Employer Engagement Guide
Employer engagement can add significant value to your academic programme. Many activities come under its umbrella; from a one off skills session delivered by a single local employer to sector research to assess industry needs when designing programmes.
This guide has been developed with funding from the Higher Education Learning Partnerships Center of Excellent in Teaching and Learning (HELP CETL) to highlight things that work as well as provide lots of resources to shortcut the process of engaging employers.
Employer engagement can be summarised as the process by which employers directly participate in activities facilitated by HEI's in pursuit of shared goals.
Using this guide
This guide is written for you to dip in and out of to get practical ideas and resources so that you are free to concentrate upon developing relationships and reaping the benefits.
The guide can be used to complement the excellent resource from Foundation Degree Forward: Employer and Provider Partnerships - an excellent resource.
This guide contains information about:
- The benefits of engaging with employers
- Things that work (including resources and useful links)
- Realising your goals
- Understanding employers
- Finding employers
- The job market
We recommend that you start by browsing some of the things that work case studies for inspiration and then looking at realising your goals to gauge where you are now and what you want to achieve. The finding employers section will be particularly useful in identifying suitable employers to work with and the other sections will provide context and a constant source of reference as your work in this area develops.
There are many academic studies in this area, some of which are referred to in these pages. However, whilst this guide gives a broad overview of the research findings it focuses on the practical elements to employer engagement. For this reason, sources are given as links and standard academic referencing has not been used.
