Paul Royston - Employment

Another key strength is the way that we thread employ-ability right through the courses with everything that the students do. A number of aspects to that, first of all just the competency of the content we deliver. We keep it up to date. We have a lot of links with industry. Staff are in and out of companies so they can bring very common material to the syllabus and what they teach. We run a number of projects with the students and sometimes live projects, and again that involves bringing in and working with employers and their particular sites and buildings.

Also another exciting aspect to what we do is we like to get the students out on field trips. So for example last we to the real estate and international real estate and finance students on a two day trip to London. That included going to visit the Olympic Legacy site and having a talk from staff there and being able to have an overview of the site and obviously talk about the prospects for the reuse of the site and the regeneration of the site.

In the last phase of the course the students have the choice between doing a dissertation module, which is basically a substantial research project of their choice, or they can do a period basically of work placement where they spend four or six weeks with an employer and then based on that they generate some work and they do a report for us which their assessed on.

Again I think the key expense of something like that from the students point of view is getting out and about, engaging with the environment with real live projects. It's finding out about how the industry works and employ-ability aspects with what employers are asking for and it's about engaging with the profession as well. So a lot about professional standards and about how the profession works.