Exploiting students’ part-time work to enhance learning, teaching and assessment

This article highlights an opportunity for teaching staff in universities to utilise students’ part-time work experience to enhance learning, teaching and assessment activities. Increasing numbers of university students are working part-time while studying and, as a consequence, there have been several academic studies highlighting the adverse impact of this practice on academic performance. This has led to suggestions for changes in educational policy, seeking either to reduce students’ term-time working or to eliminate it altogether. With a gearing to business management education, this viewpoint piece provides an argument for university lecturers to embrace students’ part-time work experience and use it to enhance the learning, teaching and assessment experience. The use of students’ own work experience extends the case study method, which is common in business teaching, to give greater control and therefore reassurance to students and so yield deeper learning. The approach also strengthens the relationship between higher education and industry in that it connects more cohesively students’ work experience and university study.