The Global Relevance of the Dyson Institute Model
As I come to the end of my tenure as Director of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, it’s a good moment to reflect not on what has been achieved, but on what has been learned.
The Dyson Institute was founded with a clear proposition: that engineering education could be redesigned so that work itself became the primary site of learning, without compromising academic standards or professional depth. From the outset, this was not intended as a critique of the higher education sector, nor as an experiment on its margins. It was an attempt to answer a practical question: how do we form engineers who can move fluently between theory, practice and responsibility from the very beginning of their careers?
This longread reflects the thinking that has shaped the Institute’s development and evolution - informed by policy reform in England, by conversations with national and international partners, and by a deepening engagement with global approaches to work-based learning. It situates the Dyson Institute not as a standalone model, but as part of a wider international shift toward learning that is embedded in productive work and which is sustained across an individual’s career.
My own perspective is shaped by history as much as policy. Earlier industrial leaders understood instinctively that skills formation was too important to outsource - that education and innovation flourished when firms assumed responsibility for developing the people on whom their futures depended. The challenge today is different, but the principle is enduring.
The Dyson Institute now enters its next chapter with strong foundations: graduates whose impact can be traced across the business, an institutional model that continues to evolve, and a widening set of international conversations about what high quality work-embedded education can look like. My hope is that this piece contributes to those conversations - not by prescribing solutions, but by offering evidence, principles and questions that are worth carrying forward.
Leadership transitions matter not because they mark endings, but because they clarify what is worth sustaining. For the Dyson Institute, that is a simple but demanding commitment: to place learning where value is created, to treat work as an intellectual space, and to design education around contribution rather than simulation.
Across the Atlantic, our colleagues are facing a familiar paradox: record employer demand for advanced technical skills, and record scepticism about whether traditional higher education can supply them. In England, apprenticeship assessment and funding rules are being reformed to be more flexible and employer-responsive; in the United States, governors and federal agencies are investing heavily to scale Registered Apprenticeships, and looking for the fresh thinking that can catalyse a successful skills infrastructure. There is a hunger for proven models that break free of debt-based structures, and which can deliver learners who can innovate and build from day one. At the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, that’s exactly what we do.
Put your hardest problems into the hands of learners
In the USA, one of the central movers in this space is non-profit platform Craft Education. In partnership with them, last August the Dyson Institute hosted a seventy-strong delegation of senior leaders from the Western Governors’ University, the National Governors’ Association, and the National Grow Your Own Teachers Initiative from the USA. The year before that, we hosted 16 colleagues from California’s Reach University, the accredited University building talent pipelines in communities through apprenticeship degrees. And before that, our model was shared with President Biden's National Infrastructure Advisory Council Subcommittee on Expanding the Workforce.
These colleagues ask a simple question with complicated implications: how do you make hands-on, workplace-embedded learning work without diluting academic standards, and whose responsibility should (or could) that be? In answer, the Dyson Institute story points to three levers: co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment.
Our discussions with these partners have crystallised a shared conviction that a central feature of higher education’s future lies where work and university are one and the same space. Rather than being simply a Dyson Institute story, this reflects wider systemic signals in both countries. In England, apprenticeship assessment reforms and the trajectory of the Growth and Skills Levy signpost a policy commitment to more employer-responsive pathways. In the United States, the Department of Labor’s expansion of Registered Apprenticeships, alongside governors’ coalitions seeking to scale earn-and-learn routes, reflects a similar diagnosis: skills formation is drifting too far from productive work.
What degree apprenticeships do differently
Degree apprenticeships are not work experience bolted onto a course. They are hybrid designs in which paid employment and formal study are interwoven from day one, with structured off-the-job learning, regulated curricula and shared accountability between employers and providers. Achievement of capability-driven learning outcomes is not inferred; capabilities are evidenced through performance in real occupational contexts.
In England, this architecture matters. Students are employees with rights. Employers commit to protected learning time. Providers evidence planned and delivered learning. Regulators judge quality through occupational competence, the continuation and completion of learners, and the employment status of graduates 15 months later. These measures can feel reductive and bureaucratic, but they are a threshold in demonstrating the credibility of degree apprenticeships credibility with employers and learners alike.
Dyson Institute: evidence in outcomes, not novelty
Our own students’ learning lives in the real engineering problems Dyson is solving. By graduation, they have not merely demonstrated knowledge but contributed to innovation pipelines, sustainability initiatives and product development milestones. Graduates now work across Dyson’s global network, often leading complex technical reviews and presenting to senior stakeholders. Some have taken ownership of products through multiple development stages; others have been named inventors on patent applications within a few years of joining as undergraduates.
Seven years on, this longitudinal visibility matters. It allows us to directly evaluate graduates (and our model) by impact rather than through proxy measures. That insight has also informed our institutional evolution, including the transition from a Level 6 degree apprenticeship to an employer-sponsored MEng that retains the rhythm of work-embedded learning while reducing administrative friction.
A historical model that shaped my thinking
As I reflect towards the end of my tenure as Director, I am conscious that the Dyson Institute did not emerge without precedent. Long before work-integrated learning became common policy language, the General Motors Institute – now Kettering University – in Flint, Michigan demonstrated what was possible when employers treated skills formation as strategic infrastructure.
Founded in 1919 and acquired by General Motors in 1926, the Institute operated for more than half a century as a degree‑granting university built around co-operative education. Students alternated between academic study and paid work inside the company, completing a substantial industrial thesis and progressing into roles of genuine responsibility. Over this time, over 60% GM’s technical leaders came through its Institute, as well as CEOs and Presidents. It was often described as the “West Point of the automobile industry”, reflecting its rigour and influence.
What captured my imagination was not corporate ownership of a university, but the idea that work itself was the curriculum spine. Academic standards were not compromised by proximity to practice; they were strengthened by it. Although General Motors divested ownership in 1982 amid industrial restructuring, the lesson endures: when firms really assume responsibility for developing talent, the boundary between work and higher education dissolves.
Contrast with the modern U.S. landscape
That history throws today’s U.S. context into sharper relief. Expansion of Registered Apprenticeships and the emergence of apprenticeship degrees mark meaningful progress, but many initiatives still fit employment into structures designed around separation – between universities and employers, between learning and work.
The challenge is coherent design. Where the General Motors Institute treated work‑embedded degrees as core industrial infrastructure, contemporary systems are still aligning accreditation, funding and academic legitimacy. The question that remains unsettled is the same one GMI resolved by design: who owns responsibility for turning novices into professionals?
A global convergence around work-based learning
Across OECD countries, the direction of travel is remarkably consistent. Governments and employers are re-examining how skills are formed, how long initial education should dominate, and how learning can be more closely coupled to economic activity. The OECD has identified work-integrated learning and adult reskilling as central responses to technological change, demographic ageing, and green transitions, noting that learning increasingly occurs in and through work rather than solely before it.
What varies internationally is not the intent, but the institutional architecture used to connect learning and work.
Germany and Switzerland: dual systems as national infrastructure
Germany and Switzerland remain the reference cases for integrated skills formation. In both systems, apprenticeships are not marginal pathways; they are the default route into skilled employment for large proportions of young people.
In Germany, around half of school leavers enter the dual vocational education and training (VET) system, combining paid employment with formally regulated education. Apprenticeships are collectively governed, nationally standardised, and deeply embedded in employer practice, especially in engineering and manufacturing sectors. Switzerland shows similar features, with around two thirds of young people entering apprenticeships after compulsory schooling. Crucially, Swiss apprenticeships are permeable, allowing progression into universities of applied sciences and in some cases, research universities. This permeability underpins social legitimacy and sustained employer engagement. This well-designed approach to pathway agility is one both the UK and US could learn from.
Yet both systems face pressure. OECD analysis notes rising apprenticeship dropout rates and gradual drift towards academisation, as demand for tertiary credentials increases even within vocational pathways. The lesson is not that dual systems are fading, but that work embedded learning with degree-level credentialisation is becoming increasingly important, even in countries with strong apprenticeship traditions.
Singapore: a deliberately hybrid degree apprenticeship model
Singapore offers one of the most explicit examples of policy designed work based degrees. Through the SkillsFuture Work Study Degree (WSDeg), universities and employers co design curricula, co deliver training, and co assess performance. Students are employed by sponsoring companies while completing degrees in engineering, computing, data science and related fields, alternating between work and study on structured schedules. The WSDeg mirrors several design principles familiar to degree apprenticeships in England:
• Employment as the primary learning context
• Formal academic credit for workplace learning
• Shared accountability between employer and institution
What differs is the centralised, system level coordination. SkillsFuture Singapore acts as an orchestrator, aligning universities, employers and funding mechanisms to national economic priorities. The role of such intermediaries is a high-level question in the US right now, and I’d argue intermediaries continue to be badly needed in the UK to support SME uptake of apprenticeships. The Singapore example works well to demonstrates that work-embedded degrees are relevant, successful and can be purposefully engineered outside the purely Western HE ecosystems.
Australia and Canada: work integrated learning without full integration
Australia and Canada illustrate both the promise and the limitations of work integrated learning when employment and education remain structurally separate.
In Australia, degree-level apprenticeships are beginning to emerge, with apprenticeship activity historically focused on trades at the ‘Certificate in HE’ level. South Australia is the leader here, piloting courses in STEM skills to service the defence industry, and a further $2.5m has been allocated in 2026 to expand these pilots with an additional 375 new starts, again targeting STEM and project management. Canada is another developed economy that has no formal degree apprenticeship system; apprentices graduate with a ‘Red Seal’ journeyperson certificate which carries an academic equivalency of HND, and apprentices are typically in their late-20s when they start.
In both countries, higher education courses integrate co ops, work placements, industry projects, internships, and applied research into diploma and degree programmes, and these can lead to strong employer satisfaction and high graduate outcomes. Yet in both countries, most students remain students first and employees second. Learning happens about work or adjacent to work, rather than through sustained employment; academic credit for authentic workplace contribution remains limited. These systems show how far work integrated learning can go without fundamentally re designing the role of the university. They also point to what is missing: employment as the curriculum spine, not an attachment.
Japan’s KOSEN colleges: early immersion in engineering practice
Japan’s Colleges of Technology (KOSEN) present a different but relevant model. KOSEN institutions admit students at age 15 and deliver five year engineering programmes heavily focused on laboratory work, applied projects and industrial relevance, for which they can earn an associate degree. Many graduates progress directly into engineering roles; others continue into advanced courses or universities and earn a full bachelor's degree.
While not employment based in the UK sense, KOSEN demonstrates another key principle: professional identity and practical competence are formed early, not postponed until after graduation. KOSEN’s disproportionate success - producing around 10% of Japan’s engineering graduates - reinforces the idea that deep integration between education and applied work is compatible with high academic standards.
What the Dyson Institute shares with global exemplars
When seen in this international context, the Dyson Institute’s model looks less like a national anomaly and more like a convergent solution shaped by firm level agency rather than state architecture.
Across successful systems, several shared principles emerge:
1. Employment is not a placement; it is the learning environment
Whether in Switzerland, Singapore or the Dyson Institute, high quality outcomes depend on learners being embedded in productive work, with real responsibility.
2. Curriculum is co owned
Employers do not merely host learners; they shape curricula, learning outcomes and assessments alongside academic staff.
3. Credentials retain public legitimacy
Degrees and qualifications are nationally recognised, regulated and portable - essential for learner trust and social equity.
4. Progression matters as much as entry
Permeability into further study, professional roles and leadership positions sustains participation over time.
These are precisely the design logics that underpin the Dyson Institute’s degree apprenticeship and employer sponsored MEng models. However, relevance does not mean replication - global relevance does not mean exporting the Dyson Institute as a template. As international research on policy borrowing repeatedly shows, copying systems rarely works. What are portable are principles:
• Work as the site of knowledge production
• Credit for contribution, not simulation
• Shared accountability for outcomes
• Measurement of impact beyond graduate employment proxies
In some countries, this will sit within apprenticeship legislation. In others, it will emerge through work-study degrees, polytechnic pathways, or employer university hybrids.
The deeper question: who owns skills formation?
Ultimately, the global relevance of the Dyson Institute lies in the question it answers. Across countries, the unresolved question is no longer whether universities should engage with work, but how much responsibility employers should take for developing the people they depend on.
Where employers systematically co produce education (as they do in Switzerland, Singapore and at the Dyson Institute) skills pipelines become more resilient, more inclusive and more adaptive. Where universities are left to interpret future skill needs, mismatch persists. Whilst this does not denigrate the essential value of higher education, it has (unfortunately) become a material issue in the transaction that UK HE has become.
A closing reflection
As I conclude my time leading the Dyson Institute, I am struck less by the novelty of what we have built than by its familiarity. Work‑embedded degrees are not an experiment but a rediscovery. For the UK, social and economic value will not be secured by ever more elaborate simulations of practice, but by placing learning where value is created – the question is whether we are willing to design this with sufficient ambition, and whether employers will ramp up their investment in developing the skilled graduates they complain are lacking.
The Dyson Institute is globally relevant not because it can be replicated wholesale, but because it demonstrates – in a modern regulatory context – that when work makes the degree, the degree makes the work better. As productivity becomes the ultimate engine for sustainable growth, the symbiotic relationship between learning and doing is one we can no longer ignore.
