Tag: Mapping

  • Mapping how the industrial strategy is, and isn’t, showing up in HE policy

    Mapping how the industrial strategy is, and isn’t, showing up in HE policy

    While for the average member of the public the industrial strategy might just be that thing the government drones on about while guaranteeing a £1.5bn loan for Jaguar Land Rover, it’s been one of the key talking points and organising principles in higher education policy in 2025 – at least in the English system, despite the strategy being UK-wide.

    The run-up to June’s publication of the finalised strategy was characterised by plenty of debate about whether sufficient recognition was being paid to higher education’s role, and far less – depressingly, but rather characteristically for the sector – about how the strategy seeks to reshape the higher education and research systems to achieve its ends.

    As an indicative example, one entirely unremarked on aspect of the strategy – admittedly buried in a complicated graphic on page 34 of the technical annex – was that one of its outputs is increased enrolments in higher education and apprenticeship subjects that address skills shortages in the eight chosen sectors. In the strategy’s theory of change, an output is the result of a policy intervention, and some 18 are chosen in all – one of them involves changing what subjects higher education students study. This was surely worthy of closer attention.

    Six months after publication, we can see the industrial strategy showing up all across the new HE landscape that Labour is oh-so-gradually taking steps to unfurl – in the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, in maintenance grants, in capital funding, in high-cost subject premia, in local innovation funding, in PhD scholarships, in strategic research funding. In some of these areas we just have mere hints to go on, whereas in others the strategy is already a central organising idea. It’s also clear that in different areas of government, the strategy is being interpreted in different ways and used to achieve different priorities.

    We’re going to take a run through all of this, and attempt to gauge where the strategy is cutting deep and where it’s running pretty shallow. But to begin with we need to look back over the development process since Labour came to power, in order to understand what the industrial strategy is seeking to achieve and – just as importantly – where.

    From green to white

    The Invest 2035 green paper in autumn 2024 chose eight “growth-driving sectors” to be the focus of policy intervention and prioritisation (cue a degree of huffing and puffing that universities were not given enough prominence). This was followed by a consultation to greatly refine the detail and identify sub-sectors within each that were most key.

    Each of those concepts got a rebrand – the growth-driving sectors became the IS-8, the sub-sectors were rebadged as “frontier industries” – but at heart this was the thrust of the move from green paper to finalised strategy: a process of concentrating on a subset of the initial sectors.

    If you’re interested in how these choices were made, we are told that a five-point assessment of different possible sub-sectors took place, based around the criteria of growth potential, strategic alignment, sector interconnectedness, rationale for intervention, and presence of policy solutions.

    Here they all are (the IS-8 are the headings in red boxes, while the frontier industries are the bullet points):

    (the frontier industries in the finalised defence industrial strategy, published in September, were essentially unchanged)

    So with the chosen priority areas selected, our next step would be to think about how higher education fits in, you would think. But there’s a further element that is regularly overlooked – how the industrial strategy relates to place.

    A bowl of clusters

    The final strategy is clear throughout that its “picking winners” philosophy extends not just to specific parts of the economy, but also to the location in which they will be supported:

    The Industrial Strategy will concentrate efforts on those places with the greatest growth potential for the IS-8 sectors, namely city regions and clusters.

    The focus on sectors “cannot be divorced from considerations around place,” we are told – the “specific relationships between sectors and between places” has to be part of the equation. “All economic activity occurs somewhere,” it uncontroversially emphasised. All this focus on place “does not preclude” support for sectors in other, non-beknighted locations, however. And so:

    We focused on identifying and prioritising those city regions and clusters most important to the delivery of the Industrial Strategy. This process identified a set of unique city regions and clusters across the IS-8. To drive effective policy and maximise their growth potential, we also considered the interconnections between them.

    A cluster, in case you were wondering, for the purposes of the strategy is a geographically-connected network of “businesses, research capabilities, skilled talent, and support structures in related industries.” These ecosystems bring benefits of proximity for the businesses within them, including “deeper labour markets, knowledge sharing, innovation spillovers, and collaboration opportunities.” Their specificity makes them “well-suited to benefit from targeted support.”

    Similarly to the frontier industries, the move from green to white paper saw a process of cluster identification, which we’re told in the technical annex involved qualitative and quantitative analysis and engagement within government and with external experts, all to draw up a longlist (which we don’t get to see). This was then winnowed down to retain those with “highest growth potential” for each sector. Here’s a diagram of the process, for reference:

    In terms of the results – well, if you’re searching for specificity on exactly what is covered by each cluster, the finalised strategy documents don’t make it easy for you to pinpoint what’s included. Here’s the map for advanced manufacturing, taken from the technical annex again:

    This, however, assigns geographies to the sector as a whole, rather than to particular priority industries. For that, we need to look at the sector plans which (for the most part) were released alongside the industrial strategy. Here’s the first part of the map for advanced manufacturing again, this time with the priority industries specified:

    The regions in question are very broadly drawn at times – the clean energy industries map groups together Oxford and Solent (two areas which are not connected in any way, surely?) and has one “Scotland” cluster which includes Aberdeen, Highlands and Islands, the North Sea coast and, oh, the entire Central Belt. The bullet points are odd too, a mix of promotion of existing capacity and plans for future actions.

    There’s a much more thorough mapping of industrial strategy sector geographies available in the form of the DSIT cluster map, which was one of the inputs to the selection process. However, it’s only currently available for five of the IS-8, and is at the sector, rather than subsector, level.

    Handily, the map lets you superimpose university and R&D facility locations onto the clusters, which in theory would let you assess which are the “right” places for different kinds of higher education provision and research, were you so minded.

    It’s not clear this is on the government’s radar for tying together industrial strategy and HE policy, however – rather, what we’ve seen so far largely has its roots in a different way of thinking about the country’s skills needs.

    Demand for priority skills

    To recap: in order to finalise the industrial strategy, the Department for Business and Trade identified priority sectors (and “frontier” sub-sectors) of the economy, and engaged in a degree of prioritising certain places. At the same time, Skills England was taking a complementary but at the same time rather different approach – identifying priority occupations and priority skills.

    The main piece of work here was the quango’s Assessment of priority skills to 2030 report, which we looked at when it first arrived in August. But it’s worth going over some of the main beats of the analysis performed, and recognising how it represents certain choices beyond what the industrial strategy itself set out.

    The report looks at “future employment demand across 10 key sectors important for delivering the government’s Industrial Strategy and Plan for Change priorities” – see our initial coverage for some of the oddities in how this forecasting was performed, but what’s done is done – and then goes on to pinpoint the “key education pathways” associated with the priority occupations in these sectors.

    In addition to the IS-8, Skills England had been asked to roll in both health and social care and construction. For each of the ten sectors, it looks at a specific subset of occupations – those where there is expected growth in employment, current skills shortages, general “high demand” or which are otherwise judged important in some way. Each list was chosen by the lead government department for the sector in question.

    By my calculations – removing the duplicates on the “priority occupations” tab of this spreadsheet – this brings us to 148 unique occupational areas which, in theory at least, are now the government’s priorities. This is as defined by SOC20 units (the four-digit codes), of which there are 412 in total. Feel free to check whether your job is there or not.

    This wasn’t all though. Skills England then took an additional step – some might say leap – in plotting a link between these priority occupations and higher education subject of study. In coming to a judgement about what education pathways “feed” the priority occupations, one approach would be to actually look at the occupations themselves (for example, musicians are one of the priority occupations in the creative industries sector, so surely music degrees would be a winner?). But a different approach was taken, one that aggregates up degree choice and field of employment.

    As seen in table 6 of the report (and in an expanded version in the accompanying spreadsheet), what Skills England chose to do instead was to generate a percentage for each subject area – at the very top level of the Common Academic Hierarchy classification, i.e. the broadest possible brush – according to the historic likelihood that a graduate of a degree in that field would go on to be employed in a priority occupation:

    The probabilities were applied to a cohort of education leavers from LEO Graduate and Postgraduate Outcomes who were in sustained employment in the year after education, to estimate their occupations at 4-digit SOC. We include graduates and post-graduates employed in the 2021 to 2022 tax year and who graduated in 2019 to 2020 academic year.

    This, essentially, generates a ranking of higher education subjects, by their past propensity to funnel graduates into a list of priority occupations chosen by government departments. These choices tie in with – but are very much not the same as – the industrial strategy. They are also place-blind, in a way that the strategy sought to avoid.

    Not just a desk exercise

    While the fact of the Westminster government deciding that there are certain occupations that are more of a priority than others is notable in itself, the Skills England report isn’t just a fun bit of modelling – policy consequences have followed, even if they haven’t been spelled out.

    For one thing, the top ten ranking of priority subject areas has given rise to the list of subjects eligible for modular provision under the Lifelong Learning Entitlement. It took a bit of digging at the time for us to make that connection, but it’s since been essentially confirmed by DfE.

    The list isn’t exactly the same – medicine and pharmacy aren’t given the LLE nod, presumably not being seen as well-suited for unbundling. And Skills England’s analysis found that business and management degrees had a higher likelihood (53 per cent) of leading to employment in a priority occupation than health and social care degrees (51 per cent) – again, you can imagine the careful political choices being made there, though further transparency from the department about what exactly its thinking is for modular study would have been welcome.

    If you’re not a big believer in the presence of much demand for loan-backed modular study, this may seem like only a minor exercise in picking winners, especially as the government has said that the current list is, in theory, just a starting point. More important, perhaps, are the clear indications that a similar process will be used for determining which courses of study are eligible for maintenance grants. The department had previously indicated that it would use much the same list as for the LLE, only to somewhat walk this back in the slight policy paper that accompanied the Budget:

    It is crucial that the list of subjects eligible for maintenance grants is informed by the best and most up-to-date evidence on skills needs. This list will be confirmed in advance of grants being introduced in the 2028 to 2029 academic year.

    We will: draw on further stakeholder engagement and ongoing work from Skills England to assess future employment and skills priorities; explore alignment with the subject lists for Lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) modular and priority additional entitlement funding.

    What we can read into this is that a similar process will probably be employed, though coverage might not match up precisely, especially if you are erring on the side of scepticism regarding how much funding is going to be put towards the grants (or optimistically pinning hopes on ministerial nods to rolling it out further in future years).

    The third area where we might expect the Skills England subject ranking to show up in policy relates to the ongoing reforms to the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG). Returning to the parliamentary written answer referred to above – which in passing I will observe seems an odd thing for former Reform MP James McMurdock to have been asking after – the Skills England list is also juxtaposed with plans to align SPG funding with “the priority sectors which support the Industrial Strategy and the Plan for Change and future skills needs.” Making high-cost subject funding more effectively targeted towards what was then termed “priority provision” was first announced in the SPG guidance letter to the Office for Students back in May.

    Given the specific choices made in translating “priority sectors” into “priority subjects”, it’s worth considering a few further consequences of the department’s decision to use Skills England’s analysis in Assessment of priority skills to 2030 as a basis for determining subject-level policy decisions. First, even if you go along with the logic steps in the process, it is noticeably based on old data. Is it possible that at some point the modelling gets updated with new graduate outcomes figures, and we see (say) chemistry no longer make the top ten, with its spot taken by languages and area studies (for example – it was only a handful of percentage points lower down on the ranking generated by data from the 2021–22 tax year)?

    This wouldn’t be any kind of stable basis on which to determine which subjects are funded as high cost, which are in scope for modular provision, and which attract small maintenance grants for disadvantaged students. Yet taken to the extreme it’s the consequence of the way DfE has gone about its planning.

    The approach also bundles together subjects into top-level classifications and then applies broad-brush percentage propensity scores to them, ignoring essentially any other factor, such as applicant or institution characteristics. Once you go down this road of picking priority subject areas, some loss of resolution is probably inevitable. But it didn’t have to be done in this way (indeed, as was much remarked at the time someone from the department stepped in and took out landscape gardening from the architecture, building and planning subject group, with no explanation given). If you’re going to pile one methodological assumption on top of another, shouldn’t the chosen process at least go out to consultation?

    Cosplay

    But methodology aside, there’s also a question of whether this approach is in the spirit of the industrial strategy, which as we have seen in its purified form had a focus on frontier industries and their geographical distribution.

    Let’s take the Lifelong Learning Entitlement modular provision process as an example. If you want to apply to deliver a module of a full degree programme at level 4, 5 and 6, as we’ve already seen it will need to be in one of the subject areas generated from Skills England’s calculations – but also, you will need the Department for Education’s approval for it to qualify for loan funding.

    The process of applying was set up in an interesting way. Providers are required to demonstrate that their modular “offer” has been developed in response to employer and learner needs. Applications will be required to have established relationships with employers or industry bodies relevant to the subject area, and show that specific employer (and/or learner) engagement in the module’s design has taken place. Indicative evidence includes letters of support from industry bodies, evidence of co-design of curricula, and even “learner or employer consultation summaries, surveys or focus group findings.”

    This is quite the thing – the proportion of full degree programmes that could say they have been through such a process of due diligence is probably pretty slim. It’s a level of reflective employer engagement quite rarely seen in the sector, as opposed to gestures at the promise of fairly generic “employability” outcomes. Part of the reason for this is how time-consuming it appears.

    There’s certainly a question whether all this admin is worth it – there are various other hoops to jump through as well, in order to demonstrate to DfE a track record of delivery over time as well as evidencing quality [sic] through continuation and completion data. It would make more sense if being able to offer modular provision through the LLE was really the treat that the government seems to be hoping, and you could be confident (as opposed to extremely sceptical) that you would have potential students knocking on your door to enrol on your freshly approved course.

    But we could certainly draw some lines to the industrial strategy – not only has the provision been restricted (in a manner of speaking) to those subjects most relevant to the strategy, this provision is also directly linked up with the industries in question, and stems from engagement with specific areas, both in terms of prospective students and graduate employers. It’s also of a piece with the recent moves on local skills improvement plans that Labour is looking to nudge universities towards. Put simply, it is very out of character for higher education policy over the last decade or more to have the government approving whether provision can go ahead based on individual provider contexts, rather than what we might term the “have at” approach of letting anyone anywhere deliver anything and then seeing if the market will accommodate (if that is not too much of a simplification of post-2010 policy).

    There is one mammoth caveat, however. The issue is that everything I’ve outlined above only applies to a small proportion of providers in England – anyone with a TEF gold or silver, or who had a suitable headline Ofsted rating back when they were not obsolete, can skip all of this. So all the finickety detail which gestures at a move to a different kind of system is basically irrelevant for all but a small number of providers who both performed poorly in the 2023 TEF (wait, wasn’t bronze a mark of “high quality”?) and who fancy throwing their very expensive hat into the LLE’s very small ring.

    This is the perfect encapsulation of how the Department for Education’s adoption of the industrial strategy has – so far at least – the appearance of a performance rather than a real sea change. It is to an extent choosing priority subject provision that meshes with the strategy, though in a way that is very STEM-focused in a way that plenty of the strategy is not. And then it is more or less letting anyone participate who fancies taking a crack at it, with a small number of exceptions for whom the process would actually be much more in keeping with the strategy’s principles.

    There are pragmatic reasons for taking an expansive approach to the LLE rollout, of course, given the well-founded fears about how much demand is there. It will be interesting to see how the approvals process develops over time.

    The same could be said for both maintenance grants and SPG reforms. Tying them (in some way yet to be determined) to the Skills England list is a kind of gesture towards the strategy, but a more thorough engagement would involve thinking much more deeply about types of provision, specific subject choice rather than top-line groupings, and – most of all – place. At time of writing, there is little indication the department is minded to go in this direction for either policy.

    And there is surely little appetite in the sector for it to do so. It would be highly interventionist, get bogged down in bureaucracy, and result in far more by way of “picking winners” than the current vibe of endorsing the idea of specialisation but doing little to make it happen. But you could make the case that it’s what an industrial strategy-led higher education policy should look like.

    Other futures are possible

    These particular moves are only a small slice of the much greater volume of work the industrial strategy has kicked off, much of it very relevant to higher education. For a start, the way the capital funding element of this year’s SPG allocations was set up was structured around the IS-8 sectors directly, rather than Skills England’s interpretation of which subject provision is most likely to feed them. In the winning bids we can see plenty of projects linked to areas of the strategy, such as creative industries or financial services, that have not made the cut for the LLE and presumably will not for maintenance grants either.

    Skills England’s own future moves are important to watch as well. The work-in-progress UK Standard Skills Classification holds the potential for much more nuanced work about the links between study, employment and place than has filtered into policy so far.

    On a larger scale, the sweeping changes to R&D funding which the government is slowly bringing to bear show a much more thorough engagement with the industrial strategy, even if the place elements are not always there. From our vantage point at the end of 2025, we can see a range of different ways the strategy is reflected in new initiatives, and different levels of prominence, from lip service to central governing principle.

    The half a billion pounds in investment for the Local Innovation Partnership Fund has one of the tightest connections. Each “triple helix partnership” (which will include an academic institution) that wants to bid will need to define a cluster in which it will operate and link its proposal to strategic objectives such as the industrial strategy. For the open bidding competition, expert panel recommendations will inform a final decision from ministers – but in picking successful applications, the government will also “seek to ensure adequate geographic and sectoral balancing that aligns with regional assets and national capability.”

    On the Innovate UK end of R&D, the industrial strategy is exceedingly directive. In advanced manufacturing, the government’s desire to directly support automotive industry R&D was so strong that it had to refer itself to the Competition and Markets Authority to ensure it wasn’t breaching laws around state aid.

    For funding flowing solely to universities, the picture is not yet as clear. The reforms to Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) announced in the autumn are more focused on economic growth in general. Revised accountability statements ask higher education providers to “consider” how to support the industrial strategy’s “key foundations”, but for now at least this sounds like an instruction to make passing reference to the strategy in one’s narratives, rather than a spur for deeper changes.

    Over in the curiosity-driven “bucket” – with apologies to anyone who’s already sick of that terminology – the strategy’s influence is less clear. The post-16 white paper did promise that institutions will be recognised and rewarded, including through REF and QR, for “demonstrating clarity of purpose, demonstrating alignment with government priorities, and for measurable impact.” This seems to be a reference to the ongoing review of strategic institutional research funding – but as Research England’s Steven Hill said on Wonkhe last week, this is a complex piece of work where change will take time.

    At the very least the government will start to understand university research through the industrial strategy lens. As the white paper put it:

    The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, together with UK Research and Innovation, will audit the provision of research activity which delivers against the Industrial Strategy, missions and sovereign capability, and assess changes in capability against our needs.

    We should also expect to see more further intervention to support doctoral provision in areas linked to the industrial strategy. The TechExpert scholarships, for example, are explicitly targeted not just at the broad industrial strategy sectors, but at specific “frontier industry” sub-sectors within them.

    Nights at the circus

    There are many models for how the industrial strategy could dictate or at least influence higher education and research across the UK (even if, as I started by saying, for political reasons much if not all of the impact is focused on England). Some of the ones we’ve seen different government departments and arm’s length bodies apply so far have the potential to be quite transformative, while others feel superficial as it stands.

    On paper, the government’s desire to push further ahead with the strategy as an organising principle for the state’s engagement with industry and geography should intertwine with a less place-blind higher education policy, though there are many forms this could take. Currently, whether for reasons of capacity, politics or inertia it doesn’t feel like this will be comprehensively realised any time soon. On the education side of things in particular, the government’s nods towards cold spots and local collaboration don’t yet seem to be reaching deep into the longer-term thinking which Jim Dickinson has characterised as “more graduates, just not that sort and not there” – a proper consideration of how place and subject of study interact.

    The political challenges around setting out a vision for higher education can’t be shrugged off either. It’s relatively painless for DfE to trumpet more apprenticeships, more engineering, and more computing. But as written, the industrial strategy should also support more creative arts provision, and it should encourage the delivery of more management training. And all the while it ought to be thinking about which places are most suitable for each.

    At the end of the day, the strategy is a recipe for a highly planned higher education system – and one that encroaches heavily on university autonomy. The initial indicators are that the government, at least in part, is happy to perform a certain coordination between it and the English higher education system, rather than follow some of its more radical possibilities through to their logical conclusion. There are plenty of reasons why this is probably something of a relief for the sector. But it also runs the risk of leaving higher education adrift from the government’s most important agenda for reshaping the state and the country, and ducking the big long-term questions about what universities do, and what they are for.

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  • University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 3)

    University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 3)

    SUMS Consulting will host a webinar from 11:00 to 12:00 on Thursday 22 January 2026. The webinar will include a walkthrough of the report and online tool, and panel discussion featuring Nick Hillman OBE (Director of HEPI). Register here.

    This blog, kindly authored by Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant at SUMS Consulting, and William Phillips, Data Analyst at SUMS Consulting, is part of a three-part mini series on UK universities’ approaches to land use.

    Today’s final blog in the series focuses on opportunities and value. You can find part one of this series, which introduces the work, here. Part two of this series, focusing on risk, is here.

    The opportunity landscape

    2025 sees many higher education institutions looking for innovative approaches to rebalance their profile of income and costs.

    Universities’ estates might offer the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds on energy costs through harnessing the sun and wind, as well as opportunities to play a role in the local and regional systems that will play an important role in the UK’s energy transition.

    Local and regional connectivity through infrastructure also brings opportunities around education, skills and jobs, as well as applied research, industry partnership and knowledge exchange. These offer means for institutions to nourish relationships with their local communities, with positive impacts on public opinion and consent around universities’ legitimacy and the public goods they bring to society.

    We have also explored opportunities around afforestation and the natural capital value of ecosystem services supplied by UK universities’ lands – which stands separate to the commercial land value. (And there are many additional opportunities which we did not have time to investigate in detail).

    Again, many institutions have already taken steps (in some cases over many years) around the opportunities outlined. Our mapping of sector land use cannot pick up these existing examples, but we have referred to some accessible cases in the report.

    We hope the insights of this work can help individual institutions which may not yet have engaged with these questions to understand their initial option space, opening the track to more detailed investigation; and support the higher education sector and policymakers to have more informed conversations about what these options may mean for decisions and guidance at the aggregate or whole-sector level.

    We also refer to sector resources around topics such as carbon credits, improving biodiversity and reducing impacts on nature (the greatest of which, for universities, are typically through their supply chains).

    Mapping opportunities and value

    Using our mapping tool, institutions can explore the potential of their estates for solar and wind energy generation, as well as suitability for broadleaf forest growth.

    These opportunities vary across the country according to latitude, topography, aspect and a range of local conditions and constraints. We used an assumptions-based approach, referring to sector-wide averages, to model the potential aggregate impacts of sector-wide uptake (noting that some institutions have already done this).

    If 10% of universities’ built land were equipped with solar energy installations, this could generate an estimated 208,826 megawatt-hours (mWh) per year. This would equate to around 2.9% of the sector’s total energy usage in 2022/23 (as reported by 135 institutions in the Estates Management Record). Based on current commercial unit rates for energy, this could achieve an annual saving of around £42 million on energy bills. It would also abate in the region of 47,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) annually, representing around 3.3% of the sector’s reported scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2022/23.

    If 10% of universities’ grassland was used for solar power generation, this could generate an estimated 189,360 mWh per year. This would achieve energy savings, financial savings and abatement of carbon emissions of a similar, slightly smaller magnitude than the estimates just above for built land.If the same percentage was used for wind generation, this could generate an estimated 19,920 mWh per year. This would achieve energy-saving, financial and carbon abatement benefits of roughly 10% the size of those set out for solar opportunities.

    Using carbon flux factors extrapolated from the UK Natural Capital Accounts, we also estimated the annual carbon sequestration of the university sector’s (core) estate as 3,162 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year. If 10% of universities’ grasslands were put to forests, this could sequester an estimated 571 tCO2e per year of greenhouse gases over a 40-year period, increasing carbon drawdown by around 18% annually.

    Although the potential carbon impacts would be smaller than those around renewable energy, afforestation would bring positive impacts for nature, biodiversity and the sector’s natural capital.

    Our natural capital calculations are based on a value transfer approach, which extrapolates generalised national-level data (also from the UK Natural Capital Accounts) to a local area based on the assumed ecosystem services supplied by one unit of land (typically hectares).

    We estimate the asset value of ecosystem services (including renewable electricity provisioning, water provisioning, air pollution regulating, greenhouse gas regulating, noise regulating, and recreation health benefits) provided by UK institutions’ lands at £248.5m. Of this, £147.4m (59.3%) is provided by built environment, £54.9m (22.1%) is provided by grass, £43.3m (17.5%) is provided by trees and £2.9m (1.2%) is provided by water. This is likely an underestimation.

    Why this matters for universities

    The way that we use land is a critical part of securing a sustainable future for the planet. In global terms, land use is a key driver of climate change and degradation of nature; but it can also be a solution to reversing these.

    There already exist both regulatory and market-based frameworks which reflect various dimensions of the value of natural capital and ecosystem services.

    Partially due to concerns around the credibility of commercial offsetting schemes, some universities have turned to approaches for carbon sequestration or “insetting” on their own lands, which allow for easier assurance and impact evaluation. We refer to some examples in the report.

    While still emergent, these developments represent attempts to account for the true value of nature and the cost of destroying it (which traditional accounting and financial systems fail to do effectively) and may bring new economic opportunities around the stewardship of nature and natural resources.

    Ultimately, everything depends on this.

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  • University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 2)

    University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 2)

    Join HEPI tomorrow (Thursday 11 December 2025) from 10am to 11am for a webinar on how universities can strengthen the student voice in governance to mark the launch of our upcoming report, Rethinking the Student Voice. Sign up now to hear our speakers explore the key questions.

    This blog, kindly authored by Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant, William Phillips, Data Analyst, and Pippa Wisbey, Consultant, all of at SUMS Consulting, is part of a three-part mini series on UK universities’ approaches to land use.

    Today’s blog focuses on risks. You can find part one of this series, which introduces the work, here.

    The risk landscape

    Most readers will be familiar with the current conditions for the UK’s universities. Proximate financial risks – potentially existential for some institutions – understandably focus minds on the here and now.

    Whatever system emerges from the current turmoil will need to be more resilient than what it replaces.

    While the gathering risks in the economic and geopolitical theatre are familiar, on longer horizons – and let’s remember that many universities like to emphasise their longevity of foundation and core mission – the greatest risks are those stemming from the disruption to world’s climate and natural systems.

    These risks are generally slow onset. Until they become acute, causing loss, damage and danger to human health and safety.

    Solely the “physical” risks that we have modelled may cause hundreds of millions of pounds of loss and damage to universities each year (estimated at a potential £166.8m annually, based on moderate estimates), as extreme weather becomes more frequent.

    These do not account for “transition risks” and “systemic risks”, which have less direct linkages to physical location and would manifest in disruption to their supply chains, national infrastructure and so on.

    While impacts of extreme weather would likely be spread across multiple institutions, financial impacts of this order are material – particularly for those institutions which are most exposed.

    Climate impacts might manifest not only in damage to buildings and other infrastructure, but also loss of valuable equipment and disruption to critical business – carrying further costs for institutions – and impacts on the health, wellbeing and safety of their staff and students. Insurance costs are also expected to rise, and in the most exposed cases, some assets may become uninsurable.

    Securing future resilience is therefore very much a long-term game.

    Mapping risks

    Physical risksrelate most closely to the location (“exposure”) of assets. As hazards (storms, heatwaves and the like) become more frequent and more severe, loss, damage and costs increase – further exacerbated by institutions’ vulnerabilities.

    Using our mapping tool, institutions can explore both observed patterns of temperature and rainfall at their location, and modelled patterns for 2C and 4C of global temperature rise – both plausible scenarios for the second half of this century.

    They can also explore datasets containing granular local-level data around flood risk and heat islands. While these have not yet been modelled for future climate conditions, it is safe to assume that flooding and extreme heat events will become more frequent and more extreme, as winters become wetter and summers hotter and drier across most of the country.

    Under current conditions, 197.5 hectares (ha), constituting 3.2% of mapped lands are at high or medium risk from flooding, while 4,102.1 ha (or 64.2%) are at high or medium risk of extreme heat stress.

    The instances where floods or extreme heat risk incurring the greatest costs for institutions, is where their built estate is in high-risk areas. By our mapping, 92.1 ha (or 1.4%) of university estates are areas where high or medium flood risk coincides with built environment; and 2,898.6 ha (or 45.4%) are built environment with high or medium heat risk.

    Of course, flood risk and heat islands are not totally independent variables from land cover. Built areas can exacerbate both flood risk by reducing the scope for water absorption, and heat islands due to their high retention of heat compared to non-built surfaces.

    Responding and adapting to risks

    Many institutions have already begun to respond to climate and environmental risks, and sector organisations have developed guidance on adaptation and resilience.

    Those institutions that haven’t yet done so can use our mapping tool as an initial pointer to frame detailed site-specific risk and vulnerability assessments. Following UK Government guidance, we recommend using scenarios of 2C and 4C global temperature rise.

    Better understanding of this picture for the specifics of university sites will also allow for options assessment around adaptation measures (including land-based approaches such as increased areas of non-built space or green infrastructure) to mitigate heat island effects; or if it is unavoidable, manage conditions of high heat through more cooling (which brings increased energy use).

    The same stands for institutions that have a large built area in flood-prone zones. Understanding the current risk (which is likely to be on the radar already for many of these institutions) and how it might develop with the changing climate opens into exploring options for response. Nature-based solutions such as extending wetlands or porous ground surfaces can potentially mitigate flood risks in some areas. That said, institutions may wish to consider relocating valuable equipment, high-use areas or strategic activities if situated at the most risky sites.

    While adaptation will carry upfront costs for institutions, national-level modelling indicates that the projected costs of loss and damage without adaptation will be substantially greater, and most adaptation measures have a high benefit to cost ratio if they are undertaken in good time.

    In other words, spending sooner will save later.

    The bigger picture

    In the big picture, reducing the risks around increased exposure to physical hazards also underlines the necessity for every organisation to reduce its own impacts on climate change and nature loss – the ultimate drivers of the deteriorating risk environment.

    In part 3 of this mini-series, we will explore opportunities that universities’ estates may offer to do that, some of which also offer other benefits to institutions’ financial position and core mission.

    SUMS Consulting will host a webinar from 11:00 to 12:00 on Thursday 22 January 2026. The webinar will include a walkthrough of the report and online tool, and panel discussion featuring Nick Hillman OBE (Director of HEPI). Register here.

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  • University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 1)

    University lands: mapping risks and opportunities for the UK higher education sector (Part 1)

    This blog, kindly authored by Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant at SUMS Consulting, and William Phillips, Data Analyst at SUMS Consulting, is part of a three-part mini series on UK universities’ approaches to land use.

    Today’s blog introduces the work.

    Where we are

    With the economic and policy developments of the last 18 months, the UK’s higher education institutions now face a heady mix of acute challenges and an emergent agenda around the contributions they are expected to make towards the country, its economy and society.

    The sector is already seeing mergers, amongst a range of potential measures to reduce costs. That a prominent recently merged institution is keeping its constituent campuses is not really surprising: for most universities, their mission and even shifting identities are still broadly bound up with their location.

    Over recent years, this has spoken to agendas such as the Johnson government’s “levelling up” or institutions’ own civic commitments. And place remains prominent in the current government’s Modern Industrial Strategy, in which Mayoral Combined Authorities will be central actors in integrated regional planning for many areas, and of course in the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper.

    We know that universities are critical economic players nationally and regionally, due to their scale and the value created by their education, research and convening power.

    We also know that universities cover a lot of space. A sense of this is reported in quant data terms each year in the (now voluntary) HESA Estates Management Record which, although it does not cover all providers, can be deployed for powerful analysis at the aggregate level.

    How we use our land is a national question that cuts across a range of issues including economic development, food security and a healthy environment for people and nature, amongst many others.

    These questions are about “where” as well as “how much”.

    For university estates we have the numbers, but until now we have not had much of a sense of where certain things are, happen or could potentially happen.

    We have sought to change that.

    In our new report published today, we have used public and open-source datasets and methods to map the UK higher education sector for the first time.

    Overlaying the boundaries for 174 institutions (those with data on Open Street Map) onto geospatial datasets (that is, datasets which contain a geographic or spatial component which brings the “where”) has allowed us to explore perspectives about universities’ estates and how they use them – which would not be possible without geospatial data.

    The list of institutions, representing a mix of more traditional institutions reporting to HESA as well as some alternative providers, does not constitute the whole sector (or all of its known lands). But we believe the coverage is sufficient to allow for grounded discussion of sector patterns.

    We explore the data over four strategic themes for institutions and at aggregate (sector) level:

    1. State of the sector’s land
    2. Risks
    3. Opportunities
    4. Value.

    The report is accompanied by a mapping tool which allows user to explore these questions for themselves.

    Purely in the direct financial terms we have modelled, “risks” and “opportunities” are to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds annually for the sector. And the wider dimensions of opportunities speak not only to universities’ contributions to environmental sustainability, but also to their role as critical players in regional economies and systems.

    As such, this work has implications for a range of points in institutions’ thinking. These, of course, include approaches to risk, estates management, capital and strategic planning; but also core mission questions such as regional development, skills, innovation and industry partnership.

    Over this series of blogs we will explore the strategic themes mentioned, starting today with the state of the sector’s land.

    Due to the complexity of the topics involved, we have not been able to treat every risk and opportunity area in all the detail they deserve. But we do hope to inspire new ways of thinking about universities’ lands and locations and how these fit into their wider strategic context, including trade-offs and opportunity costs.

    We also point to examples of institutions which are already engaging with these questions, to resources from sector organisations such as AUDE, EAUC and Nature Positive Universities, and to our own work supporting institutions across a range of topics relevant to this work.

    State of the sector’s land

    Our mapping of UK universities’ core estates covers a total area of 6,390.1 hectares (ha).

    This does not cover the full extent of the HE estate due to limitations of the data available. (The 2023 HESA Estates Management Record reports a total of 7,293 ha “total grounds area” for 135 reporting institutions and a larger “total site area” – roughly the same size again – outside the core estate). But it does achieve more than 80% coverage of core estates.

    While our mapped area constitutes just 0.026% of the UK’s land surface, it equates to a town the size of Guildford, Chesterfield or Stirling.

    Of this area, 3,796.8 ha (nearly 60%) is built environment (buildings or artificial other surfaces), 1,893.6 ha (around 30%) is grass, 646.4 ha (around 10%) is covered by trees and 52.8 ha (a little less than 1%) is water and waterlogged land.

    We also used machine learning to develop a typology of institutions based on their land use profiles. This identified three clusters of institutions, each of which stands out for possessing a higher proportion of one of the three core land use types (built, grass, trees) than the other two clusters.

    • Cluster 1 (95 institutions, covering 1,205 ha) is highly urban, containing universities that are at least 80% and typically around 90% built land cover.
    • Cluster 2 (60 institutions, covering 3,679 ha) is made up of universities with a relatively high grass cover (typically around 35%), still with a high built cover (around 58%).
    • Cluster 3 (19 institutions, covering 1,506 ha) is comprised of universities that have a high proportion of non-built land (around 61%) and notably high tree cover (around 25%).

    The various profiles of land use and institutions present different types of risks and opportunities, which we will explore over the coming days.

    SUMS Consulting will host a webinar from 11:00 to 12:00 on Thursday 22 January 2026. The webinar will include a walkthrough of the report and online tool, and panel discussion featuring Nick Hillman OBE (Director of HEPI). Register here.

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  • Breaking the Bottleneck: How Process Mapping and Policy Reform Drive Enrollment Growth

    Breaking the Bottleneck: How Process Mapping and Policy Reform Drive Enrollment Growth

    In today’s fiercely competitive higher education landscape, enrollment leaders are being asked to do more with less. That means more inquiries, more conversions, and more starts, all while working with fewer resources and a shrinking pool of students actively seeking traditional degree paths.

    What separates the institutions that are growing from those that are treading water? In my experience, it’s the willingness to question the status quo. The leaders seeing results are the ones taking a hard look at internal processes and policies and making bold decisions to remove what’s in the way of progress.

    The urgency to remove enrollment barriers

    Many institutions face enrollment plateaus not because they lack student interest, but because of self-imposed friction. Burdensome application requirements, slow review cycles, and legacy processes that haven’t evolved with changing student expectations can all stand in the way of progress.

    Students today expect seamless, responsive experiences. They compare your enrollment process not only to peer institutions but also to the intuitive digital experiences they encounter every day. If your application process is full of red tape or requires too many steps, students will disengage and likely move on to a more accessible option.

    Colleges and universities that want to stay competitive need to start clearing the path. By taking the time to understand how your enrollment process actually operates and identifying where students tend to get stuck, you can make meaningful changes that increase both efficiency and enrollment success.

    Start with a map: Uncovering friction through process review

    The first step to solving an enrollment slowdown is understanding where it’s happening. That’s where process mapping comes in.

    At Collegis, we partner with institutions to conduct comprehensive process assessments. We document and analyze every step of the applicant journey, from inquiry through registration, to uncover inconsistencies, delays, and points of friction that may be limiting your enrollment funnel. We often find that a student’s experience varies widely depending on who they interact with or when they enter the process, revealing a need for greater consistency and coordination.

    In many cases, we find students getting stuck at multiple points across the enrollment journey, starting with the application itself. Lengthy or confusing questions, lack of helpful guidance, and irrelevant fields can all create unnecessary complexity early on. Students may also encounter inconsistent or impersonal communication, making it unclear what to expect next or where they stand in the process.

    Further down the funnel, delays often occur during application review, sometimes taking a week or more due to internal handoffs or manual processes. In some cases, applications sit idle because there’s no system in place to move files forward or flag them for outreach. These gaps add up, slowing momentum and causing potential students to disengage.

    When you can see the entire process visualized, it becomes easier to ask the right questions:

    • Is the application process intuitive and easy to navigate, or are we introducing unnecessary complexity?
    • Are there clear next steps and calls to action for students at each stage?
    • Do students receive consistent, timely communication that reflects where they are in the journey?
    • Is the messaging and cadence of our marketing and operational emails aligned with what students hear from admissions counselors?
    • Are there opportunities to streamline handoffs, automate manual steps, or standardize the process to ensure every student receives a cohesive experience?

    Process mapping isn’t just a troubleshooting exercise. It’s a strategic investment in institutional agility and student-centered design. Institutions that complete this type of review often uncover both quick wins and opportunities for deeper transformation.

    Ready for a Smarter Way Forward?

    Higher ed is hard — but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We can help you transform challenges into opportunities.

    Rethink the rules: Policies that reduce friction and drive results

    Some of the most impactful improvements we’ve seen don’t require major investments or cutting-edge technologies. More often, they come from rethinking the policies that shape your admissions process and how those policies either support or hinder the student experience.

    When we conduct policy reviews with our partner institutions, we often find that some admissions requirements add more complexity than value. It’s crucial to determine whether each requirement is truly essential to making an informed admissions decision. By removing or refining requirements that no longer serve a clear purpose (such as excessive documentation or overly rigid review criteria) institutions can streamline internal workflows and reduce avoidable delays. These targeted adjustments not only improve operational efficiency but also create a more accessible and student-centered experience.

    Impact in action: Practical examples of enrollment transformation

    These are not just hypothetical improvements. We’ve worked directly with institutions to implement these strategies and have seen the tangible impact they can deliver. Here are a few real-world examples that show how practical adjustments have translated into measurable results:

    • Waiving letters of recommendation for applicants who meet a defined GPA threshold. This eliminates a common bottleneck while maintaining admissions rigor.
    • Simplifying transcript requirements by only requesting documentation that includes a conferred degree and any prerequisite coursework required for program entry. Additional transcripts are collected later if necessary, which speeds up the initial review process.
    • Automating workflows that trigger application reviews as soon as all checklist items are complete. This ensures students move through the process without unnecessary delays.
    • Setting up notifications to ensure timely engagement. For example, alerts can be set when a new inquiry or applicant hasn’t received contact from an admissions counselor within 24 hours, or when application reviews are taking longer than expected.

    These types of changes create a more efficient, student-centered process that helps institutions convert interest into enrollment more effectively.

    Don’t just tweak the process, transform it

    If your institution is still relying on outdated processes and rigid policies, now is the time to reevaluate. The enrollment environment is only becoming more competitive. But with the right changes, your institution can become more efficient, more agile, and more appealing to today’s students.

    This isn’t about cutting corners or lowering standards. It’s about rethinking how your process serves students. Process mapping helps uncover ways to simplify steps, ensure consistency, and build trust through clear communication and meaningful staff connections. The result is an experience that’s more efficient, more personal, and better aligned with your institution’s goals.

    Let’s break the bottleneck together

    A process mapping assessment is a powerful starting point. At Collegis, we go beyond identifying issues. We work side by side with our partners to solve them. Our approach is collaborative, our recommendations are practical, and our focus is always on impact.

    If your institution is ready to accelerate enrollment growth, strengthen internal operations, and deliver a more consistent and personalized experience for your students, let’s talk.

    Innovation Starts Here

    Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.

    Jim Callinan leads enrollment strategy and operational excellence at Collegis Education, where he partners with higher education institutions to design and deploy data-informed admissions and student-journey models. With nearly 20 years of higher education experience, Jim brings deep expertise in aligning cross-functional teams across technology, marketing, analytics, enrollment, and student success to drive growth, streamline operations, and elevate the student and staff experience. His collaborative approach helps institutions align strategy, process, and performance to achieve sustainable success.

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  • Getting Curious About Network Mapping – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Getting Curious About Network Mapping – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I’ve just embarked on Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) Workshop (October–November 2025). The first invitation Jarche gives is to examine our networks. We begin with a naming exercise: the top four people who come to mind in response to prompts like:

    • Who do you most frequently communicate with to get work done?
    • Who do you approach for career or work advice?
    • Who are the main people you socialize with informally?
    • Who do you contact when facing complex work problems?

    After listing names, we reflect on their demographics, roles, ages, and how much diversity (or lack thereof) we see in our knowledge network. Jarche encourages us to spot gaps and opportunities for expanding who we include.

    Because the prompt focuses on recent months, I observed that some of the questions hit harder than others, given what I’ve been up to, lately. For example, I haven’t been actively job-searching for a long while, so the aspect of the career advice question focused on who I reach out to when considering whether to accept a job or leave my organization felt a bit hypothetical. But answering using a longer time span than solely these last few months nudged me to think about past seasons in which those questions were more pressing.

    Serendipitous Invitations and Saying Yes

    One outcome of doing the naming exercise is that it reminded me of an invitation to co-facilitate a book study with two other friends. The topic was not related to my formal role at work. The three of us had joked throughout the month-long study about whether we chose the worst possible evening for it. I teach a multi-hour block on Monday afternoons and my fellow facilitators also had all sorts of things going on in their professional and personal contexts. And yet, we were ultimately all glad to have said yes to the commitment.

    It ended up being challenging, yet hopeful: people with shared values, diverse perspectives, different paradigms, and a desire to consider our role in the work to live out what we believe. It made me appreciate intentionally saying no to lesser priorities so that I can say yes to what matters most.

    After browsing and reflecting on some of the supporting materials that Jarche includes about network mapping, I realized that this experience may be emblematic of “The Strength of Weak Ties,” an idea brought forth by Mark S. Granovetter back in 1973. Granovetter defines the strength of a tie as a composite of time spent, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual confiding), and reciprocal services. He shows that as tie strength increases, so does overlap in one’s social circle (i.e. your strong ties tend to know each other). Weak ties, being more distant, often serve as bridges between clusters in a network. He reveals about the strength of ties:

    Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.

    Granovetter also shares the understandable emphasis on strong ties, yet also cautions us about what is lacking in our personal and societal development, were we to focus exclusively on strong ties. He writes:

    Treating only the strength of ties ignores, for instance, all the important issues involving their content. What is the relation between strength and degree of specialization of ties, or between strength and hierarchical structure?

    The article is pretty dense reading and I am only skimming the surface here, no doubt not quite getting the richness of what he shares.

    The Teaching in Higher Ed Network

    I’ve long been grateful for my Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and the network is has helped me to cultivate since June of 2014. Over the 11+ years, it’s connected me with people across disciplines and invited discussions about assessment, AI, pedagogy, digital literacy, and more..

    By the way: Harold Jarche has been a guest on Teaching in Higher Ed (Episode 213). It was an honor to speak with him, after having followed his work for such a long time. In that episode, he says, “You can’t turn data into information until you have the knowledge to understand the data.”  That line struck me again as I think about how PKM is about sense-making, not just accumulation of information.

    My Most Frequently-Mentioned Name

    As I reviewed my responses, the name that surfaced most often was Dave (my husband). That shouldn’t surprise me: we met while earning our master’s degrees, later pursued doctoral work together, and share many disciplinary interests. He is also someone who regularly challenges my thinking while supporting me. His name appeared in questions about deep matters, who I talk to when launching something new, someone I informally socialize with, a person I want to talk to about complex problems, and finally to get career advice from.

    Informal Socializing: Breaking the Rule

    One of the prompts asked: Who do you socialize with informally?

    I confess: I broke the rule of listing specific names. First off, I really don’t socialize informally very often, at all. Most time I spend with others is somehow geared toward an aim of some kind. My informal socializing is mostly with my immediate family (Dave and our two, curious children).

    I also reflected on the recent optional activity I did with the students enrolled in my personal leadership and productivity class, while answering the questions posed by Jarche for this activity. They have an assignment to plan their 85th birthday party, which is based off of a prompt offered by Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. After students reflect, they can optionally sign up for a time to join me on campus or online for a time to celebrate and reflect together on what they learned.

    That, plus I bring cupcakes and play Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday song (which thus far, 100% have agreed is the best of the birthday songs).

    Reflections & Next Moves

    A few reflections and intentions as I begin Jarche’s PKM workshop this week:

    • New seasons evolve my network ties. My closer-knit network in recent months reflect my focus during that time. In a different season, I would have listed different people.
    • Mix strong and weak ties. I already see how much value my core, close relationships (like Dave) bring. But I also am thankful for the times when my podcast allows me to reach outward, diversify, and surface my weaker ties that bring novelty and new perspectives.
    • Nurture the giving habit. As Rob Cross (in his work on networks) says, effective networks often grow when people give first and who go beyond the superficial.

    I have enjoyed this opportunity to reflect on my networks and look forward to continuing to explore some of the resources that Harold includes. I’m also ready to get to learn more about the others participating in the PKM workshop these next couple of months. If I know anything about PKM and about Harold, it is what will become “us” as a cohort that will make the biggest difference in our learning.

    Plus that whole thing about getting out of something what you put into it…

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  • Mapping Digital Spaces Part II

    Mapping Digital Spaces Part II

    Back in 2017, I wrote a blog post about how I spent my time online. Using David White’s concept of Visitors vs. Residents, I examined the technology tools and sites I frequented most and reflected on whether I used them professionally or personally. I then categorized them according to White’s idea: 

    • Visitors use technology tools to get a job done quickly. They don’t leave a digital trail or engage with others.
    • Residents regularly interact with others or create with technology while openly sharing parts of themselves, whether names, comments, or resources. 

    At that time, I was in a different role in education as a school-based instructional technology coach. Now, I am still in the field of education, but as the Director of Distance Learning for a community college. The only role that hasn’t changed in those eight years is my role as an adjunct instructor. The assignment to map digital spaces has always been one of my favorites, so this week I decided to join my students and reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same for me. Below is my current map and some thoughts that stood out to me.

    Nicole’s 2025 Digital Map

    • I overwhelmingly have a digital footprint. The vast majority of my map shows that both personally and professionally, I engage with others and leave a digital trace online. 
    • Larger images, such as Gmail, Amazon, Snapchat, Reddit, and podcasts, are applications that dominate much of my time online.
    • Applications such as podcasts, “X” (forever Twitter), Google, and Facebook are used for both personal and professional purposes. I love that these are places I can blend my personas.
    • On the personal visitors’ side, I may have signed up for accounts on these applications, but I do not engage with others or leave a public data trail- I hop on and hop off with a purpose. What may be surprising to some is that TikTok is included in this category. My husband is really the only one who sends me video clips. Otherwise, I don’t use this app much.
    • I struggled to find applications that I visit professionally as a visitor! This tells me that I am very comfortable leaving a digital presence.

    Here is my original map from 2017 and some general observations.

    Nicole’s original map from 2017

    Things that have changed

    • New apps! TikTok and Blue Sky are two examples of applications that became available after my original map was created.
    • RIP old apps! Google+, Wikispaces, and Edmodo played a big role in my professional encounters and are no longer in service.
    • My old map was very balanced- I spent just as much time as a visitor as I did as a resident. 
    • I have a much greater professional residency than I did in 2017!

    Things that have stayed the same

    • Most of the technology applications I used eight years ago remain the same today. Some, such as Fitbit, have been replaced by applications that perform a similar service (in this case, Peloton).
    • I am comfortable with using technology to enhance my professional life and comfortable sharing and engaging with others online.

    To wrap up, I’d like to revisit my blog post from 2017 by restating something I wrote back then that still holds true today: “My map will evolve as my career evolves and my PLN focus changes. For now, I’m happy with the digital presence that I have and knowing that where I go *is* helping me grow.” 

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