Organizing Team Leuven 2019

Wijnand Aalderink is the Director of Career Services and Corporate Relations, Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen.

Wijnand has over thirty years of experience in higher education, working in different roles as teacher, researcher, manager, board member, but always with a strong focus on innovation and organisation development. He is currently engaged in a wide range of projects to further connect the university’s knowledge and talents with ‘real world’ challenges.

At the summit, Wijnand will be exploring the topic of learning communities as innovation spaces for employability and curriculum development.

Griet Blieck has over 17 years of higher education experience in different roles. She is currently the Head of Corporate Relations Unit at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the KU Leuven, Belgium. Her main areas of expertise are university-business cooperation, career & employability services, experiential learning inside and outside the curriculum, student-entrepreneurship and alumni relations. 

FEB’s Corporate Relations Office acts as the single point of contact and central hub, managing long term and mutually beneficial collaborative programmes, which result in diverse business solutions. In close cooperation with FEB’s student associations and the corporate world, the Centre offers a broad portfolio of job market preparation initiatives. In addition, the Centre organizes or facilitates intra and extra-curricular initiatives to develop management and employability skills in line with student’s own aspirations & ambitions of their future career. The Centre’s approach is in line with the faculty’s vision to prepare students for successful entrepreneurial endeavours and careers in the corporate world, in policy-making or research both on the national and the international level. 

Formerly Griet was a Project Manager and Head of the Project Office where she co-ordinated many national and European funded projects in the field of professional skills development within Higher Education and the labour market and entrepreneurship education. She also coached other staff members in grant writing. 

Marc is Director of Student Experience at Newcastle University, with twenty five years of experience working in University Careers Services. Joining Newcastle in 2013, Marc worked previously as Head of Employability at Plymouth University and has spent six years on the Board of Directors for the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) from 2010-2016. Marc’s previous experience also includes ten years as Director of Gradsouthwest, a regional vacancy website for fourteen universities in the south west of England, and setting up his own publishing enterprise called Trufflehog, through which university students wrote, illustrated and published children’s books.

Newcastle University has one of the UKs leading Careers Services, and won the ‘Student Experience Award’ at the Educate North Awards in 2018 and ‘Best University Employability Strategy’ at the 2017 National Graduate Recruitment Awards (Target Jobs, UK). The University was awarded Gold in the UK Teaching Excellence Framework and hosted the Global Careers Service Summit in 2018.