Posted by: Martin Bojam
on Mar 9, 2010
With HE making headlines about funding cuts, FE can easily be overlooked. Yet this sector drives the economy by providing skilled technicians and that's what most companies want. Funding is also tight for FE, and leaders in the sector will have to learn the lessons others have learned before them. Apart from the miserable business of cost cutting, there are a number of pro-active steps which can be taken and which can lighten the gloom.
Is branding still important? Most certainly, yes. Stakeholders have to understand what a college is all about, what its core brand values are, what it stands for, what benefits it brings to stakeholders. New college structures will undoubtedly emerge, as a result not just of mergers, but of the formation of federations and other groupings and the need for powerful branding which presses the right buttons with employers and stimulates them to pay for training will be paramount.
Posted by: Martin Bojam
on Nov 30, 2009
I’ve just returned, with two of my colleagues (Gabrielle Golding and Arabella Arthy) from the (FE) College Marketing Network Conference in Coventry. It was the first time I’ve been to an FE gathering, and you can’t help but be impressed with the enthusiasm and drive – and as the photo shows, we all worked very hard!
More seriously, it seemed to me that a key theme of the Conference was Employer Engagement, an area where I believe Colleges are, by and large, ahead of universities in terms of the importance they place on this area. Both financially and in terms of their mission, it is much more critical for them, but one wonders whether, given the way the political tide is flowing, HEIs might not find themselves having to play catch up before too long. Of course some universities, for example Warwick or Hertfordshire, have been fully engaged with the business community for a long time now, but that certainly isn’t true of the majority.
