A Busy Week At Will Hall Online

This week has certainly been a busy week at Will Hall Online, with Stephanie and Will out of the office at two different events, The Beds SME Expo and The ARU Computer Science Employers Forum. So we thought a great time to do a bit of feedback from both.

Beds SME Expo

The Beds SME Expo is a Small and Medium size exhibition/business fair based in Bedfordshire to allow businesses to network and look for potential customers and clients in the Bedford B2C scene. Firstly, we have been to Beds SME Expos before and had a great time and made some useful contacts so that was great but an additional factor this time was that it was at the new Center Parcs at Woburn Forest, which was great to have a look round and we would highly recommend for future business venues and have reasonable rates for conferences and bookings.

ARU Computer Science Employers Forum

As active employers in the Cambridge areas and also actively involved in the Cambridge open-source software communities, we really relish being able to visit with local universities to discuss how their courses are developing and what skills and knowledge can be transferred from the world of work to university education. Firstly, it must be said, that ARU has come on leaps and bounds over the past few years in offering skills that are more and more useful to employers. With regular coding becoming essential to every course and exposure to large software companies the courses are getting better year on year. Additionally, ARU Computer Science department has just been awarded certification for its Computer Science courses so that their undergraduates will now leave with BEng (Hons) rather than BA (Hons) and this should mean a greater amount of specificity in the qualification.

For any scientific department, being able to keep up with the rate of change in technology is particularly difficult, however, it is also noted that whilst software companies would like practical experience in coding and project management, the number one skill required is enthusiasm. We all accept that not everyone can know everything, especially when you are starting out, and we certainly don’t profess to know everything. Education is a journey, not a destination.