Dear Universities,
We’re on a mission. A mission to bring together your most exceptional student entrepreneurs, freelancers and digital talent into one platform. A community where the next generation of creators - coders, product designers, artists - come together to build teams and exchange ideas. Imagine the beautiful things that could be created, and the challenging problems that could be solved. There is an incredible amount of latent entrepreneurial and creative talent found on university and college campuses worldwide. Our vision is to build infrastructure that helps universities celebrate and support young talent, accelerate extra-curricular career-development, and break boundaries between disciplines and institutions.
Why?
Fierce competition for graduate jobs and the price of tuition means it’s more important than ever for students to stand out and maximise the return on investment of their degree. This return typically takes the form of a steady and lucrative job once they graduate. The problem is, many young people are leaving university uncertain about their career prospects and lack work experience. This career anxiety gives rise to valid criticism surrounding the overly academic and theoretical nature of many degrees. By the time students graduate, many still don’t feel they've been sufficiently equipped with skillset and understanding that will enable them to thrive in the workplace and confidently navigate the employment landscape.
Employers feel similarly frustrated. A widening graduate skills-gap and shortage of skilled talent means many companies are struggling to recruit the quality of graduate talent they need. This problem doesn’t look like it’s disappearing anytime soon. By 2030, a shortage of skilled talent is projected to result in an $8.5 trillion loss in foregone annual revenues. Given this alarming prediction, we can’t afford to churn out inexperienced and unskilled graduates that ultimately become underemployed. It becomes imperative we equip young people with the intellectual and practical skills that will make them valuable in the digital workforce, and address the looming talent shortages of tomorrow.
Universities must acknowledge the great power they hold over the pathway to professional employment, and remain responsible for their role as a talent pipeline. The government agrees; new legislation states universities could face sanctions if fewer than 60% of graduates in a particular subject fail to find ‘high quality’ work, set up their own business or continue their studies after completing their courses. Given the speed at which digital transformation continues to rapidly change the nature of employment, universities will need to make employability and skill-development a priority. The good news is, we’re here to help. More on that later.
The emergence of modern alternatives challenges the supremacy of traditional institutions. That said, these alternatives don’t spell doom for universities and colleges; a prestigious degree to your name is still a massive bonus, and universities play a pivotal role in the social and intellectual development of young people across the globe. For that reason, we need to continue to develop engines of opportunity that will empower young people to further develop their employability, from the place of security that pursuing a degree provides.
How?
This isn’t an easy challenge to solve. Nevertheless, it’s absolutely crucial we dream up and deliver solutions that will provide economic empowerment to young people, and support universities with their employability objectives. We don’t have the golden-bullet, but what we’re proposing has the potential to meaningfully contribute in the following ways:
Improve the employability of graduates, and bridge the graduate skills-gap for employers.
Increase the success rate of student startups and freelancers.
Encourage a greater number of students to get involved in extra-curricular projects and opportunities that will develop their professional skills.
There is already a cohort of students who are ahead of the game in this respect. we call them Student Creators: The business student who launches her startup. The illustration student who sells short stories at market fairs. The videographer who starts freelancing, and secures his first client. Students who are ambitious and brave enough to pursue extra-curricular opportunities off the beaten path. Starting my own business whilst at university was the single greatest thing I did for my personal and professional development. Having been a student founder, and supporting hundreds of other student founders through my previous job, I’m incredibly passionate about helping Student Creators succeed.
Starting your own venture is never easy. But the number one problem/blocker we hear constantly (and have experienced) is the difficulty finding co-founders and team-members. The good news is, you’re on a campus! It’s the ideal social environment for forming connections with other optimistic, intelligent, and ambitious young people, and the perfect opportunity to start investing in your future professional network. We want to allow students to tap into the network at their university better than ever before. Even more exciting, we would love to expand this talent pool further by facilitating cross-university student collaboration. There’s no reason Student Creators shouldn’t be able to look beyond their own campus to find exciting opportunities to work with others - especially given you often find several world-class institutions close to each other. This would massively increase the likelihood of finding the right person who could be transformational for your project.
Amazing things happen when you bring together young people from diverse backgrounds with complementary skills and give them something impactful to work on. There isn’t enough cross-disciplinary collaboration going on, and it’s exceedingly rare you’ll find an in-curriculum project that brings together business students with computer science students and graphic designers. As a result, students are missing out on opportunities to work with people from different backgrounds and better understand the area of expertise they might want to turn into a career.
Creator Campus
There is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. The majority of students overwhelmingly view the university experience as a means to employment; whilst academia often distances themselves from the vocational. Students take on debt hoping it will land them a good job on the other side; higher education providers are pressured to achieve their employability objectives. But we’re here to help, and it’s something that may seem quite simple… a network that enables entrepreneurial, creative, and skilled students to connect, grow together, and develop their professional circle through extra-curricular projects. It’s called Creator Campus. Our bet is that by doing so, this will enable universities to unlock the entrepreneurial and creative power of their campus network.
It’s a particularly exciting time to be working in this space. There’s no denying that the rise of entrepreneurship and freelancing has found its way onto university campuses and inspiring a generation of students to increasingly consider self-employment. Combine this with the fact students are crying out for opportunities to better understand their career options through work experience, and the need for such a community becomes obvious. I also have the suspicion that developing such a campus network would inspire countless young people to pursue their dreams once they realise the talent that's nearby and ready to collaborate.
The Future
This is only the beginning. Who knows what the future holds. Perhaps one day, Creator Campus will become the key career and entrepreneurship partner for universities worldwide. In the meantime, if you want to help the mission, get in touch.