On Wednesday evening, Yorkshire Forward had invited people from the region to a roundtable consultation regarding a recent government report (Feb. 2008) "Creative Britain - New Talents for the New Economy".
The discussion went from 17:50 - 20:00. Among the participants were the following people which I knew:
Bill Boffin (Yorkshire Forward), Derek Hales (U.Huddersfield, Director of C3KE), Philip Morris (U.of York), Gavin Wilson (Screen Yorkshire, also MSc student in the MA Screen Media Cultures module).
The discussion went around how in the creative sector industry and academia can collaborate. It began with the statement that industry complains that students do not have the skills necessary for working.
My contributions to the debate:
- It is important to analyse the industry's complaints: these complaints could be just superficial, requiring students to be familiar with certain topics and work practices. However, it would be actually the task of the industry to train students and work place beginners to get the required specific work place skills. But it also could be that the complaints are deeper and address the issue that students are not able to learn, adapt, and display those academic skills and soft skills which are an essential element of academically trained staff. In that case, universities must ask themselves if they in fact do enough to teach properly.
- Knowledge transfer needs not only to be one way (from academia to industry), but academia also needs to benefit. I referred hereby to past KT work where we worked with companies who employed students in their MSc thesis phase, so that they could solve an academic problem that would benefit the academically justified research.
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