Classroom to Corporate 26/27

Stand out to recruiters

Securing a graduate role is increasingly competitive, with hiring down 8% and an average of 89 applicants for every vacancy posted.

Employers are also reporting a growing work-readiness gap, noting that strong academic grades are no longer enough on their own. Recruiters expect concrete examples of your skills and behaviours. This can mean that students without direct placement experience often struggle to translate their academic knowledge into language that employers recognise.

But there's no need to feel anxious about this, because LUBS Classroom to Corporate has entered the chat!

Classroom to Corporate is a free programme you can complete alongside your normal studies, designed to solve the work-readiness problem by preparing you for the recruitment process. All the sessions are in a practical workshop format, each mapped directly to the specific skills employers say are missing in recent graduates they've assessed.

Each session focuses on giving you direct experience and confidence, and you'll leave the programme better able to talk about your abilities in applications, interviews, and assessment panels. Many of the workshops are also certificated, providing a clear way to prove your work readiness to future employers.

Discover the sessions in detail

1. Be The Recruiter

When: Teaching Week 2 | Wednesday 7 October 2026

Job interviews can be a daunting prospect and knowing how to prepare can be tough. There's no better way to learn than to do, so let's turn the tables and make you in charge for the day!

During this fully interactive session you will work with leading talent development agency Gradconsult to act as a recruiter, running a simulated recruitment process from job advert to interview selection. You will learn how to find the key skills listed in job adverts and see what makes a good application stand out.

The course will also explain how employers run tests and interviews, showing you how they make their final decisions.

With this knowledge, you can quickly improve your own CV, cover letters and interview performance - building your confidence and making your next job application much stronger.

2. Strategic Sales Accelerator Challenge

When: Teaching Weeks 3, 4 and 5 | Wednesday | 14, 21 and 28 October 2026

Sales is one of the skills employers ask us for most often, and one of the few you are unlikely to pick up anywhere else on your degree. This programme, led by an international sales expert, will train you on the end-to-end complex strategic selling process.

You will study how modern business-to-business sales work, examining how corporate clients make buying decisions and how sales teams collaborate with marketing. Through a hands-on team simulation used by major global firms, you will practise authentic selling methods and discover what modern sales leaders do every day.

Session leader Tim Chapman has spent thirty-five years in B2B sales, including global VP roles at Vodafone and Fujitsu. He has since built and delivered sales development programmes for Lloyds Banking Group, HBX Group and Rogers Communications, which means the material you will be working through is the same thinking those organisations pay him to bring to their own teams.

3. Agentic AI Lab

When: Teaching Week 6 | Wednesday 4 November 2026

This cutting-edge session will be led by AI trailblazer Zandra Moore MBE, founder of Zygens and AiLab - one of the UK's leading agentic AI consultancies. Zandra partners directly with industry giants like Aviva, AXA, and Metro Bank, alongside local SMEs who are actively hunting for graduates equipped with applied AI skills. Let's make you one of those graduates!

This three-hour session covers how AI tools are actually being used in financial services, professional services, and business today.

You will learn how to write effective prompts for everyday business tasks and use AI tools to improve your research, decisions, and productivity. After a  single afternoon you will walk with practical skills you can use straight away, plus a co-branded micro-credential from AiLab and Leeds University Business School - invaluable evidence of applied AI capability for your CV and LinkedIn.

Bring a laptop and your curiosity!

4. Commercial Awareness: Behind the scenes at Leeds Rhinos

When: Teaching Week 7 | Wednesday 11 November 2026

Almost every graduate job advert asks for commercial awareness but very few of them explain what it is. Many students find out the hard way during interviews, that having read every line of the business pages does not get you to a satisfactory to answer to a question about this.

So, here is the short version.

Commercial awareness is understanding how an organisation makes its money, what it spends money on, who its customers are and what pressures it is under. It is being able to look at a business and work out where the risks sit and where the opportunities are. It is not memorising headlines, reciting share prices, or being able to name three competitors - Interviewers can tell the difference immediately!

Rather than explain this in a lecture theatre, we will take you inside a real business. Leeds Rhinos looks like a rugby club from the outside, but the organisation behind it runs a stadium, a hotel, conferencing and hospitality, sponsorship deals, retail and a community foundation. It is a multi-million-pound industry. Matchday is only part of the picture, and how the rest of it fits together is exactly what commercial awareness looks like in practice.

You will get a behind the scenes tour of the operation, followed by a session with Rob Oates, the club's Managing Director. Rob joined the Rhinos in 2003 from Carlsberg and has spent more than twenty years building the commercial side of the business, from sponsorship and partnerships through to hospitality.

He knows exactly where the money comes from and what it takes to keep it coming. You will be able to ask him anything.

5. Corporate Content Creation – Create Like a Professional

When: Teaching Week 8 | Wednesday 18 November 2026

You do not need hollywood-grade equipment to create professional content that has an impact on your audience. This practical workshop will show you how to use an iPhone or similar smartphone to produce engaging, industry-standard digital content and communications.

You will learn what makes content capture attention, how to plan and shoot effective video, the fundamentals of framing, sound and lighting, and how to edit content for a professional finish using freely available tools such as CapCut.

The emphasis is firmly on learning by doing, leaving you with practical digital communication skills you can use in the workplace from day one.

6. Employer Panel – Ask the Recruiters

When: Teaching Week 9 | Wednesday 25 November 2026

Get direct access to the people who recruit graduates like you!

This interactive panel brings together graduate recruiters from across different industries to give you an honest insight into what employers are looking for, what makes candidates stand out and where students commonly go wrong.

There are no presentations – the session is driven by your questions, giving you the opportunity to ask about applications, interviews, assessment centres, AI in recruitment or anything else you want to know about securing a graduate role.

It is also an amazing opportunity to meet and network directly with employers in a relaxed, informal setting.