Recruit our enterprising, professional graduates and students to support your business through schemes like Unitemps, GradForce, and CDIO project support.
Unitemps
As Canterbury Christ Church University’s in-house recruitment agency, Unitemps can help you find bright, reliable, and motivated graduates for your vacancies.
Unitemps offers an easy to use, ethical recruitment solution, whether your vacancy is temporary, permanent, or you simply need to promote your advertisement.
GradForce
GradForce provides a bespoke recruitment service to ‘match-make’ our talented graduates with your business to meet your needs, ultimately reducing the time, effort, and cost spent on your recruitment process. Working closely with you to understand your role requirements, GradForce pairs you with graduates who have the potential to fulfil them.
The project can also offer:
- assistance with defining and shaping graduate roles
- help with shortlisting
- interview guidance as needed
- ongoing support for both you and your graduate employee for their first year of employment
- discounts on postgraduates courses
- networking opportunities.
As part of the programme, GradForce nurtures final-year students at Canterbury Christ Church University to prepare them for the world of work. As an innovative, extra-curricular programme, students opt-in to develop key employability skills ready to meet your graduate recruitment needs.
The University’s Future 360 framework is designed to provide a holistic employability education that prepares our students to be adaptable, enterprising professionals. GradForce is part of this wider offer, with the programme set to run every new academic year.
Get in touch with GradForce today.
GradForce Testimonials
‘We have worked in partnership with GradForce for just over a year now and are really pleased with the service we get from the entire team. The work that they put in guarantees that candidates are well prepared and suitable for the role, meaning that we have a cost-effective solution to recruitment.
We have recruited Law, Psychology and Computing graduates to the Watermelon team and all of them are hard-working, dedicated and passionate about starting their careers with us. They are all settling into their roles nicely and already proving to be extremely valuable to our business, exceeding our expectations.
The GradForce team are also always on hand to help me with new roles that we advertise and regularly check in with me and our grads to see how we’re getting on. We couldn’t be happier with how the partnership is progressing.’
David Adley, Director of Operations, Watermelon Research
‘As a local paper manufacturing business based in Maidstone, we were quickly able to build a reciprocal relationship with Dempson Ltd, assisting them with their search for talent. After meeting with the business to understand their needs in a graduate hire, we were able to successful fill the role of Sales & Marketing Officer at the firm. The graduate after several weeks was “doing brilliantly and picking things up very quickly. So quickly in fact that I’ve actually escalated the training plan I had in place which is always a good thing! It is of course still early days, but so far so good.’
Lauren Abbott, Commercial Manager
Student projects and live briefs
Benefit from our students’ knowledge and insight applied to real-world scenarios, problems, and issues that affect your business. Student projects are devised in collaboration with you to bring new insights and different perspectives to your business. Focused either on specific problems or issues, or on day-to-day business, student projects can unlock new thinking or innovative approaches and solutions.
Please contact our Enterprise & Engagement Team to discuss a project brief.
Placements
Employing a student on a placement basis is a great way to identify future talent for your business and to access the fresh insight and knowledge our students bring.
We offer a range of options, including full-time or part-time placements for a year, a few months, weeks, or even a few days. Please contact our Enterprise & Engagement Team to discuss placements.
Canterbury-based digital design agency Finally has supported the Graphic Design mock agency module for the last three years and mentored some of our students during this time. They have offered internships to second year students who were then employed for one day a week whilst they completed their final year.
Chris Waterlow, Camera Supervisor from QVC, has been impressed with how knowledgeable our students are and regularly employs interns from the BA Film, Radio and Television. One graduate he hired last year was so good that after only seven weeks as an intern she was taken on to the QVC freelance list and now works full-time for them as a technical operator.
CDIO projects:
Canterbury Christ Church University is just one of a handful of universities in the UK to offer the pioneering CDIO international engineering education model, which was developed by the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in collaboration with business.
The framework centres on the importance of close collaboration between organisations, industry, and education providers in the context of Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, and Operating (CDIO).
Having gained considerable momentum, the benefits of supporting students by introducing them to real-world systems and products are becoming increasingly recognised by industry.
Some of these benefits include:
- producing engineers who have relevant knowledge, talent, and experience
- students working on real-life projects means businesses and organisations directly benefit from results and contributions
- in fostering student’s creative abilities, the model stimulates innovation, often resulting in fresh and inventive solutions to business problems
- robust evidence suggests that this is an effective model not only for giving students the necessary technical expertise needed in industry, but also the professional independence and team working skills required post-University
- businesses and organisations can influence the project, tailoring the model to their current needs.
Please contact our Enterprise & Engagement Team to discuss CDIO projects.
Examples
Using the CDIO model, students were asked to solve a real engineering problem and demonstrate its efficacy by printing a 3D model and presenting it to industry.
The project had five engineering groups each with 3-4 students sharing responsibility for separate project design and engineering roles including design sketches, 3D CAD product development, 3D printing, project reporting, and a company presentation.
Since the model is underpinned by the growing importance of close collaboration with businesses and industry, students involved in a CDIO project must solve a real engineering problem. In this case, the problem addressed door locks that were compatible with multiple models of Ford commercial vehicles and worked on rear slam locks and side-opening sliding doors. The moving locking parts had to perfectly integrate with the standard euro lock module and not have breakable / penetrable options for thieves. This was a particularly challenging technical task for the students.
For this project, there was an added layer of pressure given the financial prize for the winning team from the Engineers in Business Fellowship (EIBF).
‘AMC and TVL worked with Canterbury Christ Church University to help create a new version of our commercial vehicle lock.
The students have done a tremendous job in providing various mechanical solutions, one of which we will consider taking forward into production and we congratulate Group 4 – Adam, Ope, Harry & Joe in winning a prize from the Engineers in Business Fellowship (EIBF) for a significant student engineering project’.
Chris Hambrook – Director AMC
The £3000 fund was awarded to the winning group, who designed a set of moving lock parts with a re-imagined slide bolt component, which was counter sprung and re-designed to be significantly stronger than existing products. The prize was awarded based on the following criteria:
- simplicity of the internal mechanism (i.e. few moving parts less likely to fail)
- strength (parts are solid – not thin and potentially weak areas are demonstrated)
- easy to manufacture
- direction the mechanical works means there is no easy way to drill and attack lock
- addressed the aesthetics for housing as requested by the industrial partner (does require some improvement to make less bulky).
The winners will also be able to participate in the Champion of Champion annual final competition hosted by the EIBF to compete for a £15,000 prize pot and other prizes.