Challenge on

More than 50 students from Southampton Business School have taken part in a challenge which saw them work with real-world businesses, including a Southampton-based company, to solve a business issue for a real-life client.

The Southampton Business School Business Challenge included students from across all year groups and programmes working in small teams with clients, to co-create a brief that aimed to tackle the businesses’ challenges whilst developing the students’ transferrable skills and enhancing their employability.

“As a small business based in Southampton, gaining access to talented Business School students and working with them on a critical area of my business was invaluable,” said Kate Healey, Director of Kate Healey Happy Ltd, a Law of Attraction Coaching and Consulting Company. “I briefed the students on my Happiest You Programme, an online programme designed to help people feel happier, for businesses to use as part of their employee wellbeing package. I tasked them with creating a marketing strategy including a social media plan.”

As part of the challenge, students had to conduct surveys or short interviews with a sample of local employers, research current trends in employee assistance programmes and corporate health and wellbeing, research company budget allocations for employee assistance programmes, and provide return-on-investment metrics to justify the implementation of the programme for companies.

“I had regular contact with the students throughout the challenge, so they could ask me questions or test ideas,” said Kate. “The outcomes were useful in helping me better understand the competitive landscape and refining my marketing activities to align to the new customer segments that we identified.”

The challenge was hosted on the experiential learning platform, Riipen, which was used for client communication and is invaluable as part of the Business School’s suite of tools to enable more experiential education.

“I opted to take part in the Business Challenge to gain some insight into working for a real business and putting my skills to the test in providing actual ideas and solutions,” said Peizhang Gong, MSc Business Analytics and Management Sciences student. “Kate was fantastic to work with because she really let us into her business and gave us a great understanding of what she did and the challenges she faced. The whole experience has given me a real appetite for getting out into industry.”

CEPAR

The Careers, Employability, Placements and Alumni Relations (CEPAR) team supports Southampton Business School’s strategy to ‘attract a diverse body of ambitious, agile and talented students to whom we provide a transformative experience to become responsible and resilient future leaders’.

CEPAR aims to:

• Enable Southampton Business School students to build their portfolio of technical and non-technical knowledge and skills throughout their student journey by taking part in a wide range of employability-enhancing experiences.

• Offer a high-quality, award-winning, Student Placements service, taking pride in working closely with employers locally, nationally, and internationally. It places 100 students on average per year at wellknown brand names as well as local SMEs.

• Connect, build, and partner with Southampton Business School alumni to create a mutually supportive community that benefits current students in diverse ways.

• Embed experiential learning throughout the curriculum to ensure that all students can engage in real-world experiences that will enable them to apply subject-specific knowledge, while at the same time developing their nontechnical, transferable skills including problem-solving, teamwork, client liaison, and communication.