A Very Good Approach

Posted on: 6 January 2020 by Gill O'Brien, Employer Connections Manager in Employer Connections Blog

Be inspired by our work with Very Group to develop the skills and employability of maths students.

Challenge 

I have worked in an employer-facing role at the University of Liverpool for 17 years and many things have changed since I joined the team. However, one thing that remains the same is the fear that students will fail to show up to employer events. It doesn’t take much… a rainy evening, a football match or a cancelled bus service and we’re all in trouble.

A central programme of multi-disciplinary activity in our Career Studio is still a valuable part of our offer to employers and we are constantly finding successful ways to engage students in this space. To ensure mass student engagement with employers, it is essential that as well as encouraging students to come to us, we also go to them!

Solution

Following a restructure in 2018 we have assumed a pivotal role in supporting academic departments with curriculum re-design and we aim to embed employers in every programme. The success stories are just starting to take shape.

One recent triumph came out of our maths department. Working alongside careers and employability colleagues who are now directly aligned to faculties, we were able to utilise our employer partnerships to provide an opportunity for students to engage with employers from the comfort of an assessed academic module.

Very Group were one of the organisations involved. We linked academic colleagues with specialists from Very Group’s analytics department who provided real data from customer interactions with their website.

The students were tasked with analysing the data, identifying trends in behaviour and making recommendations on how to create more high-value customers. The students worked on this project in small groups over a three-week period. They presented their recommendations back to the business alongside academics who assessed the work.

Success

From an employer’s perspective, opportunities of this kind offer significant benefits. This is a unique, innovative and more targeted approach to engage with students’ on-campus outside of more traditional activities.

For Very Group this opportunity also provided them with exposure to a guaranteed talent pool of over 40 students who do not ordinarily attend their campus events - fewer than five maths students engaged in their central activity last term - whilst also providing an extra resource dedicated to a real business issue.

Lyndsay Geraghty, Early Careers Partner at Very Group explains:

“This was the first time we had partnered with a university in this way. Data professionals are in demand so any opportunity to raise awareness of a career in analytics whilst also providing students with the chance to apply their education to a real business problem is exciting for everyone involved.

“We decided to take a real problem with real data (warts and all) for the teams to solve. We were so impressed by the recommendations in the final presentations, which all combined commercial thinking with data analysis. Perfect!

We invited the winning team to visit our HQ to give them a taste of what it’s like to work for us and are now hoping to recruit some amazing candidates on the back of this project.”

Connections in action

A curriculum embedded employability module with employer input is difficult to fault and we are committed to facilitating more of this activity in Liverpool to ensure every student gets the opportunity to develop, practise and articulate the skills that we know graduate employers demand.