A student’s perspective #Grads4nottm

Part one - The application 

Me and the team

I’m Declan Manning, a third year student on the Business Management and Marketing course at Nottingham Trent University. I recently secured a place on the Graduates for Nottingham scheme or #Grads4notts for short. Graduates for Nottingham is a scheme where students, graduates and businesses such as Experian, Ikano bank and other small and medium businesses such as Appinstitute work together with Boots and the University of Nottingham Trent to resolve challenges facing industry.



Applying for a place on #Grads4nottm

As a third year student  getting increasingly close to graduating I understand the difference varied experience makes to a CV. This was my reason for applying for #Grads4nottm as it gives both a weeks worth of work experience and is a great opportunity for networking. To apply for this scheme, I submitted 250 word document outlining my skills and reasons why I was a suitable candidate for the week long programme. There was over 30 different challenges put forward by 25 different companies spanning from competitor analysis, design work, business & operation development, customer engagement and finally advertising and PR work.

Official #Grads4nottm logo

I chose competitor analysis as I found it best suited to strengths and fit in with the management aspect of my business degree. Before #Grad4nottm started, I was assigned a business challenge that involved completing a benchmarking analysis of the company. For anyone that’s unfamiliar with the term benchmarking analysis, this is an evaluation of the company and its competitors using the same criteria.



Bring on the challenge!

The challenge took place over the course of a week. Our first day was an induction to the scheme at Boots, and meeting the company we would be working with during the week. The following three days involved working on a specific project for the company. Our final day had been allocated to presenting our findings back to NTU and the relevant company. Once we had completed the scheme we had the opportunity to attend a networking session with all of the companies present in #Grads4nottm. This meant that I still had the opportunity to chat with all the companies.

To read part two click here!