HeadStart for Higher Education Institution (HEI) University

 

Akonia HeadStart

HeadStartTM - the business and soft skills development programme for HE Undergraduates

 

  • Attract more undergraduates to your university with improved graduate employment prospects.
  • Gain further recognition from employers for producing work-ready graduates.
  • Increase your university’s league table rankings with better Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) data.

 

WHY?

We understand that teaching highly-regarded graduate degrees is not enough to ensure the success of your University. With tuition fees at record highs, and talk of them going even higher, undergraduates more demanding than ever; with exceedingly high expectations of what your institution can deliver for them, it has never been more important than now to provide your undergraduates with their best possible prospects of obtaining job offers and relevant employment to embark upon their chosen career path.

 

Too many undergraduates feel it is their primary responsibility to acquire employability skills with only a minority of undergraduates agreeing that their institution should take prime responsibility.

 

Likewise many employers expect universities to do more to teach practical employability skills.

 

What a wonderful opportunity this opens up for your institution.

 

In today’s competitive world of league tables we want to help you accelerate up the Employability Index league table rankings by making employability (business and soft) skills training programmes an integral component of your degree courses.

 

HOW?

We pride ourselves on helping your undergraduates to learn business and soft skills in a stimulating environment that aids retention of knowledge and quickly enables them to become competent and confident at applying these skills.

 

Our trainers are very experienced business people cum trainers.  This means that each can bring an average of some 25 years business experience into the classroom, and provide a wealth of anecdotal material from their business careers with which to illuminate the topics being taught and the issues your undergraduates may have with them.

 

Every trainer has recruited and/or managed first-time employees, and really understands the challenges these employees face when entering the world of work.

 

Our HeadStartTM training programme and content is designed with your undergraduates in mind. They’re comfortable learning things in the classroom as well as online. They are engaged with social media. They expect the content to be tailored to their personal requirements and relevant to their level of experience; not aimed at people with many years of work experience.

 

Our modularised instructor-led classroom-based programme is flexible in its design so it can fit in comfortably with your existing degree course curriculum and extra-curricular activities. We make it easy for you by taking care of what they need to learn, and we’ll help you integrate it into your existing timetable. You’ll be able to track your undergraduate’s performance and progress, and utilise this insight for improving your existing degree courses with more employment-related content.

 

Using our tools, you’ll be able to benchmark your institutions performance against its peers and measure your trajectory in the Employability Index league table rankings.

 

WHAT

Research shows that the most important employability (business and soft skills) that Employers are looking for your graduates to have, are:-

 

  • Business & Customer Awareness
  • Self-Management
  • Communications & Literacy
  • Problem Solving
  • Teamworking
  • Application of Numeracy & IT skills

 

We’ve designed our HeadStartTM training programme specifically for the needs of university undergraduates. As they progress through each year of their degree, our training programme builds and develops their business knowledge and soft skills in a stimulating, thought-provoking, pro-active environment that aids retention of knowledge and quickly enables them to become competent and confident at applying these skills.