Rob Wilmot, my fellow director here at BCS, had the honour recently (and it’s a huge honour believe you me) of accepting an honorary degree of Doctor of the University of Bradford, whose Chancellor is Imran Khan, the famous cricketer and politician! Yes, Rob does keep good company.
Rob graduated in 1994 with a BSc Honours degree in Electronic Imaging and Media Communications. As far as I can understand it, this seemed to involve him dancing naked in front of a camera and then burning it to CD – but I’ll leave that to you to ask him about it!
From then to being part of the Freeserve phenomenon, becoming Chair of Doncaster college to taking equity here at BCS, Rob has always straddled the world of academia and commerce well and it has really got me thinking about how this should be the norm rather than the exception if we are going to raise our game here at UK PLC.
Some of our most talented thinkers are in academia and, to date, the “joined up thinking” between the two worlds isn’t as strong as it could be.
As belts have been tightened due to the recession, graduate recruitment programmes have shrunk, and today’s school leavers and their parents are going to have to think long and hard if this is the right direction for their children to follow.
Now I’m not saying I have the answers, though at BCS we do foster strong relationships with our local university (where we work with final-year students on a range of video work for on-line video press releases and podcasts) but surely by bringing these two worlds together we can come up with a strategic way forward.
It’s worth seeing this video of Rob at the ceremony (if nothing more than for once the man is wearing a tie!).
