These days it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. That’s why we have developed a wide range of opportunities that you can take advantage of alongside your chosen programme to enhance your offering to future employers and reach your full potential.
Digital badges
The opportunity to showcase your skills to prospective employers via your social media profile has become increasingly important and for some of our programmes you can earn digital badges that recognise your accomplishments. The badges are widely recognised by employers as a mark of expertise and dedication.
Employability skills are increasingly important to prospective employers who are looking for applicants with something more to offer than just subject knowledge.
Our course modules provide learners with the core transferable employability skills they need to go on to have a successful career. We have developed the Cranfield Competency Framework to help our learners to identify and reflect on those skills that they have acquired, or those that need further development. Competencies are clustered under four different groupings: Communications and Relationships, Personal Attributes, Leadership and Business.
Find out more on our employability skills page.
Being entrepreneurial isn’t only about running your own business, having an entrepreneurial mindset is all about thinking differently and creatively to solve problems. Through our entrepreneurship programme of activities, we can help you become resilient, resourceful and solutions-oriented.
Entrepreneurship is a fantastic opportunity to expand your knowledge, build your skills and meet students from across campus in a friendly and fun environment. Through our Cranfield Enhance Entrepreneurship offering hosted by the Bettany Centre for Entrepreneurship, you will become more resilient, cultivate your problem-solving skills, encourage creative thinking and resourcefulness, and learn valuable soft skills such as communication, negotiation, leadership, and teamwork, which are essential in your personal life and professional career.
The entrepreneurship badge consists of two levels. Level 1 (which consists of two badges) will offer you the opportunity to:
- attend speaker series, entrepreneurship club and entrepreneurship week events.
- participate in the Cranfield Start-Up Weekends.
- participate in the Colworth Innovation Challenge.
- participate in the i2i programme (research students).
In addition, if you would like to move to level 2 (which consists of two badges) you can:
- attend two masterclasses.
- sign up for mentoring with the Bettany Centre.
- participate in investor day.
If you complete all four badges you may also have the opportunity to apply for the Cranfield Seed Fund.
At each level and for each badge, you will attend specific events and workshops before submitting a written deliverable. You can find out more in the following links:
- Entrepreneurship: Ideation
- Entrepreneurship: Inspiring
- Entrepreneurship: Impact of Research
- Venture: Developing Entrepreneurship
- Venture: Getting Ready for Launch
As the opportunity to showcase your skills to prospective employers via your social media profile has become increasingly important, you will earn digital badges that recognise your accomplishments once you have successfully submitted each deliverable. Employers widely recognise the badges as a mark of expertise and dedication.
If you are studying for a PhD, you have access through our Doctoral Researchers Core Development programme. It offers a suite of resources enabling you to develop transferable skills that are important for personal development and career progression.
Digital skills underpin everything we do at Cranfield and how we do it. Recent reports and surveys have highlighted the importance of relevant, up-to-date digital skills both for study and for work.
To help you to enhance your digital skills we provide a self-assessment tool to discover how your skills levels compare against the six elements of the Jisc Building digital capabilities framework. There are also two specialist question sets covering digital skills in AI and generative AI and digital skills for employability. Jisc is the UK's expert body for digital technology and digital resources in higher education, further education and research.
The Jisc discovery tool enables you to self-reflect on your current digital skills and provides a personal report indicating your current skill level, access to resources and next steps to further develop your skills.
To support your development and fill any skills gaps identified we offer a range of learning opportunities and resources:
- a rolling programme of free online or classroom-based courses.
- self-paced resources including online learning tools and video tutorials; plus free access to LinkedIn Learning
- access to professional digital skills qualifications and certifications.
- one-to-one support.
The Jisc discovery tool provides digital badging for some questions sets, and on completion of a LinkedIn Learning course you’ll receive a certificate.
If you would like to know more about the Jisc Building digital capabilities framework or the Discovery tool, please email us at bdc@cranfield.ac.uk.
Future programmes
At Cranfield we are always developing and enhancing our offering. In addition to the programmes already on offer we are working on some exciting editions for 2024/25 study including badges in sustainability and outreach.