Universities spend considerable time and money preparing students for the workplace. At the same time, their own technology teams are struggling to find the capacity and skills needed to modernise. You might expect those two challenges to meet somewhere inside the same institution – but too often, they do not.
Students contribute to academic research, complete placements with external employers and work on live briefs connected to their studies. Yet they are far less likely to work alongside the teams running and improving the digital services of their own university.
At a recent Roc roundtable with Higher Education technology leaders, one participant asked:
“Could students gain practical experience by helping tackle the real digital challenges at the institution where they already study?”
It was a brief point in a much wider discussion, but it exposed a clear contradiction. Universities are educating the digital talent they need, but are they making enough use of the university itself as a place for that talent to develop?
University IT teams are being asked to do more than ever: support student experience, enable global research, strengthen cyber resilience, protect data and introduce AI and new models of learning.
They must do all of this while maintaining the systems and services the institution depends on every day. That leaves little room to experiment, despite the number of live challenges that would benefit from fresh thinking and closer insight into how services are experienced.
At the same time, universities are full of students studying computer science, cyber security, data, engineering, design and behavioural science, many of whom need opportunities to apply their learning.
The talent is already there. The missing piece is a way to connect it to the work.
Students experience university technology differently from those who design and manage it, and even if it’s painful for IT to hear, students know which systems are difficult to navigate. They know where processes break down, where guidance is ignored and where the official student journey bears little resemblance to reality.
That perspective is not only valuable. It is difficult to reproduce without involving the people who use those services every day.
A group of students might examine why a digital service is not being adopted as expected. A computer science student could contribute to a contained automation project. A cyber security cohort could work through a controlled challenge based on a real institutional scenario.
The point is not to create artificial exercises dressed up as work experience. It is to identify genuine problems where student involvement could improve both the outcome and the learning.
That would also give greater meaning to the idea of the student voice. Instead of asking students what they think once a new platform or service is already in place, universities could involve them earlier: understanding the problem, testing assumptions and shaping how the service works in practice.
Students would move from being passive users of university technology to active contributors to its improvement.
There is a limit to what students can learn from a classroom exercise. They can understand the principles of data analysis, service design or cyber security. Seeing what happens when those disciplines meet the realities of a large organisation is a different thing altogether.
Inside a university technology project, they would encounter legacy systems, governance, limited budgets, sensitive data and competing priorities. They would see why a technically sound answer is not always the answer an organisation can implement.
That experience builds more than technical skill. It develops judgement, communication and an understanding of how change actually happens.
There may also be a longer-term benefit for Higher Education itself.
Students see the teaching, research and support services around them, but often have little idea of the technology capability beneath them. Many may never consider university IT as a career, despite the scale, complexity and social value of the work.
Giving them meaningful exposure could help the sector grow more of its own future talent rather than competing for every skill in the external market.
The model would need firm boundaries. Students should not be used to replace experienced staff, compensate for underinvestment or provide unpaid capacity.
The strongest approach would create properly structured opportunities around genuine institutional challenges. IT teams could identify suitable projects. Academic departments could connect them to relevant courses and skills. Careers teams could help shape the experience, while students could choose opportunities that genuinely extend their learning.
That connection between functions may be one of the most valuable outcomes.
Universities are often highly siloed. Bringing together digital operations, teaching and employability would show what becomes possible when the institution uses its own capabilities more deliberately.
Students are not the answer to Higher Education’s digital capacity challenge. That still requires investment, stronger operating models and difficult decisions about legacy technology.
But universities should be able to answer one simple question: why are they educating future digital professionals while offering so few opportunities to apply those skills to the university itself?
Account Director
As an Account Director for the Higher Education sector, Kieran works with universities and colleges to drive network transformation and strengthen cybersecurity operations. He loves helping institutions modernise their digital environments and deliver secure, high-performing experiences for students and staff.
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