From Graduate to Founder: How Universities Are Shaping the Future Workforce

so it's really interesting.

I mean, when we were at school, similar age, obviously, when we were at school, like enterprise wasn't really spoke about, was it? It was it was kind of you go and get a job and it's quite a structured job, maybe.

But it was it was certainly wasn't a pathway and it certainly wasn't a conversation that took place in my home.

You know, that's the opportunity of being able to open a business or start a business or even to think about having a business was an option.

So do you think that there's kind of a real shift change to where things were from when we were at school to how it is now?

Oh, certainly.

And I think there's obviously much more in the kind of media and.

you know, TV around entrepreneurship, not always for the good, I feel.

But I think, you know, you'll always have people who've been, have seen it at home, maybe their families have got businesses and they're already kind of switched on to the idea that that is an option.

Whereas, you know, there's many more people who have that potential to start something for themselves.

And I think, you know, looking at kind of economic conditions at the minute, it's really tough.

And actually the strategy around our employability strategy is actually we need as many graduates to start their own businesses as we do, you know, taking employment.

And so, you know, like I say, conditions are really tough, but how can we incentivise them to think about starting something for themselves and creating their own opportunities?

Yeah.

And actually, you know, the work that we did in the curriculum around entrepreneurial learning, if you think about what it takes to start a business, you know, spotting the opportunities in the first place, you know, building your network, gathering resources around you, you know, critically thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve.

How are you creating value? And, you know, how are you bringing that value to what markets? You know, all of those skills and that mindset that it takes to kind of creatively problem solve.

What employers are looking for, too.

And so, you know, whether they start a venture or not, they've built something in terms of their skill set and hopefully their mindset around, you know, adding value to the world in whatever context they end up in.

And do you think that's certainly more of you saying it's part of the curriculum now? Is that things that are, I suppose, in essence, drip fed in through the curriculum as you go on? So actually you do come out with a wider skill set than what you've gone in with?

Yeah, I mean, our courses are professions facing and, you know, it's about giving our students the opportunity to experience different work contexts.

And, you know, it's all you think about how you learn and develop.

It's about kind of pushing comfort zones.

and gaining exposure to experiences, whether that's part-time work, whether that's volunteering, whether that's actually listening to, I know you've done it yourself, you've come into the university and talked about your career pathway, it's about having role models.

You know, how can we build that into the curriculum? How can we look at assessment, authentic assessment in terms of, you know, can we get them to do pictures, for example, business pictures? We're building in kind of innovation challenges into the curriculum, bringing businesses in to set those challenges so that they've got some real world experience.

And, you know, across the curriculum, across all programmes, how can we and give the students exposure to that kind of learning that's going to really help them in their future career, whatever that looks like, you know, and experimenting.