Any organisation including corporates, not-for-profits, small to medium sized businesses and public organisations can become an experiential learning partner with a university, business school or college.
This means that parts of a qualification or learning programme offered by the institution are delivered within your organisation, to bring the experience or work-place based learning components to life.
Students could come from the partner university or college, or you may want to include some of your own staff on these programmes.
Examples of ways you can become an experiential learning partner include hosting apprentices or interns, enabling parts of learning programmes to be completed at your workplace, inviting problem solvers or innovators to help with projects, structured experiential leadership programmes, or letting students shadow your employees and experience some of the inner workings of your industry.
The benefits of becoming an experiential learning partner are numerous and include:
1.Strengthen your talent pipeline
Experiential learners are often students from the university you partner with. Quality universities will have student selection criteria in place to ensure they attract top learners. Students may be further pre-vetted by the university before they are placed with your organisation. You can also conduct your own in-house interviews before confirming experiential placements. Experiential learners can become an automatic part of your talent pipeline.
2. Conduct extended interviews of future talent
One of the best ways to decide on future talent is to see individuals in action. You have lots of opportunities to assign certain tasks and observe experiential learners in the workplace for days, weeks or months at a time. You can see who the top learners are and who has what it takes to fit into your organisational culture and deliver as part of your team. You can then invite specific individuals to attend formal job interviews, or even build formal job interviews into experiential learning activities together with your partner educational institution.
3. Address any skills gaps
Experiential learning programmes can address your organisational skills gaps in two different ways. You can bring in new students who are learning new skills at the partner university, such as AI or data science, and then assimilate these new skills into your organisation. Alternatively, you can put selected internal employees onto internal experiential learning programmes, where they can acquire these skillsets in addition to the ones they already have that got them hired in the first place. For example, your leaders and managers may be good at their core jobs but may not yet know how to interpret and manage data, which could benefit them in their roles.
4. Reduce recruitment and training costs
Apprentices and interns can be hired at a much lower cost than more experienced talent and the experiential programmes they are on are designed to ensure that they learn on the job. Apprenticeships may be funded by government, which means you don’t need to pay for the training component and only cover the wages of the apprentice. Once the apprenticeship is complete, you may deem the person suitable for a full-time role.
5. Reduce innovation costs and risks
Some project-based experiential learning programmes are built into the partner university’s qualifications, which means that the students may volunteer their time for free to help your organisation solve problems, make changes, or innovate new products, services, or processes. Student based projects can be hosted externally, which means that they can be tested before you allow the innovation into your organisation.
6. Access low cost, short-term talent
You can utilise experiential learners as a low-cost flexi-talent solution. Mature or more experienced students can cover staffing gaps or free up existing talent for higher priority tasks. If your business has a seasonal component, you can scale up talent numbers as and when required with experiential learners.
7.Bring in fresh perspectives and ideas
External learners can bring a highly dynamic, fresh, and creative approach to your organisation. Through their unique perspectives and perceptions, they can highlight important things that are blind spots for your existing employees. Experiential learning talent can encourage existing talent to develop new skillsets and can even have a positive influence on company culture. Over and above this, experiential learning programmes are a great way to bring more diversity into your organisation.
8. Upskill and reskill talent
Structured internal experiential learning can be custom designed to upskill or reskill your existing talent in line with your organisational strategies. This is especially relevant in today’s world where rapid advancements in technology require employees at all levels to constantly update their know-how. It may be possible for your university or college partner to design custom programmes that include credit-bearing modules towards other qualifications.
9. Access problem solving teams
Problem solving projects are a common form of experiential learning. You can call upon external students or internal employees, or a combination of both, to solve pressing organisational issues as part of an experiential learning intervention.
10. Retain and promote key staff
Retention of top talent can be a struggle for many organisations. It costs a lot more to hire and train someone new that it does to spend a little to retain someone good. Top talent will highly appreciate work-place based learning programmes that enable them to build their careers within your organisation. Individuals who are valued can engage in experiential tasks to fill their skills gaps efficiently and effectively in order to get promoted.
Thousands of organisations from around the globe are joining forces with educational partners to reap these and many other rewards. The next step in the evolution of experiential partnerships is for learning institutions to offer their partners a more comprehensive, cross- collaborative experiential learning menu to maximise these relationships going forward.
