By Nathan Bostock, Chief Executive of Santander UK
11/2021
Nathan Bostock explains how the teams at Santander and MK:U worked together to co-design a business apprenticeship focused on today’s changing workplace.
Business leaders, myself included, consistently raise the issue of how the UK can provide students with an education that will set them up with the skills for tomorrow’s workplace.
Consequently, when Santander first partnered with Cranfield and MK:U several years ago, I was excited by the potential of what we could build together, but also a little daunted by the challenges ahead.
I want to see businesses being able to attract young talent who have vital skills, especially in emerging data and digital fields, and who can then use those skills to find great jobs in the area that they have grown up or studied in. So, from the outset, we agreed that MK:U would genuinely work hand in hand with employers like ourselves to design courses that benefit both apprentices and employers.
Co-designed
With that mutual objective, the teams at Santander and MK:U worked together to co-design a business apprenticeship that enables our people to study for a prestigious Cranfield BSc degree at MK:U whilst working. We designed the course to give apprentices the skills to be effective managers in today’s changing workplace, with a particular focus on digital businesses, as well as encouraging them to be more entrepreneurial and free thinking in their approach to solving business problems.
Alongside these important curriculum elements, we adopted a problem-based learning approach through which our apprentices work in teams on business challenges that we ourselves set them, supported and coached by the MK:U education team. This special feature means that our apprentices are not only honing their problem-solving skills, they are producing innovative ideas and thinking that helps us to tackle business issues and improve our customer experience; and they do this from the very first day of their apprenticeship.
This shared purpose, to ensure that the apprentices who come to MK:U develop the skills that will help them thrive in whatever work they choose to undertake, has made it a refreshing and rewarding experience for the Santander team to have worked on the development of MK:U.
Our initial cohort of 20 apprentices are all current Santander employees and will be taking their Chartered Management Level 6 degree apprenticeship. The fact that the vast majority of the apprentices have been with Santander over five years indicates that partnerships like this are a great way to reskill and retain employees.
Shared learning
Through our collaboration, we have learned a lot about how we can better train our colleagues – for example, the ‘problem-based learning’ approach that MK:U has adopted will help colleagues develop their communication and collaboration skills; things that are crucial in our business. In turn, I’m glad that our feedback on priorities for the curriculum and course structure have been so openly received.
The development of an outcomes-focused university like MK:U means that we will be able to invest in our talent locally. This is an important issue that goes beyond Santander. I passionately believe that the UK will thrive if different parts of the country succeed. It is not healthy for the country if our talent and investment simply moves to London. To do this we must not just create opportunity, but also a thriving environment and community.
I look forward to seeing this mutually-beneficial partnership between Santander and MK:U evolve and contribute to the growth of Milton Keynes and its people.
