Developing Global Talent for the World of Work through staff-student-industry collaboration and co-creation on a global scale.

Abstract

This case study reports on the organisation and impact of the Global Talent for the World of Work forum (aka the WoW forum) 2019, as captured through a comprehensive framework of key performance statistics, reflections and qualitative feedback from staff, students, industry partners and other participants in the event. The WoW forum was the main deliverable from a British Council funded project for enhancing Higher Education (HE) Partnership with Vietnamese universities. The forum built on the experience of BU in running 9 Global Festivals of Learning (GFOL) over the past 4 years, partnering with HE partners in India, China ASEAN and Europe. Students play a critical role in these events, with their roles and the activities for the WoW event designed to accommodate latest seminal work on the future of jobs (WEF, 2018) and the global graduate skills gap (ISE,2019). The settings of the WoW forum offered rich foundation using a critical participatory action research as an learning platform for participants to share their knowledge, experiences and reflections on innovative HE-industry practices. It concludes that multi-dimensional events such as GFOLs and the WoW forum demonstrate the value of ‘comprehensive internationalisation’.