Business student consultancy projects
Develop your business and gain new insight through free consultancy from students specialising in a range of business subjects.
What are business student consultancy projects?
Business student consultancy projects involve students, from a range of business courses, offering local organisations free consultancy to investigate specific business challenges or opportunities. As a business, you are also helping to develop future talent.
Our students can help by:
- bringing new ideas into your chosen business need
- providing you with additional resources at no extra cost
- producing tangible outcomes – the student(s) will make recommendations at the end of the project by producing an in-depth analysis, final written report and presentation.
How does the project work?
The project is a three-way collaborative partnership between The Bristol Business School, the student(s) and your organisation.
Our group projects usually commence in late January and individual projects from April. They run between eight and 16 weeks, dependent on which course the student is registered on. This may involve undergraduate, post graduate or MBA students.
The student business project process
- Define an appropriate project for the student(s) to embark on.
- Agree with the student(s), the scope, requirement, outputs etc.
- Ensure the student has access to relevant company information, data and key stakeholders.
- Assign a member of staff to work with them, as their main point of contact throughout this project.
- Provide office space for them to conduct some of their research (dependent on the project).
- We recommend covering basic expenses if students have to travel outside of Bristol, agreed with yourself in advance.
Project timeline
Download an approximate timeline (PDF) for the 2024/25 academic year.
How to decide on a project
The nature of the project will reflect opportunities and issues selected by your organisation and can relate to any function therein. Previous projects have covered most aspects of business and public sector activity. We suggest that highly technical projects are avoided unless we are able to find a student who has the necessary expertise (see list of example projects below). Students are supervised throughout the project by academics with commercial experience.
Project ideas for students on our Masters programmes
Here are some ideas about the type of projects that students studying a range of our Masters courses could support with.
- A project related to Marketing (typically briefs required October 2024 and outputs available in June–September 2025).
- A project related to Human Resources (typically briefs required between October 2024 and January 2025 and outputs available between April and September 2025).
- A project related to business and management, strategy, operations, change management, organisational development or accounting and finance (typically briefs required between October 2024 and June 2025 and outputs available between April and September 2025 with one cohort running to January 2026).
Further information
To express an interest in taking part in the consultancy project, tell us about your project idea, or for further information and enquiries, please email the team at cbl.engagement@uwe.ac.uk.