Company Consultancy Challenge

Every year, Nottingham University Business School runs a Company Consultancy Challenge for a select group of postgraduate students from across the School. The challenge involves stakeholders from local companies setting a real-life challenge based on their business for teams of students to work on over a 2-3 week period over the summer.

The project is a great opportunity for students to engage with real businesses, apply their knowledge and develop key skills in preparation for entering the job market. It also provides volunteers with the chance to gain valuable insights and new perspectives on key areas of market research or customer insights for their business.

University of Nottingham alumna Vanja Ljevar (MSc Marketing, 2014), co-founder of Kubik Intelligence, took part in the challenge this year as a project advisor, in order to gain fresh perspectives on the challenge of scaling their company.

“We really wanted to see what students could come up with and maybe investigate some areas that we didn’t even think about”, she said.

The groups were made up of students from all of our MSc programmes, who combined their expertise and areas of interest to provide proposals and recommendations following an intensive two-week research period. The groups then presented their ideas to project sponsors and business mentors, before a celebration and prize-giving event at Nottingham Contemporary.

“The Company Challenge has given me the opportunity to go beyond the scope of my course and actually apply the skills that I’ve learned” said Aditya Taneja, MSc Management student.

Applications for volunteers for the 2024 Company Consultancy Challenge are now open, and the university is looking for locally based businesses, social enterprises or charities who can provide a project and around six hours of their time in June next year.

“We got so many useful perspectives and views that we never really considered before”, said Vanja. “That’s one of the main reasons why I really like working with students, because even just the questions they asked were very engaging and very different to everything we’ve been thinking about so far.”

“I would say to any company thinking about getting involved next year – this is the perfect opportunity for you to tap into the potential of the great minds of the future. It’s a really empowering, inspiring and engaging project - definitely get involved.”