Skip to content

NTU's Graduate Internship Scheme sets a precedent for 8 years of successful collaboration

NTU's Graduate Internship Scheme gives businesses the opportunity to take on NTU talent for a fully-funded, six-week placement. Our graduates will bring extra resources to help grow your organisation, bring fresh ideas and the latest skills and knowledge to your team. Simultaneously, participating businesses will play a fundamental part in providing experience to some of our unemployed or underemployed graduates.

Student sat smiling

NTU Talent solves "underwhelming" recruitment efforts

Diversity, a Creative Digital Marketing Agency from Nottingham, have been working with NTU for around 8 years. Simon Elliott, Managing Director, says it has been a long and fruitful relationship.

Prior to engaging with NTU, Diversity would typically ask for 3-5 years of experience when recruiting account management roles. At the time, the management team were underwhelmed by local talent and reached out to NTU on a complete whim to explore alternative avenues for recruitment.

Since then Diversity have benefited from accessing different funding pots to find and recruit graduate talent, worked with NTU to hire numerous graduates with much success – one NTU alumni even worked her way up to a director of the business in 7 years.


Benefitting from NTU funding pots and "try before you buy" talent

Another graduate, Alexandra Mihut, has progressed from a marketing executive to account manager since joining Diversity after graduating from NTU in 2017.

Alex came in after completing her Masters degree. She had already completed a 6-week internship organised by NTU at Diversity during her studies, where she looked at how to improve internal communications within the agency.

Engaging with the university on these types of short internships has been hugely beneficial. It has not only allowed Diversity to “try before you buy”, but also helped lessen the gamble of hiring someone without as much industry experience. The soon to be graduates know the business, its culture, and on top of that, management are already aware of their skills and talent.

Alex was invited to apply for a vacant position and got the job having interviewed against other candidates who on paper had more experience. Simon notes that, much like their other NTU recruits, Alex was able to demonstrate that she met the technical and interpersonal elements of the role.

The standard of NTU graduates is extremely high. NTU students are prepared for the real working world”.

Simon says that in his experience NTU graduates have always proven that they can communicate across all levels - internally in the business as well as externally with clients. He also noted how quickly the university’s graduates hit the ground running, saying “every bit of management time is absolutely repaid”. Since starting, Alex has pushed the agency into new areas of marketing and now manages a number of important accounts for the business.


Students sat smiling

Over the years, Diversity’s relationship with the university has developed to the extent that they are able to utilise NTU as a talent pipeline into the business. “When thinking about recruitment plans, we analyse who we can move up within the organisation before looking to NTU to find us entry-level talent”, allowing everyone in the company to develop professionally at all times.

Overall, Simon has maintained a great relationship with NTU Employability and is an employer for its Digital Marketing Academy initiative each year. He is always happy to be involved and is even working with the academics in the School of Arts and Humanities to deliver a lecture this term to its students. He sees the relationship as mutually beneficial, and in return the Employability Team have helped make links with who he needs to talk to within the university.


Get in touch

To find out more about the Graduate Internship Scheme and how NTU can become a talent pipeline for your organisation, please contact Grad.Internship.2022@ntu.ac.uk.

  • Notes for editors

Published on 18 June 2021
  • Category: Business