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Guidance for engaging local employers and partners in Colleges Week

Colleges Week is an excellent opportunity to showcase the brilliant things that you do with employers and organisations that you already have strong relationships with, as well as a way to engage new employers. There are many activities you could carry out to engage local employers. We’ve listed a few options below, but we encourage you to be creative in thinking about what you can do.

Inviting them into the college

If you have been looking to organise any activity with employers and organisations, Colleges Week offers an ideal time to host this. If you are organising any events at the college remember to extend an invite to local employers and organisations. Remember to share anything you do on social media with the hashtag #LoveOurColleges.

This could include a range of activity such as:

  • An employer engagement activity, such as employers visiting the college for a roundtable or lunchtime discussion on the role of colleges in delivering on the missions
  • Talks with students, such as industry specific talks discussing careers in specific sectors relevant to the missions, such as construction, nursing or green energy
  • Engaging with students on careers advice, perhaps getting them involved in a careers fair or a careers carousel. You can also invite former students to share their experiences of moving from college to work, particularly in professions key to the missions.

Share Colleges Week graphics

Having complementary social media messaging with local employers and organisations will help amplify the messages we are trying to promote during Colleges Week. You might also want to create content around case studies of partnerships that demonstrate how your college works with local employers or organisations in the local community, particularly across the five missions. If you are preparing your own content, sharing these with employers and organisations ahead of time can help them to plan what supportive content they would like to post.

We are asking for a particular emphasis on sharing the AoC graphics allocated on each of the Mission days. These are:

  • Monday 3rd March: Kickstart the economy
  • Tuesday 4th March: Become a green energy superpower
  • Wednesday 5th March: Take back our streets
  • Thursday 6th March: Break down barriers to opportunity:
  • Friday 7th March: Build an NHS fit for the future

Compile a shared case study

If you work closely with any local employers to deliver across any of the five key areas of the missions, we encourage you to work together with the employer to compile a case study outlining how the partnership is delivering on one or more of the government’s missions. You can use our guidance on how to write a compelling case study and our case study template to guide this and share it with your local MP using our letter template. These resources can be accessed here.

Asking your local employer to co-sign this letter and/or provide a quote for the case study will make the case study more impactful and highlight how such partnerships are crucial to successfully delivering on the missions.

Think creatively

We encourage you to think creatively about how you can engage the employers you work with and tell the story more widely. Engaging students in these activities can be beneficial and they may have ideas of their own about how best to do this. Perhaps you might want to do an interview with a local employer that you can both share on your social media channels, or a video clip of students talking about how they have benefitted from their experience engaging local employers and organisations.