Getting beyond ‘enterprise’: Defining and communicating enterprise for successful engagement

10:00 am - 4:00 pm 28/06/2017

Wednesday 28th June 2017, University of Sheffield, Workroom 2, 38 Mappin Street, S1 4DT

This one day ‘Enterprise Exchange’ enabled delegates to:

Explore the language used by educators and employers to describe enterprise, entrepreneurship and employability skills in students
Identify barriers created by this language and consider how these affect our work and impact, and influence students’ ability to articulate their skills
Contribute to initial discussions on the development of guidance on the language of enterprise education
Network with enterprise and entrepreneurship educators and a range of employers from across the UK.

Background and summary

Language has a big impact on our success as enterprise educators, and it is not easy to get it right. The term ‘enterprise’ is often confused with ‘entrepreneurship’, and colleagues across our institutions then argue that it is not relevant for their students, who are not interested in starting new ventures. Getting beyond the word ‘enterprise’ is therefore a real challenge. And it is clear that we do not get this right at the moment: some of our language puts academics off; it doesn’t always engage senior managers; employers use different terminology to describe enterprise capabilities, which educators often dislike; and students are frequently unable to articulate their skills, struggling to translate between how those skills are labelled in education and what employers are asking for in job applications.

A major challenge for enterprise educators is to find ways to challenge assumptions, and communicate what they do in ways that engage their target audiences, and for our students, whose capability we develop, the challenge is to articulate those skills in meaningful ways to a variety of audiences, including employers. This event brought together educators, employers, and students, to explore how we can communicate enterprise education in ways that speak to all stakeholders. Our aim was to find a common language that enables us to get better recognition of what we do both within and outside education. Delegates left with ideas for how to better engage stakeholders through tailoring their vocabulary and the articulation of their offer, whether that offer is enterprise or entrepreneurship within or outside curricula.

Speakers:

Wayne Adams, Operations Manager and Damir Latte, Talent Acquisition Manager, Perkbox
Daniel Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Photography, London South Bank University
Sheen Chin, Student and President of Enactus Leicester 2015-16, University of Leicester
Daniel Furniss, Masters Student, International Marketing, Sheffield Hallam University
Professor David Gibson, Head of Entrepreneurship Education, Liverpool John Moores University
Dr Sam Marsh, Teaching Fellow in Mathematics, University of Sheffield
Dr Tracey Moore, Head of School of Nursing & Midwifery, University of Sheffield
Andy Mosley, Projects Director & Chair of Services Operations Graduate Scheme, Engie UK
Vasileios Kalliris, WCOM Process Engineer at Saint-Gobain and Environmental and Energy Engineering Graduate, University of Sheffield
Jamie Wharfe, Group Talent Acquisition Manager, Enterprise Holdings

You can download the event slides below: