New: GTI and AGCAS launch framework for industry-educator collaborations

Industry-educator collaboration is a major part of the student experience and drives huge value for organisations and society.  These collaborations are expanding, with new forms of collaboration being developed and taking place across higher education (HE). Employers and other industry representatives are increasingly involved - and seeking to be involved - in HE in relation to student skill development, the advancement of research and knowledge, and to support work experience for students and graduates.

With growing innovation in industry-educator relationships and increasing opportunities for embedding these into the curriculum, we set out to work with AGCAS and members to help define these interactions.

Our shared objectives included:

• Provide a review of what is happening today including some high-level challenges and opportunities to support project roadmap planning
• Help to create consistency in language and definitions (for universities and also industry and employers) to support trend analysis, new collaborations and further embedding
• Support careers and employer engagement professionals to take the lead in centralised platform and systems projects. These projects aim to co-ordinate university-wide external relationship intelligence and reduce silos. Increasing in number, they are often referred to as ‘centralised CRM’.  Careers and employability employer data might be requested to be shared to a central platform to help provide centralised corporate intelligence. Any CRM project needs a well thought through data structure for the system to be well designed and be useful.

We have purposely referred to industry collaboration as opposed to employer collaboration. Whilst employer collaboration is the highest volume and closest to careers teams, industry collaboration includes activities such as research, as well as volunteering, civic and social engagement.

The research has highlighted the on-going value and importance of fostering connections and collaborations between industry and HE, as well as the breadth of interaction types and the diversity of contacts with industry that exist in universities. Industry has a key role to play in student skill development, the creation of work experience opportunities and the development of research and knowledge.

The findings from the research suggest that joining up conversations and activity is key to establishing, developing and maintaining positive interactions between industry and HE to enhance the student experience.

You can find the full research here. Our hope is that the Interactions Framework becomes a living framework that can be reviewed and added to over time. If there are other interaction types that you’d like to suggest, we would love to hear from you! Get in touch below.