It’s fair to say that the past 18 months has been a rocky road for Unitec’s International Market Development team. With COVID-19 first forcing the closure of New Zealand’s borders last March and then plunging the country into a series of lockdowns, the offshore part of the team’s pipeline of international student recruitment suddenly disappeared.
But the team of five, including Toby Yin, Liang Luo, Puja Malik, Daniel Achonwa – and led by Don Sirimanne – wasn’t about to be beaten by a global pandemic.
For the past year and a half, the International recruitment team has been putting in the mahi to keep the momentum going so they’re in a strong position to meet the demand from students once borders open again —and their efforts have paid off. They have a strong pipeline for the 2022 academic year with more than 2,400 applications from across the key markets of China, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, including Viet Nam, Malaysia, Korea, the Philippines and Cambodia.
Unitec has been commended for its efforts in continuing with regular in-market activity, despite the disruptions and challenges of COVID-19, and Don says that once the borders reopen, they’ll begin an immediate push into Unitec’s key student markets with offshore visits.
“It’s critical to secure connections early on in the markets and to continue to engage with our agents and institutional partners to build solid ties.”
Continued outreach and engagement
In the meantime, to ensure brand awareness for Unitec, they’ve maintained a steady schedule of onshore international agent visits with Auckland high schools, participated in more than 40 virtual networking events organised by a range of industry groups and international education organisations, hosted a regular International webinar series over the past five months, attracting more than 400 students and agents, with topics including business intelligence and data analytics, the Internet of Things, cloud accounting, and the value of internships in tertiary education.
The team has also just staged two successful Global Partner Networking events for onshore and offshore agents, featuring speakers from Te Pūkenga and Auckland Unlimited.
International grant acknowledges disruption
In recognition of the disruption caused to students over the past two academic years, Unitec has recently launched an International Student Study Grant valued up to $5,000 for all new and progressing International students enrolling for Bachelor’s, Postgraduate Diploma and Master’s programmes. The grant goes towards tuition fees and Don says it was a way of supporting our international students who have been heavily impacted by COVID-19 and are undertaking full-time study in 2022.
In addition, Unitec has implemented initiatives to support its international agents, recognising the impact that COVID-19 has also had on their businesses and revenue streams.
The International team is looking forward to the re-opening of New Zealand’s borders early next year, and a long-awaited reconnection with the rest of the world. There are plans to meet with partners in India, China and South East Asia to re-establish relationships and to rebuild partnerships with a focus on recruiting students into the Business, Computing, Construction, Engineering and Applied Sciences programmes.
Hitting the road again
Last month, Unitec country manager for India and Sri Lanka, Puja Malik, attended her first in-person event in 18 months, in Chandigarh – India. The event attracted more than 50 universities from Australia, New Zealand and the UK, with Unitec featuring among the half dozen New Zealand providers.
“It was great to be back out there again,” says Puja. “Travel is living for me, and one of things I love most about my job is the travel and meeting new people in different parts of the world. I obviously haven’t been able to do that for a while, and I’ve really missed meeting up with colleagues and friends from the education industry.”
Puja has been one of the key drivers behind Unitec’s continued awareness in the market, and she has taken part in more than 80 virtual events over the past 20 months. She’s delighted with the feedback she’s had from industry colleagues and agents.
“From what I’ve seen and heard in the market, Unitec has been one of the most active institutions in terms of keeping connected with its stakeholders, despite not being able to travel.
“We’ve been present at a large number of virtual events and we’ve been the only one to run a webinar series.”
Puja anticipates there’ll be considerable interest in study at Unitec when the borders re-open, with a good mix of the right kind of programmes and the International Study Grant making it financially attractive for International students to come to Unitec.
“We’ve got to continue to focus on solutions that enable us to recruit international students even during the pandemic,” Puja says. “It’s been challenging, but we’re looking forward to a return to normalcy, and having international students back on campus at Unitec.”