Birmingham City University is repositioning its courses to be more practical in order to retain more talent within the area in a move that it is hoped will help enhance SME growth and the local occupational market.
Speaking in the EG debate “Game on: how the Midlands has become the UK’s engine for digital growth” at MIPIM, Ardavan Amini, professor of enterprise systems at the university, said: “At the moment we have a lot of challenges in the university sector, with more people joining apprenticeship schemes rather than coming to university.
“To make it more interesting for talent to come to university we need to up to our game and to introduce more tech and practical courses to retain students. We are looking at linking the supply chain where we can link with industry and help solve the challenges they have. We are going through that transformation to make courses less theoretical.”
Much of the Midlands region sees an exodus of its graduates to London when they complete their courses, damaging the occupational market, but those graduates who choose to start a business themselves typically stay local and establish a business and occupational presence.
Mike Carr, pro-vice chancellor at Nottingham Trent University, said: “Most students come and then leave in a huge migration towards London. Three or four years after they leave they do often come back to the Midlands but it’s about making sure that there are good quality jobs for graduates to go to.”
Building innovation
A weak occupational office market in the Midlands is holding back innovation in development and tenants are still largely unwilling to pay a premium for high-tech buildings, the debate heard.
According to Nigel Turner, executive director at Kier Property, this is holding back the sector.
“Delivering a truly innovative building is not something that funds will always pay for, but you have had to spend money to deliver. Occupiers have slightly less understanding of what they want in terms of cutting edge technology. Some absolutely are on the ball, such as what we have done with Google, but other times we are often suggesting ways of doing something to an occupier as they don’t have the skillset of understanding how a building really works. Occupiers probably won’t pay you more if you provide a state of the art building, but they might benchmark against others.”
The jittery occupational market has prevented a major development push in the region to deliver high-quality office space and Turner said Kier was cautiously assessing opportunities to address this.
“There is very little brand new brand new grade-A space built and we are looking to address that over the short term. Fundamentally there hasn’t been the demand and there hasn’t been enough absorbed to start building speculatively due to the cautious sentiment.”
He later added: “In the offices sector, if you step outside of central Birmingham there is a massive shortage supply of grade-A space, a couple of spec schemes are coming through but there are not many and there is some demand certainly once you get out to Nottingham, Derby and Coventry and we need to get into the market and start delivering that.”
Comment: Nigel Turner, executive director, Kier Property
There is not a huge amount you can do from a building perspective in regards to innovation if you are just building a shed.
We have all gone for making buildings greener and putting photovoltaics on the roof. You can digitally connect a building but it is more about how the building is used than how it is built.
Retail and offices are very different though. Office buildings will be digitally connected and hardwired so you can link up with the back office and think about how you occupy with open floorplates that are more flexible and often not fully fitted out, just shell and core, so the occupier can do what they want.
Retail is massively dynamic and there is a fundamental shift, particularly with tertiary and some potentially secondary centres, which we are quite excited about. Ultimately, I think there will be more housing brought in to replace them and mixed-use schemes with retail and leisure integrated.
The panel
- Nick McDonald, portfolio holder for business, growth and transport, Nottingham City Council
- Monica Fogarty, strategic director for communities, Warwickshire County Council
- Nigel Turner, executive director – development, property and business services, Kier Group
- Ardavan Amini, professor of enterprise systems, Birmingham City University
- Chaired by Stacey Meadwell, national editor, EG
To send feedback, e-mail stacey.meadwell@egi.co.uk or tweet @EGStaceyM or @estatesgazette
