Graduates who want to put their creative skills to use to develop a business are being offered free tuition on an online course at Robert Gordon University (RGU).
The university is offering 21-fully funded places on its Creative Entrepreneurship course as part of its commitment to supporting the creative industries.
The post-graduate short course is designed to equip graduates with the knowledge and skills to transition their creative practice into a viable business.
The classes are open to those looking to start up a new enterprise, or with an existing creative business who want to take it to the next level. RGU said it will provide participants with a number of business tools and toolkits, as well as expert guidance from academics and existing entrepreneurs.
Potential students are urged to apply by Sunday, 16 May.
The course runs in June and July is the fourth cohort. It has been run online after the first was set to start just as lockdown came into force last year.
RGU Campus.
Hilary Nicoll, co-director of Look Again, part of RGU’s Grays School of Art which supports the course said the course having to go fully online has opened up more opportunities and formed an “amazing creative network”.
She said: “It’s been a great course, we’ve already had around 70 people participate and because it is online we now have this amazing network of people from right across the north east, as well as the central belt, and as far afield as Iona.
“The first cohort was set to start in the first week of lockdown so we postponed by a week to integrate the course fully online and this has enabled us to offer it to students across the whole of Scotland, as well as have guest speakers from London, Edinburgh and all over Scotland.
“It has changed the dynamic and the connections people can make – it’s fantastic to see a designer in Aberdeen strike up a partnership with someone in Edinburgh who they may not have met otherwise and see how they can work so well together.”
The course is a collaboration between the University’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group (EIG) and the Look Again team with funding provided by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). It is a credit bearing Master’s level qualification which allows participants to accumulate further credits and achieve a full postgraduate qualification over time.
Nicoll added: “Look Again and EIG were able to mobilise really quickly during that initial stage and the impact it has had on individuals has been fantastic – when everyone else was shutting down, we were actually rising up and a dynamic network has been formed throughout the process.”
For more information or to apply to the course please visit the website.