University-industry collaborations are key to UK’s talent revolution

Graduation is definitely a glass-full-to-overflowing kind of day. Whether beer or bubbles, it’s a watershed moment when you look back on all that you’ve achieved – and look forward to reaping the benefits.

Photographers love a flying mortar board yet all too often their pictures appear beneath glass-half-empty headlines. Instead of celebrating a 71 per cent professional employment rate in the six months after graduation – a UK market average figure that has risen steadily since 2010 – stories focus on the much smaller percentage of graduates who haven’t got an instant foot on their chosen career ladder.

It’s no coincidence that universities boasting the highest proportion of graduates who are employed or still studying six months post-graduation tend to have strong specialisms and business links. Their campuses eschew ivory towers: instead they are buzzing with industry professionals leading seminars, students undertaking work experience as part of their degrees and academics who consult ‘end users’ and understand what employers really need.

According to the Higher Education HESA report 2016, one of the most solid graduate employment records belongs to The University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). Six months after graduating, 78 per cent of former UWE Bristol students are working in professional or managerial roles compared with the 71 per cent UK average. Separate out UWE Bristol graduates who worked with an employer during their degree and the professional or managerial occupation figure leaps to 90 per cent.

UWE Bristol vice-chancellor, Professor Steve West, places closer collaboration between education and industry at the heart of the talent revolution needed to equip resilient graduates with the right skills and mind-set.

“Perhaps now more than ever, universities lie at the heart of the UK’s economic future,” he says.

“We need to teach not just the academic and functional skills, but focus on real-world learning experiences that allow graduates to be adaptable, enterprising and ready for work. We can’t do this in isolation.”

The way people work and the work they do has always been led by advances in technology. The University Alliance predicts that in four years’ time, 80 per cent of new jobs will typically involve the analytical, problem-solving and complex communication skills imbued in graduates. Therefore, the UK workforce needs a greater proportion of university-educated people with the right high-level skills to remain globally competitive.

Using an hourglass analogy, the Alliance shows sustained growth in managerial, professional and associated technical occupations; a shrinking middle-wage sector where technology takes care of routine administration and physical operative tasks; and an expansion in lower wage, manual occupations to meet the burgeoning demands of industries such as leisure and care.

“We need to train a new generation of graduates to meet the challenges that leaving Europe will present,” says Professor West.

“From research and innovation to mapping the skills of the future, it will be progressive, collaborative universities that will fulfil their role as key drivers of productivity and economic growth in a global knowledge economy.”

Hourglass graduates could be working for the next 50 to 60 years, requiring an attitude of mind that embraces change and is refreshed by new challenges. Universities that move with the times have already set the stage for them to flourish.