Employer engagement - a practical perspective

This paper addresses many of the issues arising from the parallel session seminar I gave at the GEES Residential in Edinburgh this year. It focuses
on both my presentation and discussions I had with delegates at the conference and since. I am not an academic and did not set out to present a learned paper. However, many of my clients are FE colleges with substantial HE provision and my perspective is that of the entrepreneur/businessman with a foot in the FHE world. For many years FE has had strong links with employers and the Employer Engagement agenda is a natural extension of their commercial work; however for many in HE, linking academia with commerce is not a natural priority and leads
to certain tensions. My aim was to introduce a pragmatic approach to employer engagement that would provoke discussion and effect behavioural
change.