While there are many reasons why people decide to go to university, most see it as a stepping stone to a chosen career, a place where they will expand their knowledge and gain the skills and qualifications needed to be successful. But if the theoretical knowledge they acquire from their course doesn’t match industry requirements, they could find themselves locked out of their chosen field. So how can universities ensure that graduates are employment-ready?
During a recent Guardian Labs seminar, the issue was discussed by two pro vice-chancellors from the University of Derby and the senior vice president for economic partnerships at Rolls-Royce, the aerospace and defence company. They homed in on the importance of universities forming strong partnerships with industry, both locally and globally, and discussed how that looks in practice – an approach that has been mastered at Derby.
Prof Kamil Omoteso
Pro vice-chancellor and dean of the University of Derby’s college of business, law and social sciences.
Provides executive leadership for the college and is responsible for driving change, growth and sustainability across it. He is also the executive lead on institutional equity, including the university’s access and participation and equality, diversity and inclusion efforts.
Prof Chris Bussell
Pro vice-chancellor and dean of the University of Derby’s college of science and engineering.
Provides executive leadership for the college, which is the university’s focal point for Stem teaching, research and innovation.
Ian Cuddington
Senior vice president for economic partnerships at Rolls-Royce and a member of the business school council at the University of Derby.
Leads on global public investment in support of Rolls-Royce’s activities and has worked for the company for more than 20 years.
Working in partnership with industry benefits the business, the university and, importantly, the student. It provides opportunities for collaboration, enabling businesses to nurture new talent and access knowledge exchange and research. Students get the opportunity to innovate, learn from leading industry experts, and apply this to real-world scenarios, ensuring that when they leave university as graduates, they are equipped with the skills that industry truly wants. That’s why partnerships are such an important part of the University of Derby’s business degree programmes, which aim to provide students with exposure to industry, with a focus on getting them to solve genuine business problems.
“Students are able to work on live briefs – challenges that industry is actually grappling with,” says Prof Kamil Omoteso, pro vice-chancellor and dean of the university’s college of business, law and social sciences. “This gives students a real-world insight into the intricacies of organisations and how they can make a difference within them, which is an invaluable part of their learning, as it sets them up to make a successful transition into the workplace.”
The currency of the university’s programmes also ensures graduates have the skills they need to thrive in a fast-changing world. “[Students] are growing up in a world of hyper-connectivity, they are looking at different media for gaining information, and now AI is coming into it as well,” says Prof Chris Bussell, pro vice-chancellor and dean of the university’s college of science and engineering. “Our approach is to embrace these new technologies and work in the new education sectors associated [with them]. This helps students to understand the authenticity of information, and how to manage and curate it so that they can form their own opinions and perspectives.”
These opinions and perspectives can help organisations to approach problems in new and innovative ways. “When you join an organisation you get trained into their way of doing things,” says Bussell, but recent graduates “do not have those pre-determined boundaries”.
After this top-level introduction to the university’s business degree programmes, the rest of the discussion centred on four main areas of collaboration with industry. The key points are summarised here:
Nurturing local talent
Applied learning will continue to be at the heart of the student experience when the university’s business school relocates in 2025 to a new state of the art building in the city centre. Designed to be a focal point for the business community, the new net-zero Derby Business School building will provide a place where talented students and expert academics can network and collaborate with business leaders and entrepreneurs, learning from them and, hopefully, inspiring them too. “We are creating a blueprint for the business school of the future – one where we can co-locate, co-create, and co-deliver useful innovation, as well as learning and teaching capabilities,” says Omoteso. “This opens up a whole world of possibilities and enables us collectively to make a positive impact on society.”
Rolls-Royce, the global engineering giant, is a major employer in Derby and the wider region, and Ian Cuddington, the company’s senior vice president for economic partnerships, says that partnering with the university is very much in the company’s interests. “Being able to show students what we are doing – and working closely with staff – is a feature of our research and technology model,” he says. “Our competitors are bigger [than us] and they have more money to invest, so one of the things that we have to be good at – and that we have developed a strength in – is collaborating widely to get the best use of academic expertise.”
Partnering with the university also helps to make Rolls-Royce more “open and accessible” as well as “a better actor in the community, more fully engaged”, says Cuddington.
Bussell adds: “It is really important that two of the region’s key anchor organisations – Rolls-Royce and the University of Derby – work collaboratively to further advance technologies and opportunities for all. Rolls-Royce is a global company but with local roots and is working within its community to provide an exceptional learning experience, supported through its partnership with the University.”
These opportunities also provide Rolls-Royce with an important talent pipeline. For example, the Nuclear Skills Academy – a Ministry of Defence-funded programme featuring a partnership between Rolls-Royce and the University of Derby that aims to sustain nuclear capability within the UK’s submarines programme – supplies Rolls-Royce with apprentices that Cuddington believes have the “appetite, hunger and energy” to drive innovation.
Collaborative innovation
Another prominent example of the partnership is the Rolls-Royce Technology Hub, where experts from the Rolls-Royce Central Technology Group are co-located with the University of Derby’s academics, researchers and students. This specialist laboratory space is used to develop future technologies that could be of use to any division of Rolls-Royce, from robotics to sensor development.
Cuddington says that there are three main roles for the hub: “To evaluate someone else’s state-of-the-art technology; to develop our own in-house technology; and then thirdly, perhaps most importantly, it is there to demonstrate that the technology has a commercial benefit.”
It also acts as a “shop window” for attracting talent to the university. Bussell says: “It is really inspiring for students to be able to walk through a building where they are seeing Rolls-Royce in action and the cutting edge of innovation. They think that it is accessible to them – which it is, thanks to the partnership we have and the way we work together.”
Building industry skills
When it comes to the attributes employers most want to see in graduates, Cuddington says that resilience is key as companies are constantly reinventing the way they do things. “Being able to thrive in a world of change requires a different mindset, so for us that is really important.”
Employees increasingly need to feel comfortable using technologies such as AI, for instance, he says: “We have plenty of people who are very, very smart at Rolls-Royce and I am sure they understand artificial intelligence deeply. But what we need more are practitioners – people who perhaps do not know the ins and outs of how AI works, but know what they can do with it and how to apply it safely, ethically, and in a way that is commercially viable.” This is what Rolls-Royce gets from the university, a pipeline of talent, taught by experts in an applied setting, who have skills and knowledge that can be transferred straight to the workplace.
Knowledge transfer partnerships, supported in part by government funding, are another way that businesses can tap into academic expertise and research. They bring together an organisation, the university and a recent graduate to work on a project that addresses a specific business need. The overall aim is to help the business make a step change in an area that it has identified as a high priority, such as improving an existing product or developing a new one.
“There might be a particular engineering dimension that a business is struggling to build upon, or it might be that they have the solution but want to analyse it in a different way. This is where our research and academic expertise really comes into its own; we are creators of new knowledge after all,” says Bussell.
A student’s perspective: ‘We had the opportunity to work on live briefs and real business issues that connect theory with practical, real-world examples’
Kam Puchala, 23, from Bratislava, Slovakia, recently finished his business and management degree at the University of Derby, and has secured a management graduate role with the Arora Group, which has interests in hotels and property
“The University of Derby has a strong reputation and a focus on achieving high academic results, along with initiatives to enhance students’ employability, which played a crucial role in my decision to enrol there.
The university’s business and management degrees are accredited by leading industry bodies, including the Chartered Management Institute. This meant that I was awarded a professional qualification from the institute when I completed my degree. I was aware that this additional qualification, which is highly valued by employers, could significantly enhance my employability.
At the University of Derby, they provide hands-on experience too. We had the opportunity to work on live briefs and real business issues that connect theory with practical, real-world examples. I had to analyse situations, consider solutions, and make decisions based on real data.
I also did a one-year placement with the Exclusive Collection [a hotel chain], based at Lainston House Hotel, in Winchester. It was a great opportunity that equipped me with so many extra skills. There were a lot of tasks that required active teamwork, for example, or that involved customer interaction or creative problem solving.
After I finished my placement, I felt so motivated and proactive that I applied for – and got – a summer internship at Disney World, Florida. I wouldn’t even have known the opportunity was out there if it wasn’t for the [university’s] careers centre. They kept sending job openings to my inbox, and one day it happened to be there.
In my final year, instead of a dissertation, I did a business consultancy project module [which sees students acting as consultants for real companies and charities]. I had to apply my theoretical knowledge in a practical context, and the experience made me feel more passionate and motivated because it translated into a real-world solution.
Embracing an entrepreneurial mindset and innovative thinking has positioned me [in the eyes of employers] as a potential valuable asset for company growth. I’ve also had time to explore all the options for my future career and find out what I’m truly passionate about.”
Award-winning partnerships
At the Nuclear Skills Academy, a partnership between the University of Derby and Rolls-Royce Submarines, the next generation of nuclear scientists, engineers and business apprentices are working on research and innovation supporting the UK nuclear submarines programme. When it opened in 2022, more than 1,200 applicants from all walks of life applied for one of 200 places on its apprenticeship schemes. Just a year later, the university and Rolls-Royce received the Employer & Training Provider Partnership Award at the UK Nuclear Skills Awards 2023.
Cuddington calls it a “fantastic example” of how partnerships between academia and business should work. “We need those skills – and those apprentices – in our business to expand,” he says.
There are a number of apprenticeship pathways, from level 3 focused on fundamental engineering skills such as machining and welding to level 6 nuclear engineer degree apprenticeships. This provides a variety of routes into an engineering career. “The great thing about it is the number of students who come from the local economy or local schools,” says Bussell.
Omoteso adds that social mobility is a “huge thing” for the University of Derby. Indeed, it has a strong record in tackling barriers to access and success. It was named University of the Year at the UK Social Mobility Awards 2020, for example, and also won the Guardian University Award 2020 for Social and Community Impact.
To help the university ensure that its degrees and research remains relevant to industry needs, key business partners sit on its industry advisory board. “The members of the board play a significant role in shaping our curriculum with us, bringing their expertise and expectations to ensure that it is fit for purpose,” says Omoteso.
“It has to be future focused so that our graduates are employment ready, and it is our job to prepare them for that. We must give them the skills, knowledge and confidence they will need to be successful and to solve the global problems they will face. Working as we do, in partnership with industry, will play a big part in that.”
The seminar’s key takeaways
• Applied learning, focused on real business problems, provides graduates with insights into how organisations work, and what skills are needed to solve the challenges they face.
• Resilience is an attribute that can help graduates thrive in today’s world of work, along with familiarity with emerging technologies such as AI. Students and recent graduates can also bring fresh thinking to tricky business problems.
• Close partnerships between universities and industry bring many benefits to society and help to ensure that curriculums are relevant to current and future workforce requirements, so that graduates are well positioned to secure employment in their preferred field and to tackle the future’s biggest challenges, whatever they may be.
If you are looking to embark on a degree that equips you with everything you need for a successful career, visit derby.ac.uk
