Industry Consultation / Who

Supervisors know more than executives

Seniority and proximity to the work run in opposite directions.

Consultation naturally seeks senior people, because they represent the organisation and their participation signals that it was taken seriously. They also work at a distance from the tasks graduates actually perform, and their view of what is needed is frequently a strategic abstraction.

The person who supervises a graduate in their first six months has the specific knowledge: what they could not do, what took too long to teach, what they had been taught that was wrong. That is the level at which a curriculum conversation is actually productive.

Getting access to that level requires asking for it explicitly, since an invitation to an organisation will be routed upward by default. Asking to speak to whoever supervises new starters is a different and usually easily granted request.

Both levels are worth having for different purposes. Senior participation establishes direction and legitimacy; supervisory participation establishes content. Treating one as a substitute for the other is the common error.

The other reason to reach supervisors is that they can be specific about timing. Knowing that a graduate took six weeks to become useful, and what happened in those six weeks, identifies exactly what the course could have covered and did not, at a level of detail no strategic conversation produces.