Nurturing Employer Partnerships for Long-Term Success at LSE Department of Management

With employability a top factor in students’ university decision-making, and increasing competition from alternative routes into higher education such as apprenticeships, school leaver programmes, nurturing partnerships with employers and industry to embed employability is key to students’ and higher education’s success.

As Employer Relations Manager at the LSE Department of Management and having worked in a variety of employer-facing roles, I share some experience for nurturing employer partnerships for long term success:

Communicate and reinforce synergy

Communication is the most important aspect of partnerships. In addition to keeping in touch, reminding each other of your shared goals (and therefore mutual benefits) reinforces your synergy.

It is not recommended to call employer partners every week to exclaim “You should continue to work with us because x, y, z!”. Instead, scheduling informal catch ups at relevant times is important to keep up to date with their needs and challenges (and therefore, inform how you can support them). Gaining broader updates on their organisation helps you to understand the wider factors that could affect their early careers recruitment.

Celebrating and sharing success whether that is a simple update on the outcomes of a recent collaboration, tagging them in a LinkedIn post, or holding a more formal event to recognise their contributions to student employability are all ways of ‘subtly’ reminding employers. For example, at the LSE Department of Management, we host an annual Thank You Awards & Networking event to award employers who have made outstanding and positive impacts to our students’ careers and teaching, with nominations and thank you speeches from our students and faculty. This not only reinforces the positive impacts and benefits of our partnerships, it also enables employers to be meet with and be a part of our community.

Expand

A natural way of nurturing partnerships is to expand. Collaborating and supporting each other in more than one area can create greater impact. In addition to recruiting future talent, what other ways can employers benefit from us (and therefore also add more value)? It might be more ways of developing student employability such as hosting capstone projects in the curriculum, mentoring or hosting work shadowing.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that universities are huge business ecosystems themselves. Depending on their needs, you could introduce and connect employers to opportunities beyond employability such as research collaboration with academics, executive education, or philanthropy. The more multifaceted the partnership (whereby the employer collaborates with your institution in multiple ways with different stakeholders), the stronger and more sustainable the partnership.

We do this by having a regular ‘annual review meetings’ with employers who consistently collaborate over the years, to gain their feedback on current engagements and identify areas where they can potentially expand to in alignment with their business needs. I also keep in touch with external engagement peers across our university, attending school-wide corporate engagement network meetings in addition to having informal catch ups. This has helped me to smoothly introduce employers to other services within the university and even cross-collaborate for greater impact. For example, we are exploring cross-collaboration between our employers and our university’s Digital Skills Lab to better bridge digital skills from academia to industry.

Be dynamic

A ‘partnership’ can sound quite fixed but being dynamic is key to long term success. Understand that employers’ needs and priorities are always changing and be ready to adapt how you can support and collaborate with them.

This can be easier said than done – many universities are old institutions with a lot of history and with that can be a slow approach to change. Being agile where you can, whilst assuring and showing the steps that you are taking to make relevant changes, goes a long way to acknowledging employer needs which can only be appreciated.

In addition to being dynamic, keeping informed of the wider graduate labour market as well as business news can help you pro-actively design and offer engagement opportunities that are attractive and tailored to employers. The Institute of Student Employers (which we are members of), Prospects Luminate, LinkedIn as well as news such as Financial Times are some useful resources that I follow to keep up to date with the graduate labour market.  After all, a partnership needs to always remain relevant – when the relevance is no longer there, there is no business case for the employer to continue investing resources and time in a partnership.

Build trust and respect

There will always be some ‘give and take’ to developing employer partnerships. An employer may not be able to partner on an engagement immediately but if they are a potential future partner, you’ll want to keep in touch with them by offering other ways to engage or support them in the meantime. If it is a paid engagement or partnership and depending on the potential value that they could bring to your students’ career success, are you able to offer a discount or ‘free trial’ which can give them a ‘taste’ of the potential benefits? Delivering on the success of these will be key to building your credibility as a partner.

Alternatively, you might want to step back and give them space as you also do not want to be harassing them. However, keep an eye on them ‘from a distance’ in case there is the opportunity to approach them in future – I typically connect with and follow employers on LinkedIn, perhaps promise to reach out at a later time or when I notice that they are advertising early career vacancies. This can be a balancing act, but both approaches build trust and respect – and these are your tickets to nurturing employer partnerships.

As universities, we now offer a wide and diverse variety of employer engagements, ranging from traditional career fairs to specialised diversity programmes and ‘micro-placements’. Hopefully, I have outlined that it is not only ‘what’ but importantly ‘how’ (the all-important human aspects of relationship management) we can become employers’ partner of choice.

Ardy Cheung is Employer Relations Manager at the LSE Department of Management, London School of Economics & Political Science