Rise of work experience presents universities with a range of challenges

It used to be said that a sandwich degree course typically increased the classification by about a grade. The new higher apprenticeship which usually includes a Professionally accredited HE qualification, however is expensive for employers and still inconvenient for many trainees, moreover the bulk of opportunities potentially exist in SMEs, a sector that has struggled to fund or accommodate training. Perhaps more higher apprenticeships could be offered as standard HE qualifications, with student picking up the degree fee element and the employer/government budget the training/NVQ component. The regular full time 3 year degree course may need to be offered in flexible part time transferable blocks, as pioneered in some Masters programmes. i.e. a dramatic change to conventional university teaching mind set.

Work experience is incredibly important for today's graduates and I always advise any students that speak to me about it to take advantage of any opportunities for work experience. It quite simply gives you much better preparation to deal with today's graduate scheme selection procedures, particularly competency-based interviews. I have conducted a number of interviews for graduates and those with work experience have always out-performed inexperienced candidates. Equality of access to this work experience is always an issue in a world where few businesses operate work experience recruitment processes to the same standard as their graduate schemes. However some firms do and, having worked for one of them and been involved in work experience recruitment I believe this system is hugely beneficial for the company (by being able to fast track promising work experience candidates into graduate schemes without risk of losing them by putting them through a whole new recruitment process) as well as much fairer and transparent for students seeking work experience.