Category Archives: Management and Consultancy

Employer Case Study: The University of Exeter

  Free Man Teaching Woman in Front of Monitor Stock Photo

Name of Organisation: University of Exeter 

Description of Organisation:  

At the University of Exeter, they want to make the exceptional happen, and have a real and lasting impact on the world around them. They are already firmly at the forefront of universities worldwide and their ambition is to increase that position, particularly as a Global 100 institution. They challenge their talented students to achieve more than they ever thought possible and recruit the very best people from around the world to reach greater heights in research excellence, innovation and impact.   

Name of Employer: Craig McEwan 

Job Title:  Academic Developer 

Internship Scheme used:  

The Graduate Business Partnership Scheme (GBP) | Employer Engagement & Student Employment | University of Exeter 

Feedback: 

“Will was the first person that I line managed. He was a good colleague, and I enjoyed the experience.” 

“Will played an important role in supporting the management of this summer’s Students as Change Agents projects. He provided valuable support to the six Change Agent SCPs, their line manager and the three project leads.”

“Will also helped to take forward two important projects in the Academic Development & Skills team. He gathered and consolidated the views of the team and presented suggestions for a new set of standards for ‘writing for the web’ in our team. He also started an important project to map the level and type of academic skills support provided within academic departments across the university. All this work will be taken forward and built on by the team follow his departure.” 

 

Student Case Study: Verisk

Name of Student:  Ria Serena Luchun

Degree Subject:  Natural Sciences

Job Title: Energy Consulting Intern

Company Name:  Verisk

Type of Internship:  Access to Internships (A2I) 

What were your key duties and responsibilities during your internship?

My main role during this internship was to provide support creating deliverables for a variety of energy consulting projects, ranging from new energies and renewables all the way upstream to oil and gas. The tasks I carried out were more diverse than the energy sectors I was working in – from forecasting the demand for ammonia-based products globally to in-depth research concerning Jordan’s electricity market structure and even presenting my work to clients. All of this contributed towards creating solutions and fresh energy strategies for external clients.

What was your biggest achievement on your internship?

My biggest achievement over the course of the internship came right as the experience was ending. I had been working on an upstream project for just under a week and was able to successfully present the findings I had made over that short time to high-stake clients with praise for my efforts from them and the project manager. After a rocky start to the internship, this ending really boosted my confidence in myself and my skills which I am quite proud of.

Were there any challenges and how did you overcome these?

The biggest challenge for me was adjusting to a new workplace in a sector which was quite foreign to me. The first project I was placed on had a very demanding workload which was quite overwhelming at first, especially considering that I had very little subject-specific knowledge. Compounded with trying to acclimatise with a completely new work environment and style, the beginning of the internship was a bit tumultuous. This was overcome mainly by working closely with another intern and by seeking support from the other members of the team individually.

Skills Learnt: 

  • Ability to Work Under Pressure
  • Organisation
  • Negotiation

Attributes Developed:

  • Logical thinking
  • Independence
  • Professionalism

Your message to other students considering a similar job role, organisation or sector?

Overall, the internship was a bit of a whirlwind and an incredible learning experience. Being able to work within so many interlinking teams gave me a taste of the advantages to working for such a large, multinational cooperation. The soft skills I’ve gained at university well supported me throughout my journey of learning at Wood Mackenzie and have propelled both my personal and professional development in this collaborative environment. Not only have I increased my skills and employability, but also my confidence in myself and my abilities.

Employer Case Study:  White Willow Partners Limited

Name of Organisation: White Willow Partners Limited

Description of Organisation: A bespoke HR consultancy focusing on the individual needs of every customer. White Willow provide a service which is designed around you and your business requirements. There is no “one fit” when it comes to HR so our services are tailored exclusively to you. They help recruit, develop and retain the right people for business’

Name of Employer: Carrie White

Job Title: Company Director

Internship Scheme used: Student Business Partnerships (SBPs) | Career Zone | University of Exeter

Feedback:

“We’re operating in a hybrid world where we don’t always need to go into the office, our intern worked well in that he was completely remote, we connected through technology, and he was able to get up to speed quickly with the work we set him. We were keen for him to support us on a new product we had recently launched, creating the infrastructure sitting behind the Leadership Development Programme to enable us to deliver a fully accredited programme which leads to a professional qualification. He developed new processes which support our route to accreditation, and which will now be used to support our quality assurance reviews annually.

We also asked our intern to support us with development of new training materials that would be used to develop summer interns for one of our clients. He successfully designed/delivered three modules complete with facilitation materials and resources for us to share with our client’s interns. We also got him involved in developing our organisational presence in the Southwest working with our marketing manager, he was able to identify new contacts and supported on business development through the creation of new marketing materials which will be used in new business pitches.

I would recommend this scheme and have already signed up to use it again.”

Student Case Study: ClearLead Consulting

Name of Student:  Josh Marshall

Degree Subject: MSC Global Sustainability Solutions

Type of Internship: Green Consultants Scheme

Company Name: ClearLead Consulting

Job Title: Green Consultant

Description Of Company: ClearLead Consulting is an international energy and sustainability consulting company founded in 2012, with offices in Canada, the UK, and Ireland.  ClearLead takes pride in giving our clients straight, practical advice and support, with a commitment to conduct work that is useful and makes a difference to clients.

ClearLead specialises in helping commercial, industrial and public sector clients reduce their energy costs, operate more sustainably and comply with complex environmental regulation, both in the UK and internationally.  They aims to lead by example and are therefore working to become carbon neutral as a company.

ClearLead’s services in the sustainability and energy field include corporate sustainability and carbon neutrality/net zero strategies and assessments; Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) audits; energy audits and surveys; energy metering and monitoring systems; renewable feasibility studies and appraisals; resource efficiency (water and waste) programmes; carbon footprinting; training and behavioural change management programmes.

What were your key duties and responsibilities during your internship?

Izzy was my mentor and she gave me a long list of actions an example of this was – data entry. She also wanted me to work out how much carbon they are saving clients – extracted data.

From day to day I would help with scoping of clients emissions under the GHGP and ISO 14001, which mainly looked at key sources of emissions and whether they could be reduced in anyway. I did a number of small independent research projects over the course of the 3 weeks, the particularly exciting ones involved assessing the safety of mixing natural gas and hydrogen to emit less CO2 on combustion, looking at sound pollution for a new housing development and researching ways Clearlead themselves can reduce their carbon footprint.

What outputs and outcomes did you deliver for your employer?

I had a massive variation of the outputs I delivered. One thing I did was create a GIS visualisation to make public more engaged with activity for a client who wanted to blend natural gas with hydrogen.

The were a number of emissions scoping projects that were delivered directly to clients, mainly in the form of a PP presentation. This included small word documents on a given research topic that the client had asked for.

What was your biggest achievement on your internship?

Presenting to directors on project work and the directors took my work to the clients and won the bid. Clearlead offered me a job which was amazing. This was for a new client who was looking to reduce emissions but the business model was complex. This created problems is establishing scope boundaries and determining which emissions were directly a result of the clints industrial operations and which were as a result of 3rd party operations.

What did not go so well on your internship? How did you overcome any challenges?

More contact time with business – go to office more.

Skills Learnt: 

  • Ability to Work Under Pressure
  • Organisation
  • Decision Making
  • Researching
  • Time and Work Load Management

Attributes Developed:

  • Initiative
  • Perseverance
  • Professionalism
  • Confidence
  • Motivation

Your message to other students considering a similar job role, organisation or sector?

“My advice would be to engage as much as possible with recruiters and organisations in the industry. Experience is key to your development, but more importantly it’s a way for you to learn what you enjoy about the sector and what you’re good at. The same can be said for what you don’t like about working life. Start to build up a picture of your ideal job and think about the small things that make a difference like work-life balance, purpose and working environment. All of them have a huge impact on the enjoyment you’ll get from your career.”

Employer Case Study: Procura Consulting 

Name of Organisation: Procura Consulting

Description of Organisation: Procura Consulting is a boutique management consultancy firm specialising in procurement and supply chain optimisation. Our consultants work closely with all kinds of organisations to improve their profitability by identifying, delivering and maintaining savings in procurement expenditure.

Founded in 2016 we have grown rapidly fuelled by a compelling service offer to clients and a commitment to the highest standards of professionalism and operational excellence. Our success has been recognised with recent nominations for the Management Consultancy Association’s “Best New Consultancy” and “Commercial Excellence” awards.

Name of Employer:  Luke Abbott

Job Title: Manager

Internship Scheme usedGreen Consultants 

Feedback:

“We recruited an intern from the Green Consultant scheme to help develop our Sustainable Procurement service. We are developing a new service that focuses on helping organisations become more sustainable by utilising their procurement function and supply chain.

Our intern researched sustainable solutions and suppliers in different areas of spend, for example, IT and completed completed a number of internal projects focusing on the sustainability of Procura as a business and formulated some great ideas for our sustainable procurement service.

She was a fantastic intern who really took initiative in tasks. Her passion for sustainability is clear. We asked the student to come back and work for us, we offered her a one-month internship in October this year to continue her great work which she accepted. I expect we will offer her another internship or possibly a graduate role once our Sustainable Procurement service is up and running.”

Employer Case Study:  Jurassic Fibre Ltd

Name of Organisation:  Jurassic Fibre Ltd

Description of Organisation: Jurassic was founded by CEO Michael Maltby, a resident of Sidmouth in East Devon. Michael has built fibre and similar networks around the world, including in Russia and the Caribbean, and his goal is to build the digital infrastructure you deserve to support your lifestyle in the 21st Century.

Jurassic Fibre is part of the Fern Trading Group, and has substantial funds available to deliver a top quality fibre broadband network for the South West. We are planning to invest over £250m into building a fibre network in Devon, Dorset and Somerset, passing over 300,000 homes, making gigabit speeds a reality.

With the valued support of our partners – who together form a world-class supply chain to deliver fibre to the region – we started to build in 2019, with continued growth always on the horizon.

Name of Employer:  Gillian Huppler

Job Title: SHEQ Manager

Internship Scheme usedGreen Consultants 

Feedback:

“We recruited an intern to work as a Green Consultant. They provided us with a report identifying JFL strengths, weaknesses, opportunities to improve and potential threats associated with current compliance. He gave us an overview of what competitors are doing and gave us recommendations. He used our auditing tool (iAuditor) and build useful audit formats which will enable us to monitor compliance and track our performance.

I was hoping to get the student involved in review our waste management but the manager involved had been given an important task and was not forthcoming with the information. Our intern handled this well and we discussed other objectives, he got on very well with the change of plan.

I would have been more than happy to offer our intern a role if there was one available and I will be discussing this with CEO to see if there is any future opportunities.

The student provided us with some extremely useful information which will add value to our business. He was professional, pleasant, enthusiastic and would be a great asset to any company. He worked well in the office and on site talking to the civils teams undertaking excavations. Our intern provided us with a useful presentation to enable our company to understand our opportunities for improvement and developed useful tools for monitoring progress, which is amazing as we only had him for 35 hours. If this is the quality of Students Exeter can provide, we will definitely be looking to repeat this in the future.”

Employer Case Study: Adaero Precision Components Ltd 

Name of Organisation:  Adaero Precision Components Ltd

Description of Organisation: We were founded in 1988 and, since January 2015, have been part of the Indutrade group. Adaero is a specialist manufacturer of high precision components, engineered to customer specifications. We aspire to be first choice for companies who require high quality finished parts ready for assembly at competitive prices. We invest in state of the art machine tools and continually improve what we do so that we supply machined parts of genuine excellence. Our skilled and experienced team continually innovate to meet customers’ changing needs.

Name of Employer:  David Smith

Job Title: Finance Manager

Internship Scheme usedGreen Consultants 

Feedback:

“We recruited an intern to work as a Green Consultant. The intern comprehensively reviewed our environmental impact and provided a report which recommended a range of actions. Our final action plan takes on most of the actions recommended by the intern, with a small few overridden by commercial factors. The vast majority of his recommendations will be put in place.

We got value from this internship and will explore further graduate roles, probably covering other priority aspects of our business. The internship provided very useful independent review of our own initiatives, giving us a fresh and well-informed pair of eyes to evaluate where we had left gaps. The intern was eloquent, influential and professional.”

Employer Case Study: The Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Name of Organisation:  The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery

Description of Organisation: The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) is one of Britain’s finest regional museums and a flagship service of Exeter City Council. Its displays showcase world-class collections and collectors that tell the story of Exeter and Devon from the prehistoric to the present.

Name of Employer:  Sophie Harbour

Job Title: Engagement Officer (Skills Development)

Internship Scheme used:  Green Consultants

Feedback:

“We recruited two interns to work as Green Consultants.

One of our interns spent a week researching RAMM’s waste management and following her this developed:

  • A sustainable agenda for waste management across the RAMM’s services, notably in relation to recycling of staff, shop, and café waste.
  • A focus on taking forward the Green Champion initiative and making suggestions for reducing single use plastic waste.
  • A more formal sustainable policy for the RAMM’s shop based on their verbal policy which is printable and can be shared with customers.

Our other intern researched potential methods of making RAMM’s museum building more energy efficient, more specifically by;

  • Using energy assessment tools to identify key problem areas in addition to those suggested by staff (insulation, open space and lighting)
  • Identifying key sustainability solutions to increase energy efficiency of the RAMM building by looking at new technology such as BEMS and best practice from similar buildings
  • Suggesting solutions should be effective at increasing energy efficiency, be financially affordable as well as practically feasible in terms of implementation for a grade II listed building.

This internship was a real success. We didn’t find there were any aspects that didn’t go well. Both interns did a fantastic job with their research and the outcomes will be used in the future. The outcomes of which we will use to inform future funding applications in order to implement some of this work.”

Employer Case Study: EFFECT Photonics Ltd (2)

Name of Organisation:  EFFECT Photonics Ltd

Description of Organisation: EFFECT Photonics have been shaping the future of photonics by interconnecting humanity through fast, affordable, sustainable, and effective communication technologies. The emergence of DWDM is one of the most innovative and important phenomena in the development of fibre optic communication technology. From both technical and economical perspectives, the ability to provide the world potentially unlimited data transmission capacity and bandwidth is a massive advantage of our DWDM technology.

Name of Employer:  Tim Durrant

Job Title: Engineering Manager

Internship Scheme usedGreen Consultants

“The green consultant student was tasked with providing a top level briefing for a gap analysis of our high tech start up business for plans to achieve ISO14001 in 2021. With her we worked up a plan for surveying the business though all the main stake holders. This work was then followed through and an excellent Executive Summary report with appendices showing main points for 14001, with linkage to ISO9001 (which we are working on this year). A very useful foundation document setting the scene for the future. The intern fully fulfilled the brief and even exceeded it by linking across to ISO9001.

The student worked flexibly and coped well with working around her exams and the additional challenges of Covid19. We had no issues and highly recommend the Green Consultants Scheme.”

Employer Case Study: EFFECT Photonics Ltd 

Name of Organisation:  EFFECT Photonics Ltd

Description of Organisation: EFFECT Photonics have been shaping the future of photonics by interconnecting humanity through fast, affordable, sustainable, and effective communication technologies. The emergence of DWDM is one of the most innovative and important phenomena in the development of fibre optic communication technology. From both technical and economical perspectives, the ability to provide the world potentially unlimited data transmission capacity and bandwidth is a massive advantage of our DWDM technology.

Name of Employer:  Tim Durrant

Job Title: Engineering Manager

Internship Scheme usedGreen Consultants

“We recruited an intern to work as a Green Consultant. She took part in various tasks which were completed excellently. They really helped with moving the business forward, this was then followed by a very effective hand over to the three month intern from the Sustainability Hub in Plymouth.

The Internship from Green Consultants at Exeter proved very valuable. It allowed some high quality focussed support to be brought to bear and accelerate the environmental policies and practices of EFFECT Photonics Ltd forward. The prior knowledge, enthusiasm, willingness to learn as well as contribute followed by an effective hand over for follow on will have a lasting positive impact on the business. Thank you.”