Assessing Readiness for Employer Engagement and Building Powerful Partnerships
The aim of this resource is to help you assess your employer’s readiness for outreach with your school/ college and their readiness to build powerful partnerships with you.
Assessing the Employers Readiness
Part 1: Readiness indicators for an Employer
As part of your outreach it is important to ask key questions to help you understand your employer’s readiness and capacity to engage in a powerful partnership. Doing so will help ensure there’s a deep understanding of the employer’s motivation to engage and their level of commitment including their capacity to build a strong relationship with sustainable engagement.
As part of your outreach, there are three key categories you should be exploring with a prospective employer partner.
- Breadth of organisational involvement, commitment, motivation and priorities.
- Experience working with education.
- Experience hosting/collaborating with students and teachers (onsite & remotely)
You can assess each category using a simple Observation Rubric Tool as shown in the downloadable version of this document (bottom of this page), or you can adapt this for your organisation.
Part 2: Listen and Learn
To really explore an entire organisation’s readiness and capacity requires active listening skills. You will never discover all you are seeking to learn in one conversation. Typically, it requires a series of conversations that each time go a bit deeper. With each conversation you develop more of a relationship with greater levels of appreciation and understanding.
Through your conversations you might discover that an organisation has room for all types of opportunities. They might want to continue doing their light touch engagement, continue engaging in certain opportunities/subjects or strategically dedicate a part of the organisation to powerful partnerships and offer deeper engagement. You won’t know the outcome or the degree to which this organisation is interested in educational partnerships until you ask the right questions and truly listen.
Here is a series of example questions you might explore during conversations with employer leaders and management. Remember, your goal is to understand their readiness and capacity to engage in a powerful partnership or simply engage in outreach activities on a less strategic level. You won’t know the outcome or the degree to which this organisation is interested in educational partnerships until you ask the right questions and truly listen.
The information you gather here is imperative for the relationship you start to build with the employer and how deep the partnership can venture.
Example questions you may want to explore:
- What partnership/outreach experiences have you already participated in?
- What was the quality of your past partnership/outreach interactions?
- What recommendations do you have to strengthen relationships with schools?
- What do you know about the curriculum?
- In what ways is your organisation involved in community or school-based boards (e.g., industry related networks (for example Engineering UK, STEM Ambassador network, school governing bodies, enterprise advisor network)?
- What activities has your organisation hosted (or participated in) that has involved teachers? What about those involving students? Have these activities been on-site? Virtual? Tell me more.
- How would you define meaningful outreach for your organisation and for you personally?
- How would you recruit department leaders and other employees to get engaged and active within the outreach work and building powerful partnerships?
- What does partnership/volunteer success look like for your company and its involvement with schools/colleges? How do you measure that success? How might the impact of those partnerships best be measured — at the company, at the student level, and within the community?
Employers whose partnerships are the most intense and collaboratively typically:
- Demonstrate broad organisational support (not limited to a few individuals).
- Engage directly with students AND teachers at the school/college.
- Host and engage with students AND teachers on-site/virtually.
- Sustain organisational commitment and prioritisation of the partnership even with organisational leadership changes.
- Advocate for educational reform and community support.
Pause and reflect:
Now that you have had the opportunity to hold intentional conversations with your employer partners consider the following.
- How would you assess the current level of engagement of your existing employer partners?
- Do your prospective employer partners have the capacity and capability to support deep engagement and a powerful partnership? Have they had any similar prior partnership experience? If not, what type of preparation might help them be better positioned to effectively engage within a powerful partnership?
Always ensure your employer feels valued and included throughout the assessment process and during engagements. Communicate regularly and a simple ‘Thank You’ goes a long way.
