Department of Informatics

Industrial Advisory Board

Our links and partnerships with business and industry not only enhance our students’ learning experience, but also make a vital contribution to their successful development.

The Informatics Industrial Advisory Board helps to ensure that our degrees reflect current developments and industry skills requirements, and Board members – from multinationals such as BT, Logica and NCSoft as well as Brighton-based new media companies such as Brandwatch, Cogapp and Semantico – offer students support and occasionally sponsorship for undergraduate final-year and Masters projects.

Collaboration between academia and industry is of course a two-way process. For instance, Logica say that their relationship with Sussex allows them to make themselves known to students early in their university careers as a potential employer and enables them to influence and encourage students with their studies and the career opportunities available to them. They are able to help shape course content from an industrial perspective to keep it relevant and interesting so that Informatics graduates are very employable at the end of their studies. "Informatics degrees provide a good range of skills and experience that industry requires", they add, "namely analytical and problem-solving skills; individual and team work; communication and presentation skills; and knowledge of programming skills, software engineering processes and the project lifecycle."

Suran Goonatilake, a Sussex computing graduate and co-founder of Searchspace, a world leader in combating money laundering, comments, "We find Sussex graduates think outside the box but are also very technically trained so our role as members of the Industrial Board is beneficial for recruitment purposes."

Regular industry liaison events include guest lectures, presentations and workshops, industry-focussed group projects, company-sponsored hackathons, and annual poster presentation events for final year undergraduates and for postgraduate students. These enable students to develop contacts with companies and to tap into potential partnership and employment opportunities.