Building a Business Clinic in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges for Students’ Skills Development
Derek Watson and Linda Anne Barkas
Sunderland Business School, University of Sunderland, UK
Volume 13: 2018, pp. 237-248; ABSTRACT
Framed within the “understanding, skills, efficacy and meta-cognition model (USEM)” of Knight and Yorke (2003), this article reports on research conducted on students’ skills development in a Business Clinic setting in a post-1992 university. In an already crowded curriculum, academic staff welcomed the initiative. A key challenge for the university was how to ensure that the value of academic knowledge could be retained, within the necessity to provide students with practical, vocational skills development. While the Business Clinic Model presented many practical challenges, the findings from the study advocate for the curriculum to embed live projects in business programme design. The opportunities were positive, resulting in new business links with local employers, whereby partnerships for business engagement and opportunities for students’ internships/placements commenced.
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