Helping businesses get more from universities and graduates

A strong regional economy needs businesses with healthy cultures of enterprise and innovation, employing people with excellent leadership skills. This is especially the case where—as in Yorkshire & Humber—we are building a knowledge-based economy. Smarter employers turn to university students and graduates in order to find the levels of education and skills they need.

Yorkshire Forward is working to:
  • Encourage more access routes, so that more people go to university
  • Retain our graduates in Yorkshire & Humber
  • Attract outside graduates to live and work in our region.

The challenge: graduate shortages

Yorkshire & Humber is experiencing graduate shortages within some of the region’s priority sectors. There are two main reasons for this:

  • Competition from other regions: There’s a national shortages of graduates in some subjects, and graduates who want a career in particular industries often feel a strong attraction to other regions. In newer industries, the attraction and retention of graduates to or within the region is particularly challenging. For example, in the Yorkshire & Humber bioscience cluster, businesses may have to compete with strong clusters in Cambridge, London and Oxford. In many sectors, the ability to retain university graduates is hindered by a shortage of industrial placements and sandwich degree courses in the region.
  • Poor industry image: This relates to more traditional sectors such as food & drink, chemicals, AEM, and parts of digital & new media (in printing and electronics). Graduates tend not to have a good grasp of the significant opportunities within Yorkshire & Humber within these sectors, partly as a result of outdated careers guidance. In the chemicals sector, which is concentrated in Humber and West Yorkshire, graduate recruitment is challenging—reportedly due to university graduates seeing Humberside as a relatively unattractive place to live. A particular issue in Humberside is the need to retain a greater number of chemical engineers.

What are we doing about it?

  • Graduate skill development—Yorkshire Forward is commissioning a programme to help businesses improve the skills of their graduate employees. This investment will be focused on a number of key sectors, but will also support the issue of a shortage of engineers, cutting across many sectors. 
  • Graduates Yorkshire—Yorkshire Forward are funding a three year Graduate Internship project through Graduates Yorkshire, to ensure that Graduates can gain valuable employabillity skills during and beyond the recession. The project will enable employers to take a graduate on a project when it might otherwise be difficult to recruit.
  • Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs)
    When a business forms a KTP with a university, part of the deal involves a post-graduate coming to work for you, for between 1 and 3 years. Most firms recoup their investment in the first year, and go on to make significant extra profits thereafter. Each project results in an average of three new research projects initiated, more than three new jobs and 15 existing company staff trained. Find out more on our page about KTPs.
  • Lifelong learning networks—The region’s lifelong learning networks (LLNs) helps the progression of vocational learners, so that they can access higher education without barriers. This creates more university graduates for Yorkshire & Humber. LLNs are based in sub-regional areas, so you can use these links to find yours: