensemaking practice.
This blog was kindly authored by Professor Paul Marshall, Vice-President (Global Campus) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Careers & Enterprise), University of East London.
As the UK Government prepares its long-awaited White Paper on the future of higher education, it is timely to reflect on the purpose and impact of our universities. At their best, they are not simply sites of knowledge creation – they are instruments of national capability. Few challenges illustrate that more vividly than cybersecurity.
When I joined a panel at the CyberBay Cybersecurity Conference in Tampa earlier this month, Dr Richard Munassi, Managing Director of Tampa Bay Wave, opened with a warning that set the tone for the discussion:
We are in a cyber war – a war waged by well-financed, state-backed criminal organisations so sophisticated that they have their own HR divisions.
He was right. Earlier this year, Jaguar Land Rover was forced to suspend production after a ransomware attack that rippled across its global supply chain. The UK Government’s intervention – with a support package approaching £1.5 billion – made clear that cybersecurity is not an IT issue; it is economic infrastructure.
As the sector awaits the Government’s vision for the future, one truth already stands out: higher education must not only prepare individuals for work – it must prepare the nation for risk.
At the University of East London (UEL), that challenge sits at the heart of our institutional strategy, Vision 2028, which seeks to transform lives through education, innovation, and enterprise. The strategy’s organising principle – Careers-First – redefines employability as capability.
Rather than positioning careers as an outcome of study, it embeds professional practice, enterprise, and resilience into every degree and partnership. The test for every programme is simple: does it equip our students to adapt, contribute, and lead in industries defined by constant change?
Nowhere is this approach more tangible than in cybersecurity. Our BSc Cyber Security & Networks, MSc Information Security & Digital Forensics, and Cyber Security Technical Professional Degree Apprenticeship all combine rigorous academic study with live, industry-based application.
Students work directly with BT, IBM, Fujitsu, and Ford, tackling real-time challenges in threat analysis, data forensics, and network defence. By the time they graduate, they are not simply work-ready — they are work-proven, having contributed to the resilience of the very sectors they will soon join.
The results speak for themselves:
With Siemens UK, students tested firmware vulnerabilities in industrial systems, informing Siemens’ internal training programmes.
With Barclays Eagle Labs, they created a fraud-analysis dashboard now in pilot testing.
With NHS Digital, they developed a ransomware-simulation tool to train hospital teams in incident response.
Each collaboration demonstrates a single idea: learning is most powerful when it changes the world beyond the classroom.
UEL’s Institute for Connected Communities (ICC), led by Professor Julia Davidson OBE, anchors this model in research excellence and policy leadership. The ICC brings together computing, criminology, psychology, and social science to examine the human, technical, and organisational dimensions of online safety.
Its research informs the UK Council for Internet Safety, Ofcom, UNICEF, and multiple international governments. Through projects such as Global Kids Online, ICC research directly shapes teaching, ensuring that our graduates understand not only how to secure systems, but why digital trust matters to society.
As policymakers consider the future role of universities in the forthcoming White Paper, the ICC already provides a working example of how academic research translates into practical and regulatory impact.
The White Paper will also need to consider how global collaboration strengthens national capability. UEL’s Global Campus model demonstrates how this can work in practice — connecting students and employers across India, Greece, Egypt, and the United States to create shared pathways for study, innovation, and employment.
Our developing partnership with Tampa Bay Wave, framed within the UK–Florida Memorandum of Understanding (2023), offers one illustration. We are building both virtual and physical experiences that will enable UEL students to engage with Florida’s growing cybersecurity and fintech ecosystem through mentoring, live projects, and placements, while providing a London base for US start-ups entering the UK market.
A genuine transatlantic bridge is being constructed – designed for movement in both directions, connecting students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to co-create secure-by-design technologies and governance frameworks. It is the Careers-First model, scaled globally.
The next phase of cybersecurity will occur where AI, data, and physical systems converge. Attacks will target intelligent infrastructure – transport grids, hospitals and manufacturing. UEL is already embedding these challenges into its curriculum, guided by ICC research. Students design adversarial-AI tests, examine supply-chain vulnerabilities, and develop frameworks for organisational resilience.
This approach recognises that technology evolves faster than any static syllabus. Students are therefore treated as co-creators, working alongside academics and employers to design the solutions industry will need next.
As the UK Government prepares its White Paper, one principle should underpin the national conversation: universities are not peripheral to resilience – they are central to it. They educate the workforce, generate the research, and sustain the partnerships that keep the nation secure.
UEL’s Careers-First model, aligned to Vision 2028, embodies that principle. It fuses employability, enterprise, and global engagement into one coherent system of capability. Our collaboration with Tampa Bay Wave is a single, tangible expression of this – connecting East London’s lecture theatres to innovation ecosystems across the Atlantic.
In a global cyber war, the question is not whether universities should respond, but how fast they can. At UEL, that response is already underway – this is what Careers-First looks like.
As colleges and universities reconsider their long-term online program management (OPM) strategies, many are opting to bring services back in-house. But taking that leap from a traditional OPM model to a more autonomous, self-directed approach requires more than good intentions. It demands a deep, institutional understanding of your operational readiness.
That’s where this discovery workbook comes in.
Designed for higher ed leaders who are exploring the feasibility of an internal OPM model, this interactive guide walks you through the foundational questions, functional assessments, and strategic planning tools you need to make informed decisions and set your institution up for long-term success.
You’ll explore your institution’s current capabilities and uncover critical gaps across data, tech, and talent — while equipping your teams to take aligned, strategic action.
What’s Inside?
Strategic readiness prompts to evaluate your institution’s vision, leadership alignment, and change management culture
Functional deep-dives into five core operational areas: market research, marketing, enrollment, retention, and academic services
A robust gap analysis rubric to assess capabilities across data, technology, and talent
Planning tools including a RACI matrix and a rose-thorn-bud exercise to turn insights into action
Guidance on identifying the right support partners and what to look for in a modern, DIY OPM model
Whether you’re just beginning to evaluate your current OPM contract or actively planning for transition, this workbook offers a practical path forward.
Use this interactive workbook to explore what it takes to manage your online programs in-house.
Our mission is to enable impact in higher education. We help our partners achieve more, deliver superior experiences, and drive impact across the entire student lifecycle by leveraging and aligning data, technology, and talent.
Trust is fundamental to all of our relationships, and it is vital for meaningful relationships.
It can be an anchor in uncertain times, as explored in this special edition of the International Journal of Academic Development. Within higher education, trust underpins our diverse institutional relationships with students, and their families, friends and supporters; colleagues, regulatory bodies, employers, trade unions, students’ unions, prospective students and schools, international partners as well as local communities and many other groups. These individual interactions combine to build a complex matrix of relationships in which trust originates, takes form or develops.
Or sometimes, it doesn’t. Uncertainty and complexity can stifle relationships, suppressing trust as partners hold back or withdraw, leading to a crisis in confidence. A lack of trust can derail any relationship, well intended institutional narrative or strategy.
Having trust often means believing that you matter in some way to a person, or to the people working in an organisation, or system, enough for them to care about your experiences and feelings. It’s possible to trust without being highly engaged, but it’s difficult to get engaged without having trust.
Trust matters in higher education because universities are there to support individuals to achieve their goals, whether these are in teaching or research. Those individuals need to feel that people and systems are designed to include and support them. Trust has to be earned and it can easily be lost. Reflecting on the many challenges for the UK higher education sector and the multifaceted priorities and constraints it will be impossible to meet the expectations and aspirations of our students, colleagues and partners unless there is trust at every level.
When we encounter media articles like this one from the Guardian, we are asked to consider the possibility that trust in the whole system of higher education is beginning to fail – perhaps a consequence of massification and a loss of faith in education for its own sake, rather than as a passport to a shrinking pool of traditional jobs. We need to talk about why higher education remains worthwhile, and how we can work together to maintain trust in it and to ensure that students feel their own value as part of its systems.
Nurturing relationships
When we build trust we are also building partnerships. When we recognise an institution as trustworthy, we are frequently noting that it delivers on what it has promised and that it values relationships with its stakeholders; it holds itself accountable. And it is not just about the large-scale sector wide challenges, it is also about considering how we build trust through the average everyday experiences of our diverse student and colleague communities.
Creating trustful spaces in the classroom is one element of this. Teachers’ perception of trust-building has shown that trust is based on teachers’ care and concern for students as much as on their subject knowledge and teaching ability. Research on how students in engineering perceive trust-building efforts also shows that they value attention to them as individuals most highly. They also use their trust in the institution to mitigate perceived problems with individual colleagues or services, believing that the university, or their department, makes student-centred decisions with respect to recruiting and training lecturers and professional services staff, and accepting that occasionally, they may not find an individual teacher trustworthy.
Trust and accountability also underpin meaningful cultural change in uncomfortable spaces and sensitive areas. When we trust each other we can have difficult conversations and begin to accept the existence of hidden barriers across our diverse colleague and student groups. Inside the university, teams must trust each other, empathising with each other’s views and values – 2024’s report from AdvanceHE and Wonkhe showed that trust is paramount when leading strategic change in challenging times. Because of this, trust underpins institutional sustainability; particularly within a sector that is currently responding to rising costs and income constraints.
Nurturing relationships through difficult choices about resources and provision requires a fine balance, transparency, and accountability if trust is to be maintained and difficult decisions explained. Few people would continue a relationship in which trust has broken down or with someone or something that they would describe as untrustworthy, but many of use will recognise the situation where this has happened and all parties feel powerless to rebuild the trust.
What can individuals and leaders do?
Trust can be expressed in many forms: You can trust me, I trust you, you can trust yourself, you can trust each other. Within a complex array of opportunities and challenges which call for attention, HE institutions will benefit from finding the most appropriate strategies, performance indicators and (regulatory) endorsements which will create trust and accountability in their provision to build their reputation. As leaders, how do we show colleagues that we trust them? How do we encourage others to show that they trust us? What do we do to ensure that we are trustworthy?
At a larger scale, a trustworthy research partner shares ideas, makes it easy to distribute funding between institutions, invites contributions from stakeholders, colleagues working in the field, and students. A trustworthy community partner supports students and employees from the local area, ensuring that they feel welcome and valued, and uses local services. A trustworthy internationalised university supports cultural diversity and makes both moving to and working with research and teaching easier by explaining practical and organisational differences. By considering how long-term relationships are built and maintained, we can develop a track record of ‘quality’ provision and demonstrate that they are ‘worth it’ to students, colleagues, funders, regulatory bodies, employers and other partners.
When trust in leaders or institutions is lost, the response is often rapid and drastic, with changes in staff and policies having the potential to create further turbulence. As the research with students showed, trust in institutions and systems can survive individual lapses. Maybe a first step should always be to try to rebuild relationships, making oneself, the university, or the system slightly vulnerable in the short term as we work to show that higher education is a human activity which may sometimes not work out as planned, but which we believe in enough to repair.
We can work at all kinds of levels to build and foster trust in our activities. Public engagement has the power to counter hostile narratives and build trust and so does effective partnership work with our local communities, students and Students’ Unions. Working together, listening to and valuing our partners’ perspectives enables us to identify and mitigate the impacts of challenges and take a constructive and nuanced approach to build both trust and inclusive learning communities. If we are to tackle our current pressing sector challenges and wicked problems such as awarding gaps when trust in public institutions is low, it has never been more important to collaborate with our partners, be visibly accountable and focus on equity.
So how can we work together to offer a holistic view of the benefits and value that focusing on trust building can bring? We are keen to build a community of practice to systematically strengthen trust across the HE sector. Join us to develop a trust framework which will explore environments that increase or decrease trust across stakeholder groups and consider how to encourage key trust behaviours such as sharing, listening, and being accountable in a range of professional contexts.
If you are interested, get in touch and let us know what trust in higher education means to you: Claire HamshireRachel Forsyth. Claire and Rachel will be speaking on this theme at the Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November – find out more and book your ticket here
As students and teachers prepare for a new school year, it’s important to remember that success in the classroom isn’t just about academics; it’s about supporting the whole child. From motor skills and posture to organization, focus, and sensory regulation, the right strategies can make the learning process smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.
While occupational therapy (OT) is often associated with special education, many OTs like me use and share the supportive tips and tools described below in general education settings to benefit all learners. By integrating simple, classroom-friendly strategies into daily routines, teachers can help students build independence and confidence and see long-term success.
Motor skills
One of the most crucial areas to address is motor skills. Many children entering kindergarten have not yet fully mastered tasks such as cutting or forming letters and shapes correctly. Simple strategies can encourage independence, such as using a “scissor template” taped to a desk to guide proper finger placement or offering verbal cues like “thumbs up” to remind children how to hold the tool correctly. Encouraging the use of a “helper hand” to move the paper reinforces bilateral coordination.
For writing, providing small pencils or broken crayons helps children develop a mature grasp pattern and better handwriting skills. Posture is equally important; children should sit with their feet flat on the floor and their elbows slightly above the tabletop. Adjustable desks, sturdy footrests, or non-slip mats can all help. Structured warm-up activities like animal walks or yoga poses before seated work also prepare the sensory system for focus and promote better posture while completing these tasks.
Executive function
Equally important are executive function skills–organization, planning, and self-regulation techniques–that lay the foundation for academic achievement. Teachers can support these skills by using visual reminders, checklists, and color-coded materials to boost organization. Breaking larger assignments into smaller tasks and using timers can help children manage their time effectively. Tools such as social stories, behavior charts, and reward systems can motivate learners and improve impulse control, self-awareness, and flexibility.
Social-emotional learning
Social-emotional learning (SEL) is another vital area of focus, because navigating relationships can be tricky for children. Social-emotional learning helps learners understand their emotions, express them appropriately, and recognize what to expect from others and their environment.
Traditional playground games like Red Light/Green Lightor Simon Says encourage turn-taking and following directions. Structured programs such as the Zones of Regulation use color-coded illustrations to help children recognize their emotions and respond constructively. For example, the “blue zone” represents low energy or boredom, the “green zone” is calm and focused, the “yellow zone” signals fidgetiness or loss of control, and the “red zone” reflects anger or frustration. Creating a personalized “menu” of coping strategies–such as deep breathing, counting to 10, or squeezing a stress ball–gives children practical tools to manage their emotions. Keeping a card with these strategies at their desks makes it easy to remember to leverage those tools in the future. Even something as simple as caring for a class pet can encourage empathy, responsibility, and social growth.
Body awareness
Body awareness and smooth transitions are also key to a successful classroom environment. Some children struggle to maintain personal space or focus during activities like walking in line. Teachers can prepare students for hall walking with warm-up exercises such as vertical jumps or marching in place. Keeping young children’s hands busy–by carrying books rather than using a cart–also helps. Alternating between tiptoe and heel walking can further engage students during key transitions. To build awareness of personal space, teachers can use inflatable cushions, small carpet squares, or marked spots on the floor. Encouraging children to stretch their arms outward as a guide reinforces boundaries in shared spaces as well.
Sensory processing
Supporting sensory processing benefits all learners by promoting focus and regulation. A sensory-friendly classroom might include fabric light covers to reduce glare, or subtle scent cues used intentionally to calm or energize students at different times. Scheduled motor breaks during transitions–such as yoga stretches, pushing, pulling, or stomping activities–help reset the sensory system. For students with higher sensory needs, a “calming corner” with mats, pillows, weighted blankets, and quiet activities provides a safe retreat for regaining focus.
The vital role of occupational therapists in schools
Employing OTs as full-time staff in school districts ensures these strategies and tools are implemented effectively and provides ongoing support for both students and educators alike. With OTs integrated into daily classroom activities, student challenges can be addressed early, preventing them from becoming larger problems. Skill deficits requiring more intensive intervention can be identified without delay as well. Research demonstrates that collaboration between OTs and teachers–through shared strategies and co-teaching–leads to improved student outcomes.
Wishing you a successful and rewarding school year ahead!
Linda Rini, OTD, MS, OTR/L, CLC, Touro University School of Health Sciences Occupational Therapy Program
Linda Rini, OTD, MS, OTR/L, CLC, is an assistant professor in the Touro University School of Health Sciences Occupational Therapy Program.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)
The rapid adoption and development of AI has rocked higher education and thrown into doubt many students’ career plans and as many professors’ lesson plans. The best and only response is for students to develop capabilities that can never be authentically replicated by AI because they are uniquely human. Only humans have flesh and blood bodies. And these bodies are implicated in a wide range of Uniquely Human Capacities (UHCs), such as intuition, ethics, compassion, and storytelling. Students and educators should reallocate time and resources from AI-replaceable technical skills like coding and calculating to developing UHCs and AI skills.
Adoption of AI by employers is increasing while expectations for AI-savvy job candidates are rising. College students are getting nervous. 51% are second guessing their career choice and 39% worry that their job could be replaced by AI, according to Cengage Group’s 2024 Graduate Employability Report. Recently, I heard a student at an on-campus Literacy AI event ask an OpenAI representative if she should drop her efforts to be a web designer. (The representative’s response: spend less time learning the nuts and bolts of coding, and more time learning how to interpret and translate client goals into design plans.)
At the same time, AI capabilities are improving quickly. Recent frontier models have added “deep research” (web search and retrieval) and “reasoning” (multi-step thinking) capabilities. Both produce better, more comprehensive, accurate and thoughtful results, performing broader searches and developing responses step-by-step. Leading models are beginning to offer agentic features, which can do work for us, such as coding, independently. American AI companies are investing hundreds of billions in a race to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This is a poorly defined state of the technology where AI can perform at least as well as humans in virtually any economically valuable cognitive task. It can act autonomously, learn, plan, and adapt, and interact with the world in a general flexible way, much as humans do. Some experts suggest we may reach this point by 2030, although others have a longer timeline.
Hard skills that may be among the first to be replaced are those that AI can do better, cheaper, and faster. As a general-purpose tool, AI can already perform basic coding, data analysis, administrative, routine bookkeeping and accounting, and illustration tasks that previously required specialized tools and experience. I have my own mind-blowing “vibe-coding” experience, creating custom apps with limited syntactical coding understanding. AIs are capable of quantitative, statistical, and textual analysis that might have required Excel or R in the past. According to Deloitte, AI initiatives are touching virtually every aspect of a companies’ business, affecting IT, operations, marketing the most. AI can create presentations driven by natural language that make manual PowerPoint drafting skills less essential.
Humans’ Future-Proof Strategy
How should students, faculty and staff respond to the breathtaking pace of change and profound uncertainties about the future of labor markets? The OpenAI representative was right: reallocation of time and resources from easily automatable skills to those that only humans with bodies can do. Let us spend less time teaching and learning skills that are likely to be automated soon.
Technical Skills OUT
Uniquely Human Capacities IN
Basic coding
Mindfulness, empathy, and compassion
Data entry and bookkeeping
Ethical judgment, meaning making, and critical thinking
Mastery of single-purpose software (e.g., PowerPoint, Excel, accounting apps)
Authentic and ethical use of generative and other kinds of AI to augment UHCs
Instead, students (and everyone) should focus on developing Uniquely Human Capacities (UHCs). These are abilities that only humans can authentically perform because they need a human body. For example, intuition is our inarticulable and immediate knowledge that we know somatically, in our gut. It is how we empathize, show compassion, evaluate morality, listen and speak, love, appreciate and create beauty, play, collaborate, tell stories, find inspiration and insight, engage our curiosity, and emote. It is how we engage with the deep questions of life and ask the really important questions.
According to Gholdy Muhammad in Unearthing Joy, a reduced emphasis on skills can improve equity by creating space to focus on students’ individual needs. She argues that standards and pedagogies need to also reflect “identity, intellectualism, criticality, and joy.” These four dimensions help “contextualize skills and give students ways to connect them to the real world and their lives.”
The National Association of Colleges and Employers has created a list of eight career readiness competencies that employers say are necessary for career success. Take a look at the list below and you will see that seven of the eight are UHCs. The eighth, technology, underlines the need for students and their educators to understand and use AI effectively and authentically.
For example, an entry-level finance employee who has developed their UHCs will be able to nimbly respond to changing market conditions, interpret the intentions of managers and clients, and translate these into effective analysis and creative solutions. They will use AI tools to augment their work, adding greater value with less training and oversight.
Widen Humans’ Comparative Advantage
As demonstrated in the example above, our UHCs are humans’ unfair advantage over AI. How do we develop them, ensuring the employability and self-actualization of students and all humans?
The foundation is mindfulness. Mindfulness is about being fully present with ourselves and others, and accepting, primarily via bodily sensations, without judgment and preference. It allows us to accurately perceive reality, including our natural intuitive connection with other humans, a connection AI cannot share. Mindfulness can be developed during and beyond meditation, moments of stillness devoted to mindfulness. Mindfulness practice has been shown to improve self-knowledge, set career goals, and improve creativity.
Mindfulness supports intuitive thinking and metacognition, our ability to think clearly about thinking. Non-conceptual thinking, using our whole bodies, entails developing our intuition and a growth mindset. The latter is about recognizing that we are all works in progress, where learning is the product of careful risk-taking, learning from errors, supported by other humans.
These practices support deep, honest, authentic engagement with other humans of all types. (These are not available over social media.) For students, this is about engaging with each other in class, study groups, clubs, and elsewhere on campus, as well as engaging with faculty in class and office hours. Such engagement with humans can feel unfamiliar and awkward as we emerge from a pandemic. However, these interactions are a critical way to practice and improve our UHCs.
Literature and cinema are ways to engage with and develop empathy and understanding of humans you do not know, may not even be alive or even exist at all. Fiction is maybe the only way to experience in the first person what a stranger is thinking and feeling.
Indeed, every interaction with the world is an opportunity to practice those Uniquely Human Capacities (UHCs):
Use your imagination and creativity to solve a math problem.
Format your spreadsheet or presentation or essay so that it is beautiful.
Get in touch with the feelings that arise when faced with a challenging task.
Many students tell me they are in college to better support and care for family. As you do the work, let yourself experience as an act of love for them.
AI Can Help Us Be Better Humans
AI usage can dull our UHCs or sharpen them. Use AI to challenge us to improve our work, not to provide short cuts that make our work average, boring, or worse. Ethan Mollick (2024) describes the familiar roles AIs can profitably play in our lives. Chief among these is as a patient, always available, if sometimes unreliable tutor. A tutor will give us helpful and critical feedback and hints but never the answers. A tutor will not do our work for us. A tutor will suggest alternative strategies and we can instruct them to nudge us to check on our emotions, physical sensations and moral dimensions of our work. When we prompt AI for help, we should explicitly give it the role of a tutor or editor (as I did with Claude for this article).
How do we assess whether we and our students are developing their UHCs? We can develop personal and work portfolios that tell the stories of connections, insights, and benefits to society we have made. We can get honest testimonials of trusted human partners and engage in critical yet self-compassionate introspection, and journalling. Deliberate practice with feedback in real life and role-playing scenarios can all be valuable. One thing that will not work as well: traditional grades and quantitative measures. After all, humanity cannot be measured.
In a future where AI or AGI assumes the more rote and mechanical aspects of work, we humans are freed to build their UHCs, to become more fully human. An optimistic scenario!
What Could Go Wrong?
The huge, profit-seeking transnational corporations that control AI may soon feel greater pressure to show a return on enormous investment to investors. This could cause costs for users to go up, widening the capabilities gap between those with means and the rest. It could also result in Balkanized AI, where each model is embedded with political, social, and other biases that appeal to different demographics. We see this beginning with Claude, prioritizing safety, and Grok, built to emphasize free expression.
In addition, AI could get good enough at faking empathy, morality, intuition, sense making, and other UHCs. In a competitive, winner-take-all economy with even less government regulation and leakier safety net, companies may aggressively reduce hiring at entry level and of (expensive) high performers. Many of the job functions of the former can be most easily replaced by AI. Mid-level professionals can use AI to perform at a higher level.
Finally, and this is not an exhaustive list: Students and all of us may succumb to the temptation of using AI short cut their work, slowing or reversing development of critical thinking, analytical skills, and subject matter expertise. The tech industry has perfected, over twenty years, the science of making our devices virtually impossible to put down, so that we are “hooked.”
Keeping Humans First
The best way to reduce the risks posed by AI-driven change is to develop our students’ Uniquely Human Capacities while actively engaging policymakers and administrators to ensure a just transition. This enhances the unique value of flesh-and-blood humans in the workforce and society. Educators across disciplines should identify lower value-added activities vulnerable to automation and reorient curricula toward nurturing UHCs. This will foster not only employability but also personal growth, meaningful connection, and equity.
Even in the most challenging scenarios, we are unlikely to regret investing in our humanity. Beyond being well-employed, what could be more rewarding than becoming more fully actualized, compassionate, and connected beings? By developing our intuitions, morality, and bonds with others and the natural world, we open lifelong pathways to growth, fulfillment, and purpose. In doing so, we build lives and communities resilient to change, rich in meaning, and true to what it means to be human.
The article represents my opinions only, not necessarily those of the Borough of Manhattan Community College or CUNY.
Brett Whysel is a lecturer in finance and decision-making at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, where he integrates mindfulness, behavioral science, generative AI, and career readiness into his teaching. He has written for Faculty Focus, Forbes, and The Decision Lab. He is also the co-founder of Decision Fish LLC, where he develops tools to support financial wellness and housing counselors. He regularly presents on mindfulness and metacognition in the classroom and is the author of the Effortless Mindfulness Toolkit, an open resource for educators published on CUNY Academic Works. Prior to teaching, he spent nearly 30 years in investment banking. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University and a B.S. in Managerial Economics and French from Carnegie Mellon University.
The shooter who killed Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk Wednesday on the Utah Valley University campus appeared to fire from the roof of a university building that houses administrative offices and student advisement services.
The Losee Center for Student Success is a 90,000-square-foot building with a mix of campus offices and student services that underwent a $4.5 million renovation in 2009. The building is fewer than 200 yards from the outdoor amphitheater where Kirk was speaking. A video taken by an attendee captures images of what appears to be the shooter standing on the roof of the building after the shooting and running away.
“The rooftop to the Losee building is pretty easy to access,” a CNN reporter said in a video analysis of the shooting. “It’s connected to another building by an elevated walkway, which … is only separated from the roof by a railing.”
Because of the distance and accuracy of the shot, it was likely fired from a large-caliber rifle, Jim Cavanaugh, a former officer of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said on MSNBC show The Beat with Ari Melber. “It does appear to be a large rifle round,” Cavanaugh said. “I would call it a .308 or a .30-06, like a deer rifle. One shot. That’s all.”
Cavanaugh explained that “Snipers use that attack method for two reasons. One, they can’t get close … and secondly, because you want to get away. That gives you the distance to get away. You can fire the round and then egress from the scene.”
“Two hundred yards is not a difficult rifle shot,” Christopher O’Leary, former director of hostage recovery for the federal government, told Melber. “Most people have optics on their weapon. … With a true optic on it, 200 yards is very easy to do.”
The university, in Orem, Utah, prohibits guns on campus to the extent allowed by state law. Utah’s Concealed Weapons Law allows people with a state concealed carry permit to be on campus with a concealed firearm, according to the campus police website.
An estimated 3,000 people were attending the Kirk event, the first of a series of campus talks the conservative activist was scheduled to hold around the country. Kirk was shot while answering a question about mass shootings. “Do you know how many mass shootings in America there have been over the last 10 years?” an attendee asked, the CNN video analysis shows. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responded before he was hit.
Local police and half a dozen campus police officers provided security at the event, but there was no screening, the CNN analysis said.
“Let’s be realistic,” O’Leary said on The Beat. “We’re not going to lock down a college campus for every speaker outdoors. Maybe you want to take it indoors. I think that’s all going to be assessed moving forward.”
Phil Lyman, a former Utah state legislator who was at the event, said on The Beat that he saw what he believed were “a lot of undercover police officers running around” after the shooting, which surprised him. “I would not have thought that [those were officers].”
The campus is closed for the week while law enforcement officials conduct their forensic work.
Across higher ed, the financial squeeze is tightening. Between shrinking enrollment and uncertain funding, colleges and universities are scrambling to deliver value with far less cash. Every purchase, from lab beakers to toner cartridges, now faces intense scrutiny. After all, one way to uncover excess spending is to identify blind spots and inefficiencies in how organizations buy.
That drive for savings puts procurement teams squarely in the hot seat. Seven in ten procurement leaders rank cost management as their most critical capability today and for the years ahead, according to Economist Impact. Yet decentralized purchasing, patchwork systems, and limited spend visibility continue to drain institutional resources.
Savvy institutions are flipping that script, moving from reactive penny-pinching to proactive value creation by consolidating spend, leveraging supplier partnerships, and centralizing purchasing oversight.
From reactive buying to proactive value creation
Financial uncertainty now dominates the higher ed landscape. To navigate it successfully, universities must shift from tactical price checks to total-value management, leveraging lessons from other industries that have successfully implemented AI-powered automations to boost efficiencies and cut costs, University Business reports. It’s the difference between playing defense and offense—both matter, but one drives wins.
This strategic transformation requires three foundational moves: gaining real-time visibility into campuswide spending patterns, establishing centralized oversight without bureaucratic friction, and building supplier relationships that deliver value beyond the initial purchase price.
“Reducing spend is important, but increasing value matters more,” shares Rosie Grigsby, senior sales manager for higher education at Amazon Business. “When you’re looking at things only from a price perspective, you’re missing out on other value aspects like quality, lifecycle, support, training, and more,” she explains. “When thinking about total value, I’m thinking about how a supplier is enhancing student experiences while giving university employees time back through efficiencies.”
To make that possible, procurement leaders would be wise to prioritize the visibility problem: You can’t optimize what you can’t see. Gaining visibility into campuswide spending starts with breaking down the silos that keep procurement teams in the dark.
Visibility and control: Centralizing spend without adding bureaucracy
Imagine navigating unfamiliar terrain with a GPS that only shows you one street at a time. When departments buy in silos, institutions lose their ability to see the bigger picture, eroding spend leverage, killing negotiating power, and complicating compliance. Each isolated purchase decision chips away at potential savings and strategic control.
Consider the cascading impact: With fragmented purchasing, universities could be paying different prices for the same product across departments, missing significant volume discounts, and discovering duplicate software licenses only during audits. Worse yet, audits could reveal policy violations that were invisible until it was too late.
Unsurprisingly, research by the IBM Center for the Business of Government shows that centralized procurement correlates with higher savings, efficiencies, and compliance. Even so, many procurement leaders struggle with organization-wide visibility.
The solution isn’t building a bureaucratic fortress around every purchase decision. Rather, modern procurement solutions maintain centralized control while giving end users the flexibility they need, eliminating the process bottlenecks that drive departments to work around procurement entirely.
Solutions could be lying dormant in tools you already own. “Universities often underutilize e-procurement systems and automations they already have licenses for,” Grigsby notes. “Electronic catalogs, automated approval workflows, single sign-ons (SSOs), analytics—tools like these cut time from sourcing to receiving while enhancing compliance and reducing errors.” What once took days of spreadsheet analysis can now happen automatically, freeing teams to focus on strategy, not data entry.
Building strategic supplier relationships
Too many institutions treat suppliers as vendors, not partners. Transactional supplier relationships are short-term and price-focused: you buy something, and you’re done. Strategic supplier relationships, on the other hand, are ongoing partnerships built on trust and alignment with the university’s mission.
“Without strong supplier relationships, you’re missing out on partners who help you anticipate needs, drive innovation, and uncover creative solutions,” Grigsby explains. “True partners embrace your university’s mission as their own and work to maintain or increase service levels through collaborative, strategic sourcing.”
These partnerships prove especially valuable during budget crunches, Grigsby adds, citing the ongoing collaboration between procurement teams and Amazon Business account executives as an example. “Our higher ed clients often leverage the know-how, experience, and ideas we’ve gleaned from working with their peers across the nation,” she explains. “Whether they’re pursuing sustainability goals or 100% automation in procurement, we help them identify ideal partners or find solutions that have worked well for other institutions facing similar challenges.”
Real results at Emory University
Emory University faced the classic procurement challenge: fragmented purchasing and spend visibility. By adopting a centralized purchasing approach through Amazon Business, procurement leaders reclaimed oversight, optimized workflows for users across the organization, and uncovered dramatic savings.
Guided buying and integrated search features brought the intuitive Amazon Business shopping experience right into Emory’s purchasing system. These integrations drove adherence to procurement policies while giving users flexibility to conduct price comparisons and complete purchases directly within Emory’s existing system. Plus, buyers enjoyed savings through Business Prime shipping and tax exemption on eligible purchases.
The payoff was significant, averaging thousands of dollars in savings each month. “Pretty hefty savings,” as one administrator put it.
Roadmap to resilience
As institutions rework purchasing strategies to boost value and savings, how can procurement teams position themselves as problem solvers instead of gatekeepers? Grigsby recommends three essential practices:
Proactive collaboration: Low collaboration with non-procurement buyers increases rogue buying risk, yet leaders currently rate collaboration as the least essential skill in procurement, according to Economist Impact. “When procurement reaches out to departments early to understand their pain points, especially in times of budget stress, they can engage, identify alternatives, and help internal customers reach their goals without being a blocker,” Grigsby advises.
Streamlined processes: Efficient procurement automates mundane tasks like recurring orders, approval workflows, and spend analysis while centralizing oversight. “Customers want to source, reconcile, and receive products easily so they can focus on mission-critical tasks,” Grigsby points out.
Broadcast successes: Procurement wins often go unnoticed despite their organizational impact. Share those wins—whether through newsletters, internal communications channels, or dashboards showing how much departments saved—to foster trust and collaboration.
Looking ahead, the financial pressures facing higher education make procurement transformation a necessity, not a luxury. Modern, cost-conscious procurement isn’t about saying no; it’s about finding better ways to say yes.
Higher education continues to grapple with its complicated reputational issues.
There’s probably never been a period of history in the UK when higher education enjoyed an uncomplicated relationship with the public and policymakers. From “elite to mass” there’s always been a debate about who should go and what universities’ public contribution should be.
But the current era does feel especially thorny, navigating populist politics, geopolitical uncertainty and, paradoxically, demand for higher education at a scale and diversity that is genuinely hard to satisfy.
In June, The Venn brought together leaders from across UK higher education to grapple with the complexities of the sector’s reputation – including an “unconference” exploration of a set of particularly thorny problems. Here, some of the convenors of those conversations consider the reputational and public impact questions that are occupying them and put forward some suggestions for building capacity in the sector to “defend and celebrate” the value higher education creates.
How can universities and government find the space and time to consider the scale and impact of impending demographic, technological and social change?
Joan Concannon, director of external relations, University of York
The UK university sector faces critical challenges driven by four interdependent forces, necessitating urgent collaborative action between the sector and government to prevent adverse impacts on future economic growth and social inclusion. The higher education sector, a significant export revenue generator and innovation instigator, is currently experiencing financial instability that will only worsen without system level evaluation.
Firstly, projections for the next two decades consistently show an increasing demand for skilled and graduate labor in the UK. This growth stems from both replacing existing workers and expanding graduate professions across public and private sectors. Data from Jisc, for instance, indicates substantial growth in UK labor market demand between 2020 and 2035, with the most significant net growth in roles requiring graduate-level qualifications. The UK already faces longstanding shortages in areas like engineering and health and social care.
Secondly, a major misalignment exists between the skills projected as necessary by the Industrial Strategy, particularly in eight key Industrial Strategy areas, and current student enrollment in those fields. Forthcoming research from University of York and Public First, supported by QS, aims to quantify this mismatch, highlighting a national skills gap that threatens the UK’s ability to capitalise on future economic opportunities in key industrial areas.
Thirdly, demographic shifts are leading to a projected decline in the overall supply of UK home undergraduates. HEPI forecasts a potential drop of approximately 7 per cent between 2030 and 2035, with an even steeper decline of up to 20 per cent by 2040. While a potential rise in demand for retraining from older adults in the labor market, exacerbated by generative AI and technological advancements, could partially offset this, the current HE funding model appears ill-equipped to handle these profound demographic and technological shifts. The UK also invests less in training compared to many other advanced economies, further complicating the situation.
Finally, widespread financial constraints within the university sector are forcing institutions to close courses and rationalise subjects to cut costs. As universities undertake these actions independently, a significant risk arises: neighbouring institutions often make similar changes, leading to an aggregate loss of supply in crucial areas. This inefficiency could result in the regional or even national closure of, or loss of access to, key subject areas for undergraduate study, further exacerbating skills shortages.
Collectively, these four forces are compelling the UK university sector to engage in individual financial “right-sizing” due to budgetary pressures and forthcoming demographic dips in home students. This reactive approach risks stifling economic growth ambitions by failing to adequately supply the high-level graduate skills demanded by the current economy, let alone the future needs of the IS-8 frontier subsectors. Therefore, a major National Commission involving HE, government, and employers is urgently needed to define what the UK requires from its HE sector to achieve economic and social advancement, with this process starting immediately to preempt further turbulence from demographic and technological changes.
How should universities respond when the political winds shift?
Rachel Mills, senior vice president academic, King’s College London
The sector is increasingly exposed to fast changing policy pressure that is getting harder to predict. It is vital we consider how to assert our public value with confidence rather than simply adapt reactively to halt declines in longstanding contributions to society and communities.
Universities need to reconnect purposefully with the wider public, not just the politicians, especially voters who may not perceive the direct benefits of higher education. Campuses could be more open and porous, inviting local communities into our spaces, and seeking out groups who don’t normally engage with us. Building these bridges can renew understanding and support, essential in turbulent times.
We could also be much clearer and more unified in our advocacy, instead of fragmented sector voices. Participants argued for better coordination, perhaps even nominating a single strong advocate or developing sector-wide mechanisms for shaping policy. Acknowledging and addressing our sometimes “flabby inefficiency” through better organisational cohesion will make us more potent in policy debates.
Importantly, we must always foreground the opportunities universities create, from widening access and advancing social mobility to facilitating economic growth. Reinforcing this message and keeping our communication simple and relatable are essential, especially as complex arguments risk being lost amid hostile narratives.
There is a tension between seeking partnership with government – aligning with priorities like growth – and standing firm on our mission, even if that risks conflict. It’s about strategic balance, not binary choices, but universities do need to be proactive: setting the agenda, identifying solutions, and ensuring that we are heard in national conversations.
Ultimately, the sector must renew local and national engagement, strengthen collective advocacy, and keep messages focused. If we do so, UK universities can remain resilient, relevant, and able to shape a positive future, no matter which way the political winds blow.
Why don’t they like us? How universities can be more effective storytellers with the public
Rachel Sandison, Vice Principal (External Relations) and Deputy Vice Chancellor (External Engagement), University of Glasgow
The question “Why don’t they like us?” may sound provocative, but it captures a growing unease within the higher education sector. Universities, long seen as bastions of knowledge and progress, increasingly find themselves misunderstood, mistrusted, or even resented by segments of the public, and this is a predicament faced not just by the sector here in the UK but around the world.
This disconnect is not just a reputational issue; it is a strategic one. In an era of political polarisation, economic uncertainty, and rapid technological change, universities must reassert their relevance and value. That starts with better storytelling.
We are organisations that often speak in metrics – research outputs, rankings, graduate outcomes – but these do not always resonate with the public’s lived experience. The sector tends to communicate “at” people, not “with” them. There is a tendency to assume that the value of higher education is self-evident, when in fact, it needs to be continually demonstrated in ways that are real and relevant to the publics that we serve.
This also means we need to do more to avoid echo chambers. To make our case requires listening to, but also engaging with, harder to reach audiences, including those who are not just apathetic but vociferously anti-academy. We have to tell stories that are local, relatable, and emotionally resonant. In essence, we must tension impact with relevance; it is not enough to simply highlight groundbreaking research, we must show how it improves lives.
This also requires third party advocacy. Our stories can have greater traction and cut-through if they are told by those who have been positively impacted. As a result, we need to think about how we can best galvanise business leaders, our alumni community, city stakeholders and, most importantly, our own student and colleague community.
To do this we need to:
1. Invest in narrative capacity: Communications teams should be empowered not just to promote but to listen, curate, and co-create stories with diverse voices. We must also be intentional about content, channel, language and tone of voice.
2. Humanise impact: Move beyond abstract benefits to showcase real people – students, researchers, community members – whose lives are changed by university work.
3. Engage consistently, not just in crisis: Trust is built over time. Universities must be present in public discourse not only when defending themselves but when celebrating shared successes.
Ultimately, storytelling is not a soft skill, it is a strategic imperative. If universities want to be seen as essential, they must speak in ways that are accessible, authentic, and aligned with the public’s hopes and concerns.
How can universities strengthen relationships with local residents in their communities?
James Coe, associate editor, Wonkhe
Universities have never asked permission for what they do. They radically change the populations of their towns and cities, they build enormous housing that local people rarely have a say in, and they skew economies toward a student market. The only reason they can do what they do is because of an implicit bargain which says in return for supporting our success we will make the local economy stronger, create good jobs, and make places better to live in.
In making this implicit social contract real universities have launched compelling GVA reports, shown their impact through their civic university agreements, and composed the crispest press releases on exports, access, and skills. All of these measures are impactful but ultimately they are not stories for local residents. They are stories for policy makers and politicians already interested in what universities do.
The challenge in making what universities do feel real is obviously about intent. Fundamentally, is what a university is doing actually make a place better. However, it is also about communicating that intent in a way that reaches local audiences.
A communications strategy which is about leaders meeting residents where they are. Sending the vice chancellor to the local residents association, making representations at planning committees, talking on the local radio about issues of the day so they get a flavour of the university leadership, and working with civic leaders on the events, festivals, cultural celebrations, and the things that bring communities together, to remind people that an education institution in on their doorstep.
In the end most people do not care about the impact their university has on the country. They care about the impact it has on their lives, their family, and their place. Do not tell them about the university but tell them what it is doing for them in the places they are already listening. This moves the social contract from a fragile agreement to a rich dialogue deepened by all of those who understand its purpose.
Following the science: just how much do universities and government really want research impacting policy?
Sarah Chaytor, Director of Research Strategy & Policy, University College London
Universities are facing increasing pressure in terms of public perceptions of their value. Simply restating our usual “lines” on economic growth, innovation, and the graduate premium is not going to cut it, especially with the government making it clear that it wants universities to demonstrate explicitly and tangible value for citizens.
An often-overlooked but crucial way in which universities can deliver societal contributions is through academic-policy engagement – connecting research to policymakers in order to inform public policy development and decisions. As policy challenges faced by government across the UK become increasingly complex, access to high-quality evidence and external expertise becomes more important for a policy system which faces ever-greater burdens.
For many universities, policy engagement is seen in terms of a public affairs agenda which is about advancing individual institutional interest, rather than creating institutional capacity to support evidence use. Operational and cultural barriers, ranging from funding and contractual processes which are insufficiently agile to respond to a faster-paced policy environment to a lack of incentives to spend time on academic-policy engagement rather than grant applications or research publications, persist. Alongside this, uncertain and unpredictable outcomes require a “loss leader” approach – investing time and resource in advance of the “payoff” – and a strong commitment to supporting activity on the basis of public good rather than institutional ROI.
Academic-policy engagement seems to function on a model that requires a willingness to keep turning the kaleidoscope to adjust the picture and find sufficient levers and incentives to justify activity. At different points in time there may be incentives arising from the public policy system (eg government department areas of research interest or parliamentary thematic research leads) or from research funders (over the past five years, I estimate we’ve seen cumulative funding of at least £100 million for policy-focused research activities such as UKRI policy fellowships, ESRC Local Policy Innovation Partnerships, NIHR Policy Research Units and Health Determinant Research Collaborations, and the Research England Policy Support Fund). But there has not yet been a breakthrough intervention which has established academic-policy engagement as core to university missions.
So what could be done to shift the dial? There are three possible areas where more action is needed on the part of universities, government and funders:
Capacity: institutional structures in both universities and government and policy organisations need to better support the mobilisation and use of research knowledge in public policymaking (for example enhancing structures for engagement and rewarding it as part of the day job).
Capabilities: universities need to recognise and support academic-policy capabilities as part of broader research skills programmes, and work with funders and government around co-creating effective training for academic researchers and policymakers
Collaboration: universities need to get much better at working together to address policy evidence needs. The necessary expertise for most policy challenges will not be found in only one institution, nor do we look particularly efficient as a sector if individual institutions replicate interactions which could be undertaken collectively
![Building an Internal OPM [Workbook]](https://blog.college-counseling.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/1759786546_Building-an-Internal-OPM-Workbook.jpg)
