Graduate Advantage Achievements
The Story So Far...The Graduate Advantage project ran for three years, and aimed to narrow the graduate recruitment and retention gap, improve leadership and management skills in the workforce and to provide graduate level work experience to help individuals find roles in the future. Activities were focussed specifically on the West Midlands and the £1.7M funding was provided by Advantage West Midlands as part of its wider Skills Strategy. It also received £1.5M in-kind contribution from the private sector. The project has achieved its goals in every area leading to increased graduate employability and engaged SMEs.
1710 students and graduates were assisted; 998 by paid placements that covered 4 weeks to 12 months and the remainder through employability training. This was 85% above target; an exceptional achievement as this project ran during a time of great economic and political uncertainty.
The project was particularly successful in getting graduates into employment, targets set for this were exceeded by 242%; this is supported by the job outcomes survey which showed that 60% of all candidates went onto a longer term role; 59% continued employment with their placement company. Overall, 75% of those candidates in longer term employment were in a permanent contract. In total, project also enabled graduates to transfer their academic knowledge into a business context, and exceeded targets set for this by 7%.
96% of businesses Graduate Advantage worked with were SMEs, demonstrating its success in attracting this marketplace and successfully answering their resource needs. The majority of businesses (95%) would work with graduates again; their positive experience and the value delivered by their placee led to many changing their attitudes to graduate recruitment. The majority of employers believed that their student or graduate increased productivity, introduced new ideas, provided specialist knowledge or strengthened resource.
The graduate skills gap was further reduced by the training activities; hundreds of student and graduates received training to make them more "work-ready". Furthermore, hundreds of businesses took advantage of a special course to develop staff they identified as their managers and leaders of the future. These courses were consistently popular; 28% more delegates were trained than originally targeted.
The consortium of 12 universities provided links to local students and a base for the project staff to work from; this support enabled the service to be offered to nearly 400,000 students. In terms of added value, the sustainable relationships Graduate Advantage has built with thousands of small, regionally based businesses has not only introduced a new group of employers to the value of graduate skills, but also created new contacts that are valuable to Higher Education Institutions.
In summary, the Graduate Advantage project significantly over-delivered on outputs, ran to budget, can demonstrate its impact through outcomes and has built a sustainable working model for the future. It proved itself to be agile, adaptable and able to react to changes in the bigger picture and amongst the various markets it works with. It has earned an excellent reputation for delivering high numbers of good quality placements for graduates, for engaging SMEs, and for running a successful, funded collaboration; in every area it can be considered a success.
Graduate Advantage have recently launched their new graduate internship service at a busy networking event in Birmingham and as before are gearing up to improve graduate employability and retention within the region.
The service will see Graduate Advantage the graduate internship provider based within the West Midlands together with small businesses and a number of the region's Universities create over 1400 graduate internships with the long term goal of boosting business performance to help the local economy.
Funding of £1.6 million has been received from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) with matched funding and support from 10 of the region's universities and the private sector to provide the service.
