Professor Carol Jarvis, founding head coach of the Entrepreneurship Hub at the University of the West of England worked with her students and faculty and students of two other European universities* to develop and run a 4-month team learning boot camp for Environmental Science graduates to help them get into graduate level roles. 

The programme supported participants develop skills across three strands, team and leadership skills, personal self-development, and business or venture development.

In particular the programme was oriented towards supporting the graduates to move from their starting position ‘I know about the topic’ to one where they ‘could do it’, ‘could create and manage projects’ and ‘could teach others’.  The team coach leaders worked with the philosophy of leading by enquiry, not instruction, aiming to be useful not helpful. Across the three universities participating, 58% of the students found graduate level roles, 9% became entrepreneurs, 8% started further training with 25% DK/NA.

With many of the participants either entering professional roles or becoming entrepreneurs the programme has created a useful template for designing and managing intensive team learning by doing programmes.  Summaries of some of the methodologies can be found at http://greenpreneurs.eu/ 

“The results of this programme were a revelation to me.  Whilst I was familiar with the impact of a three-year team learning degree programme, this specialist programme convinced me of the validity of an intensive short team learning programme to deliver change by enhancing personal motivation, resilience, creativity and determination.”

— Robert Goodsell, Director Akatemia CIC  

* Collaborative venture 2015/2016 between University of West of England (Bristol, UK), Turku University of Applied Science (Turku, Finland) and Mondragon University (Irun, Spain) with funding from the Erasmus programme and support from the Employment Service of Navarra (Spain).