Pizza Model Approach for Raising the Employability of Chemistry Undergraduates

Q&A with Pizza Model Approach for Raising the Employability of Chemistry Undergraduates

How would you describe the nature of the team in a single sentence?
Please describe as feels most comfortable to you.

For example, ‘a team from X working with collaborators from Y and Z’, ‘a collaboration between X, Y and Z’, etc.
This is a team which draws on expertise from key Central, Faculty and School colleagues to facilitate the collaborative design and implementation of regional, national and international activities which embed transferable skills and employability-focused problem solving into our Chemistry and Natural and Environmental Sciences degree programmes.

What would be your advice to educators who are working with colleagues going above and beyond, but are yet to nominate them for an RSC Education prize?
I would strongly recommend nominating colleagues going above and beyond in chemistry education, because the act of nominating alone incentivises packaging the project as a coherent story with a vision and a strategy. It also encourages the gathering of impactful data with an end goal in mind – this will serve to highlight the valuable contributions of these colleagues to their peers and will increase their profile within the organisation.

This can lead to finding like-minded potential collaborators in areas outside your normal sphere of influence, which can greatly increase the project's impact and reach.

Of course, should the nomination be successful, the range is expanded many-fold to both national and international levels, which can lead to a wide network of interested parties that really can help deliver positive change.

What were the biggest challenges in this project?
The team's greatest strength lies in its diversity, drawing expertise from across campus and beyond into industry and other external stakeholders in order to bridge the notorious skills gap. This clearly requires individuals who are both independent thinkers and willing team players, and the nature of the group means that at any given time one member's input might be quite limited compared to another's, with the roles reversed accordingly when the objective changes – for instance, the International Office will have more influence on Study Abroad strategy than the Industrial Training Year programmes. The model provides a mechanism for important 'seats' to be around the table, and the experts in those seats need to be able to both champion their own objectives and interests but also see the bigger picture and understand and support our other important goals too.

This area of cross-working really bore fruit during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the chemistry students out on Study Abroad and Industrial Training Years both experienced similar difficulties as the lockdown procedures were put in place, but our unified approach allowed us to deal with these (usually separate) cohorts consistently and fairly.
(Dr Lee J Higham)

What different strengths did different people bring to the team?
Each member of the team brings something unique that would be very difficult to replicate in their absence. For instance, the Senior International Mobility Manager brings a global perspective and knowledge of university exchange partners and mobility trends. Similarly, the Academic Liaison Librarian delivers digital and information literacy skills. The Careers Service steers us in the right direction with key employability data and student engagement metrics. The School's academics provide subject-specific knowledge, but also know their own graduate market and alumni and companies very well. (Dr Lee J Higham)

What inspires or motivates your team?
We want to produce T-shaped chemistry undergraduate students who, in addition to the specialist subject knowledge of their science, are also encouraged to take on opportunities that see them doing research abroad and maybe learning a new language, gaining valuable work experience from an industrial placement year, or working with companies and external stakeholders coming on to campus to engage in real-world problem solving. This also aims to raise their transferable skills in areas such as communication, leadership, teamwork and resilience.

Why is this work so important and exciting?
We believe the project is very timely and seeks to bring universities and the public and private sectors closer together, reducing perceived skills gaps and graduate anxiety. However, students, staff and industry are not usually familiar with working in this way and therefore as a group we have acquired more specialist knowledge and experience, collaborating with those working in this same space and we will be able to reach out and help other disciplines who are starting to approach this way of teaching and learning skills. (Dr Lee J Higham)

This work is innovative and vital since it directly bridges the gap between the knowledge and experience that chemistry students gain during their studies with the technical and transferable skills that employers are looking for from graduates in the field.
Chemistry students often have a strong theoretical foundation and our Pizza Model approach supports students to apply this in more practical ways. This keeps our Chemistry programmes up to date and reflective of graduate labour market trends, and also sets a new standard for how employability and entrepreneurial learning can be integrated into science education in a Russell Group institution. Very importantly, it also enables students to understand the range of career options available to them, whilst boosting their self-efficacy and confidence levels to ensure they are able to compete in a competitive graduate recruitment market. (Helen Atkinson)

Where do you see the biggest impact of this project being?
Study Abroad and Industrial Training Years improve the employability of our Chemistry undergraduates by increasing confidence and preparing students for the job market. Students quickly develop a higher level of academic translatable skills through being immersed in laboratory research and project planning, communication and time management development, and team and individual working patterns.

We have seen student placement successes result in job offers and PhD funding opportunities, as well as network building.
We have had students engaged in research projects in locations ranging from Singapore to Vermont and Padua, and placed in diverse industry settings such as Croda, Johnson Matthey and EDF Energy. (Dr Toni Carruthers and Dr Fabio Cucinotta)

How do you see this work developing over the next few years, and what is next for this initiative/project?
The work has caught the attention of the wider School and we are working with other subject areas in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences to help them adopt our areas of best practice. Beyond the School, the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering here has also taken some of our key initiatives and applied them to enhance provision of employability resources in the School of Engineering.

Dr Higham works closely with BioNow (bionow.
co.uk), a not-for-profit biomedical, pharma and life sciences umbrella organisation, with a Skills Interest sub-group which ‘aims to create an industry narrative to influence Higher Education Provision on the importance of academic and vocational skills required by industry’. As a member of this group, we have been influential in helping shape their objectives of new industrial placements and ‘speed-dating’ industry/student interactions. Abby Reeds is similarly involved in the North East of England Process Industry Cluster. Dr Higham chaired the inaugural Royal Society of Chemistry UK Study Abroad Coordinators Forum in 2021 and contributed to the RSC’s Rethinking Industrial Placements article in 2019.

We hope to use this Horizon Prize to communicate our team's experiences and outcomes beyond Newcastle University, using the great network provided by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
(Abby Reeds and Dr Lee J Higham)

What are the qualities that make your team special?
One of the strengths of the Pizza Model is that each champion has their own perspective and targets for their own specialism (for instance increasing the number of students with an international experience or raising their digital and information skills), but the collaborative nature of our group produces a multiplier effect by drawing these usual disparate activities together with a focus on graduate employability.

Their dedication to our overall aim of improving the skillset and employability of our graduates, and their ability and willingness to couple their in-depth specialist knowledge with that of colleagues from beyond their own expertise, makes the team special.
They have a great talent for smiling in the face of any problems and can use improvisation to find a way to make things work in an area of teaching which is challenging, exciting and rewarding all at the same time.

What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry?
My advice to anyone considering a career in chemistry is to be open-minded! Chemistry is a diverse discipline, with career opportunities in a wide range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, energy, food and beverage, and consumer goods. Follow your curiosity and don’t be afraid to explore opportunities to use your chemistry skills in non-lab settings, such as in education, science communication and policy. Building a strong foundation in chemistry is important, but it’s also just as valuable to build skills and experience beyond the lab and the lecture theatre during your studies, to help you gain valuable experience beyond your core subject. (Helen Atkinson)

How can this project benefit the wider education community?
This project tackles the perceived skills gap between higher education and the world of work. Students can navigate and bridge this space best if they have experience of an industrial placement or study abroad research experience off campus, and this initiative aims to give our students the best chance possible of securing these fabulous opportunities. However, for industrial placements the number of these offered by industry is beyond our control, and study abroad is not a commitment that every student can make. Therefore, this project also ensures that all those students who don't have this experience still work on real-world problem solving, with partner companies from the pharmaceutical, science communication, startups and intellectual property sectors coming onto the module to set 'Dragons' Den' challenges. As such, society will benefit in the future from a graduate cohort fully fluent in how to better apply their subject knowledge to the problems facing society as a whole as a result of their experiential learning.

How can good science education support solving global challenges?
Global challenges typically are large-scale, complex and multidisciplinary in nature – these are unlikely to be tackled with a single-subject, purely knowledge-based approach to the problem. If we want scientists to be able to overcome these hurdles they must therefore go beyond the traditional confines of their own classroom experience and become acclimatised and comfortable working in teams with professionals from other disciplines, both scientific and beyond. By presenting undergraduates with these real-world challenges from external stakeholders whilst they are still at university, an otherwise steep learning curve can be significantly flattened by this experiential real-world problem solving. It is also important that they can improvise and think outside of the box and be able to find solutions by applying unorthodox methods and perspectives.

How are the chemical sciences making the world a better place?
The chemical sciences are making energy and the planet greener and more sustainable; they create a deeper understanding of disease and potential diagnostic and treatment breakthroughs; and with specific regards to chemists themselves, they create a sense of bringing together minds that are curious about the atomic world and its impact on nature and society from across the globe in order to produce an equitable, sustainable and healthy society.

Why is chemistry important?
One must understand the atomic world to better influence our own.