Employer Engagement Series      

Welcome to the News and Events area of the Employer Engagement website

This area features the latest news about the activities developed in employer engagement, together with details of conferences, workshops and other forthcoming events relevant to employer engagement within the Built Environment sector.

News Headlines

NEW: Designing and Delivering a Curriculum for Employer Engagement: Workshop Summary

The first workshop of the employer engagement series took place at the Lakeside Centre, Birmingham on 26th March 2009. The workshop was jointly developed and designed by CEBE & Bibby Rumbelow with the support of the Construction Knowledge Exchange. The event attracted participants from 16 Universities spread across the UK within Construction & Built Environment.

The main focus of this workshop was to promote best practice in employer engagement in ‘designing and delivering a curriculum’. Whilst the morning session of the workshop concentrated on curriculum design and models for teaching, discussions during the afternoon session centred around challenges of delivery in the workplace and managing employer expectations.

Various aspects and issues of work place learning were discussed from different built environment contexts. This was further encouraged through using case studies and illustrative examples with an explicit ‘how to’ focus leading to interactive discussions. Participants highlighted sharing ideas and practice within the open discussion sessions as one of the most valuable activities: ‘hearing from others what they have tried and their views on what works provides various avenues to explore and support decision making’.

Most of the participants requested a longer session to cover various aspects and extended discussion sessions. They also showed keen interest regarding the challenges in designing curriculum for work based learning. This workshop was seen as ‘reflection on the practicalities of engaging with the industry’ and ‘a very informative and useful event’. Participants enthusiastically expressed their interest for the continuation of this series of workshop and welcomed the idea of covering another area of work based learning for the next workshop. One of the participants went on to say ‘it was worth every minute of my time and I would like to attend further workshops in future’.