Project Name: Student Internship Programme (SIP)

Lead Institution: University of West London 

Project Lead: Samia Oussena

 

Background

 

This project has made use of relevant JISC resources (BCE CRM; Enterprise Architecture) to assess the organisational environment at UWL in which staff can identify and exploit market opportunities in workforce development and employer based training. This project has identified how the institution can improve and provide a wider, flexible and responsive range of workforce development opportunities.  

 

Aims and objectives

 

The aim of the project was to build an internship or work experience at a school level at the University of West London, in those schools that do not have a current capability. The project also aimed to maximise both the student and employer efficiency in the internship experience with minimal overheads and optimising the cost of provision.

These aims were partially met through the following activities:

 

• Using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach to the implementation of the project.
• The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) self-assessment tool was  used to review CRM practices across the institution and identify how CRM provision ccould help in the implementation of the project.

 

Context

 

Some areas of the University already provide an integrated work experience component such as nursing, psychology and some areas of hospitality and tourism; however the majority of the schools do not have such provision. In January 2010 University of West London (UWL) ran a successful graduate internship scheme[1], in which 320 graduates from a wide range of universities took part along with corporate and SME business partners. The scheme included modules focusing on key employment skills development and support with all participants undertaking CPD in presentation skills, career planning and the use of technology, followed by a two month internship. Feedback from both interns and employers was extremely positive and the scheme was shortlisted for the THES 2010 Employer Engagement project of the Year Award. Unfortunately government funding to continue with the graduate internship scheme did not eventuate.

 

[1]http://www.uwl.ac.uk/employers/Graduate_internship_scheme.jsp).

 

The business case

 

The University of West London aims to enable students of all backgrounds to thrive and succeed and to be a business facing university with a demand led portfolio, thereby widening participation by reaching out to local communities to inspire and encourage enthusiasm for learning. This needs an environment that integrates student learning, personal and career development into a fully-rounded educational experience which includes the opportunity for students to develop through work experience. 

 

JISC resources/technology used

 

• The project took an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach. The modelling has mainly focused on the business layer. We also provided detailed motivation and event models for the project. All the models have been built using the archi modelling tool. This has been very useful for documenting the domain and in identifying the requirements for the application.
• CRM self-assessment framework was used to review CRM practices and support within the University of West London. The review identified the level of maturity in the use of CRM in the university and how CRM can be used further to improve student centric processes.
• Used Linked data from the implementation of job finder application.

 

Outcomes

 

• CRM assessment framework has provided us with a good starting point for reviewing the processes that have made use of the institution CRM. However, due to difficulty of sharing contacts throughout the schools, the UWL CRM capability could not be used for this project.
• There is an increase recognition that EA can help in implementing projects within the University.

 

Achievements

 

• Review of our CRM system using CRM self-assessment framework.
• EA models built in the project have been added to the EA models repository for the University of West London. In this project, we concentrated mainly on capturing the processes, the information, the policies, goals, actors and events involved in managing student placements.
• We run two surveys with the objectives of capturing students views and expectation regarding placement offerings. The surveys have identified that students are very keen in having a placement.
• The project built a job opportunity finder application based on the application of linked data. Job advertisement data is retrieved from PROSPECT and Graduate Job Twitter feeds every day and updates an RDF repository. A web based application was built to browse of the RDF repository. This is still in a testing phase.

 

Benefits

 

• A better understanding of student placements and what services are needed at UWL for the development and good management of student placement processes.
• A prototype system was developed to allow the automation of the processing of data related to placement opportunities.
• The project provided an opportunity to used the VPECT (Values, Policies, Events, Content, Trust) framework, an analysis method, for the contextual analysis and see how it would work with Archimate. 

 

Drawbacks

 

• Timetable for decisions made at the institution do not always follow a project schedule.
• Placement/job opportunities are advertised, with job titles. This provide a mismatch for the data provided on courses, which mainly concentrates on skills that a student will develop.

 

Key lessons 

 

• Although linked data seems to increase in popularity, we found it difficult to find external sources related to placements. For example, to our knowledge, there are no job listings in linked data. Not finding a linked data source for job opportunities that we can link to, we looked at RSS feeds instead. This also has been a problem. For example, although PROSPECTS (UK graduate career web site) has an RSS feed, this was not working and we could not link to it.
• The environment in which a project runs is dynamic and therefore any project plan needs to build flexibility in order to achieve its objectives (or part of them). In this project we had to change some of the activities in order to mitigate for the changes happening in the institution.

 

Looking ahead

 

Providing students with placement opportunities is becoming a must for most courses. Although it was decided at this time not to use a CRM across the university to support the management of placements. With the maturity of the processes, this decision will change.

 

Sustainability

 

The project has helped to embed the use of EA in projects. This has also provided the opportunity to develop two PhD research projects. The project is still being used as one of the case study for these two PhDs.