Time flies...

Suddenly it's March and I'm embarrassed to realise that this is my first blog of the New Year.  Not that nothing has happened in the past two months, more a case of juggling multiple facets of the project.  I'm discovering more and more strands to placement/internship activity and emerging initiatives across Keele.  One upshot of this is a need to revisit our original gannt chart of activity as I seek to avoid duplication of effort - heads of our academic units and others are currently the target for a number of fact-finding meetings across related agendas.  Having three PVCs and a couple of Directors on board and interested in the project certainly helps with keeping the different strands joined up.

A major strategic planning exercise was also implemented in the run up to Christmas which has the benefit of enabling the project to feed into (and feed off) the plans of relevant functional units, both academic and administrative.

On top of that we've just launched a new internships initiative to put unemployed graduates into larger  companies on 'green' projects.  We have some great names signed up and are using the project to trial a new CRM system across our Employer Engagement team, our Science & Business Park and a key academic School.  This will pilot some of the elements of improved systems that this project is looking at.