Reflecting on the UVAC conference

Written by Beth Walthew, Market Research Director at Prospect Research

The UVAC conference, held on 26^th November in York, was brimming full of best practice, new ideas and great conversations.  This is the second year that Prospect Research has attended the conference.  It’s a great way to keep up to date with the key issues in the education sector, which represents around 50% of our lead generation and market research clients now.

The theme of the conference was ‘Accrediting Professional Competence and Higher Apprenticeships at Degree Level’.  The Higher Apprenticeships were of particular interest to us, as so many of our university clients are promoting new frameworks to employers as part of their engagement activity.

As Higher Apprenticeships are so new to employers, our work still has a double objective: to promote the concept and awareness of Higher Apprenticeships and their place within the sphere of work-based learning and degrees, and to find opportunities with employers interested in developing their workforce through Higher Apprenticeships.  Awareness still seems to be largely lacking amongst employers, so it’s hear about so many universities being proactive in engaging with employers about these programmes.

Jan Woodruff and I presented a workshop entitled ‘Employer Engagement:  Building Effective Business Relationships’.  We covered the key areas to cover when constructing a market research project to better understand possible business relationships, and then how lead generation can be used to build these relationships.  Slides from our workshop are here – http://www.uvac.ac.uk/conference-2013/

So a great time had by all.  Looking forward to continuing the many conversations Jan and I had about proactive lead generation campaigns.