Career Heroes Week: Celebrating our colleagues in higher education

Progression and success team

Our team delivers a targeted programme of events, initiatives, and employability activity to support every student in reaching their potential during and after their time at NTU, no matter their circumstances. Our Rise programmes and core EDI initiatives such as Empowering Ethnic Minorities and the Women's Development Programme champion social mobility and equity of opportunity, improving the graduate outcomes of our students most in need of support.

What does success mean to your team?

Success for our team means putting students and graduates at the centre of everything we do – supporting them as individuals to build their personal and professional confidence, believe in their abilities, and pursue their own version of success.

What are your current priorities?

Our current priorities are to ensure we have measures in place to robustly evaluate our impact, ensuring that our activity genuinely deliver for our student body and understanding their everchanging needs. At the same time, we are driving efficiencies in our ways of working, adapting to the challenges of increased pressure on resource by focussing processes, clearer priorities and effective use of our capacity.

What are you currently working on to support students?

We offer a range of activities throughout the year to support students from all backgrounds and at all stages of their university and career journey – from development programmes for specific demographic groups, first-year insight days, second-year placement exploration, and final-year preparation for life beyond NTU.

The support from our team doesn’t end at graduation either, and we encourage graduates to continue to be active members of the NTU community through dedicated graduate employability initiatives, including final-year and graduate LinkedIn groups for each academic year’s students and recent graduates.

Employer-led Projects team

The team partners with academic course teams and employers to embed real-world projects into the curriculum. They support academics in bringing modules to life, while helping students gain insight into a wide range of career opportunities.

What does success mean to your team?

Success means collaborating effectively with employers and academic colleagues to deliver a mutually beneficial experience that brings industry into the classroom. It is reflected in students gaining confidence, resilience, industry awareness, and both technical and transferable skills that support their future career development.

What are your current priorities?

We are currently working with employers and academics to conclude projects for the 2025–26 academic year, evaluating their impact on students and employer partners. Insights from this review are informing our planning for next year, ensuring that future projects remain authentic, aligned to labour market needs, and maintain strong employer proximity.

What are you currently working on to support students?

Working closely with the Careers Development team, we are developing resources to help students recognise, articulate, and reflect on the skills and experiences gained through employer-led projects. We help students fully engage, embrace new learning opportunities, and actively collaborate with industry partners to maximise the value of these experiences.

Placements and Business Advice team

The team supports all students going out onto placement or work experience. They offer everything from supporting employers with job specs, arranging interviews, offers, and pastoral support on placement. And everything in between!

What does success mean to your team?

We are a happy team who enjoy what we do. We love it when employers keep coming back to NTU for repeat placement students and when students get offered graduate roles. It’s brilliant to see a role you’ve developed filled with an NTU student.

What are your current priorities?

Always supporting our students and employers. Right now, in our cycle, we are confirming placements with our corporate employers and starting recruitment with SMEs. There is so much time for students to find their role, and we advertise many roles each week. We are also currently providing additional support for students who are out on placements in high-risk areas.

What are you currently working on to support students?

Using placement intention data and pre-placement surveys, we can support with sourcing roles for students to apply to. If there isn’t something currently live on our system that meets your aspirations, let us know what you are interested in, and we'll see what we can find, or give you the heads up when it becomes available!

This achievement belongs to colleagues right across the University. NTU’s ambitions for AWLE have only been possible because of the genuine partnership between academic teams and professional services colleagues, working together to embed meaningful, assessed experience into courses.

The award was announced at the Global Careers Services Summit in Cape Town, a prestigious gathering of career leaders from around the world. It showed that what we are building here is not only making a difference for our students, but is also being noticed internationally.