10:00 am - 11:00 am 06/11/2025
Working in student enterprise and entrepreneurship is equally the most exciting and frustrating area of a university or college. For all the opportunities afforded through the embedding of entrepreneurial skills and mindsets, there’s a major problem: Senior leaders and managers just don’t get “it”.
They believe that it’s either “not for our students” or creates unstructured and undisciplined freelancers, startups, or – dare we say – influencers, NOT higher-skilled, better-prepared students and graduates, who can choose how to apply these new skills.
And this belief hinders progress in many ways. So, how do you convince senior leaders otherwise?
This session will take participants through a five-year journey of data collection and dissemination at the University of Essex, showing them how we used data to make the argument “for” increased support of student enterprise and entrepreneurship at our institute and making progress over time.
We will share how we crossed the extra/co-curricular divide, examples of the conversations and meetings held, the mistakes we made, and many more learnings, that will both resonate and provide a roadmap that attendees can take back to their respective institutes.
This will be through an example presentation we delivered to senior leaders, alongside supporting information, and demonstrate how our efforts resulted in student enterprise and entrepreneurship being included as a new, prominent, and reportable metric in a new institute-wide strategy.
At a time when there is an increased focus on value and student experience, we will present how the argument for increased support in student enterprise and entrepreneurship can help address the growing demands of students.
This session will be relevant to both academic and practitioners and show how to be data-informed, rather than data-driven and will include a Q&A session at the end.