Marketing collaboration provides career-ready graduates

A collaboration between the Department of Marketing and digital marketing agency Equator aims to provide students with digital skills fit for the workplace. Here, Dr Ewelina Lacka focuses on the positive impact of the collaboration.

We’ve been working with marketing agency Equator for two years and this collaboration is playing a major role in delivering career-ready graduates for the digital marketing industry.

Nearly 150 students recently completed the university’s postgraduate elective course on eMarketing, which is supported by Glasgow-based Equator and is part of the Masters in Marketing programme.

The collaboration was first introduced as part of a strategy by the University to develop more commercially-focused graduates – a strategy that will soon be entering its third year of success.

Employees from Equator share real-world expertise with students, delivering lectures and leading discussions on contemporary digital topics. These include performance marketing, content marketing, search optimisation, mobile commerce and future technologies.

The elective was developed by Equator’s innovation director Martin Jordan and the Department of Marketing in response to recognition by both that the digital skills gap was causing issues for both graduates and employers.

Equator has been at the forefront of digital technology and transformational thinking since it was established in 1999 and part of the agency’s ethos is to challenge the industry and the education sector to establish a more integrated and collaborative learning path for those building a career in marketing, brand and technology. For Strathclyde Business School, our ethos is at one with the wider University of ‘useful learning’ and engagement with industry is embedded throughout the Business School to ensure our students are provided with a wide range of business opportunities.

James Jefferson, co-founder and chief creative officer at Equator is clear that he wants to nurture talent and improve standards in the creative and digital industry, and the best way to achieve this is to work closely with universities to ensure course content is always aligned with what’s happening in the industry.

We want our graduates to be career-ready for the workplace environment and, by collaborating on this elective, hopefully we’re helping to fuel the growth of Scotland’s digital economy.

We’re incredibly proud that a second cohort of skilled students have successfully completed the course and are now ready to make their mark on the digital industry. Working with Equator we have made great progress in bridging the gap between academia and practice, enabling students to not only learn academic theories, but their practical application in a real business setting.

The Marketing Department is very excited about continuing this partnership and we are now working towards the next step of this collaboration.

About Ewelina Lacka

Dr Ewelina Lacka is a Lecturer in Marketing at Strathclyde Business School. She is a member of the Academy of Marketing and British Academy of Management, and a Committee Member of e-Business and e-Government Special Interest Group, British Academy of Management.