Graduate Futures

Studying at LCF gives you access to the focused careers and enterprise services, events and resources from the Graduate Futures team. Whatever your career, freelancer or business start-up ambitions, Graduate Futures works to provide current students and alumni with advice direct from industry thought leaders.

We provide a safe place to encourage you to be comfortable with risk, ambiguity and experimentation. Graduate Futures supports the whole of your LCF journey and beyond, to enable you to innovate, create and achieve.

Our support

Our services are tailored to prepare students to join the creative and cultural industries, showcasing the relationship between:

• careers knowledge;
• entrepreneurial skills;
• personal and professional development.

We offer a progressive model: learn through online resources, develop in real-time sessions and practice with industry.

We support your independent learning through:

• Creating an extensive range of industry-focused podcasts, online modules, learning guides and videos.

We enable your development through:

• Running specialist one-to-one coaching support.
• Providing a programme of practical and interactive skills building events, webinars and workshops to build your confidence.
• Access to our support when finding exciting industry placement opportunities as part of an accredited course.

We encourage practicing your new skills through:

• Collaborating with our network of other universities and organisations during topical networking debates, hackathons and panel talks.
• Enter live industry-led projects and competitions.

Our support is free and accessible to all LCF students and graduates. Most of our opportunities are open to all, but some might be limited to specific groups - we'll make it clear when this is the case.

LCF Enterprise Challenge

Once a year, we run the LCF Enterprise Challenge where you can pitch an innovative idea that can make a real difference to a community or consumer. Winning teams receive awards and support to take the idea to the next level. The annual LCF Enterprise Challenge, awards £10,000 total prize money, support and mentoring to LCF student entrepreneurs with a great business idea, and winners have included, in recent years, Chamiah Dewey and Sages

Industry Collaborations

Graduate Futures cultivates and co-creates industry opportunities for both students and alumni through its partnerships and collaborations. We also work with industry

specialists and practitioners on our dedicated support and events. We work extensively with our students to provide placement and work experience opportunities to 100% of our undergraduate courses, and a big number of our postgraduate ones too.

Our network of industry specialists provides you with invaluable industry insights as well as careers and enterprise support. We have a large portfolio of global clients that support you through:

• Placement opportunities
• Graduate jobs
• Competitions

Our Graduate Futures alumni community

Alumni Ambassadors Scheme

This is your chance to 'give back' and support the next generation of talented creatives setting out on their journey. Alumni Ambassadors receive a range of benefits and exclusive access to showcasing, events and activities designed especially for our LCF Alumni community. By joining you will have opportunities to share your insights through paid work as a guest speaker, grow your skills and knowledge and build your connectivity with other LCF alum, UAL staff, students and industry guests.

LCF Founders Club

The Founders Club members are LCF alumni business owners who are trading as Freelancers or run registered businesses in the UK and internationally. Membership provides access to range of resources and networking events to exchange ideas and look at best practices in the business development space. Since its inception in 2016 where 17 start-ups were in operation, the LCF Founders club has grown and now has over 380 active member businesses with 47% having a Limited or registered business status in the UK.