Championing Industry Partnerships

Passionate about the importance of giving our students real-world experiences in order to help them to thrive in the world of work, Honoris institutions across the continent are working to develop strong industry partnerships to increase job placements.

Believing that regional and global collaboration through employer partnerships has a positive impact on students, communities, the environment, and the economy, four of our employability experts share their insight into the importance of these partnerships, and how they work.

Hanane EL JAFFALI, Director of the Université Mundiapolis Career Centre, Morocco

In order to improve the employability of our students, the Mundiapolis University Career Center offers a range of services allowing students from the 4 faculties to develop and highlight the skills they need for an effective entry into professional life.
The career centre’s objective is to make the graduates of Mundiapolis University employable by preparing them for the job market from the start of their university course. The partnership with companies offers real opportunities to our students and our laureates. Through their complementarities, our networks respond even more effectively to the requests of our young students, particularly on questions of internships, training jobs, or even on entrepreneurship or other subjects. It is for this reason that we maintain a solid relationship with our partner companies, because we are firmly convinced that the interest of our students mingles with that of employer companies in various cutting-edge sectors such as Aeronautics, Industry, Health, Distribution, Finance, Marketing and even Legal.
We are partners with large structures such as the Attijariwafa bank group and the Orange group, which offer our students training throughout the year in Finance, Soft Skills, IT and more in order to enable them to position themselves on the job market better.
Other partners such as UTC Aerospace, Wafabail, AKKA TECHNOLOGIES, Sitel, Universap, Maltem Africa, Logigroupe, Société Générale, Bank of Africa, Technopark, Masen, Renault, ST Microelectronix, Leoni, etc. participate in our recruitment forum and offer opportunities for our students. The latter also offer training sessions to advise them on new recruitment methods. They participate in our Job dating and recruit the best profiles.

Amber Theunissen, HR Officer and Student Employability Lead, FEDISA Fashion School, South Africa

As the HR Officer and Student Employability Lead at FEDISA, I have noticed that the common thread linking our students and their journey to employability relies on their exposure to industry during their time of study. A FEDISA student is given a bridge to their future careers by learning the way the fashion industry functions in the real world directly from our industry partners and guest lecturers. Opportunities are created for our students to engage at a professional level via our collabs with brands such as Cape Union Mart, TFG and Woolworths supplementing their classroom learning. Work Integrated Learning does play an integral part in our students final year of study and is extremely valuable, however, it is the slow turning of the student envisioning themself in their career that starts in the classroom from 1st year to final year through collaborations and industry study that is the initial key to unlocking the door for that student to realise their place in the working world.

Carmen Schaefer, Head of Academics, Red & Yellow Creative School of Business, South Africa

At Red & Yellow, we are very passionate about our graduates obtaining access to their perfect career after graduating with us, so we are constantly looking for ways to integrate work into their learning. Our three main ways that we do that are work placement learnings or internships with industry partners, partner projects, and masterclasses. In all of our programs, there is a period in the final year or final semester where students go and work out in the industry with industry mentors, which really feeds into their employability, and a lot of them actually do get hired from this workplace learning experience. We also encourage our lecturers and program managers to do projects with industry partners, and there are a lot of benefits that industry players actually gain from engaging with our students. It’s a great way to just understand how industry players work – they give our students actual challenges in a safe environment before they get to the real challenge out there. And then thirdly, we have master classes where we invite industry players to come and talk to our students about their own career choices and their own career trajectories.

Kim Gush, Academic Director, FEDISA Fashion School, South Africa

Work-integrated learning with industry partners takes quite an interesting approach at FEDISA, because we encourage our students to bring what they learn in the working environment back into the classroom. We encourage them to engage a lot when they go to companies and they do their work-integrated learning, which ensures that they are constantly developing themselves and learning to really communicate in the working environment. This helps them continue with their learning consistently throughout their studies, as well as into the workplace.