In my 17 years with QS Quacquarelli Symonds, my team and I were lucky enough to have ‘carte blanche’ for creating new products that would serve you in your excitingly developing scene that is global higher education. Since going solo and launching AppliedHE - shedding the shackles of corporate culture in so doing - we again have a blank sheet of paper on which to sketch new and up-to-the-minute ideas which will help you achieve your goals.

We thought hard about what we can best do to differentiate AppliedHE from our competitors. We didn’t have to look far to realize that almost all millennials jump into their social media whenever they have a free moment, whenever they need knowledge or advice, or want to share or to inform.  

There are many successful social media out there - Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter to name but a few - all good for general worldwide networking but not serving specific sectors. So we decided to launch the world’s first social media platform dedicated to the world’s higher education sector - AppliedHE FUTURE

We will be the first to connect all stakeholders in the higher education community: students, faculty, researchers, alumni, administrators, marketers, recruiters. The first to oil the wheels of collaboration within academia - research and teaching excellence, mentorship, scholarship, employability, internship and much more - all the vital ingredients that fuel the mystical, magical world of higher education.  

Academia will not be alone in our quest. We want to be the first to forge closer collaboration and communication between learning institutions, government and business for the issues that affect them all, issues like lifelong learning, enterprise, graduate employability, innovation. We all know that these issues are neglected, that we work in silos, that humanity - more than ever in the current pandemic - needs inter-disciplinary talent and resource to join forces for social integration, health, security and evenly distributed prosperity.

But making connections and building relationships requires one other important aspect that we feel is very important: TRUST. There are so many fake news out there and we don’t want our audience to even feel that they are getting fake news. Which is why our institutions and users can be verified so that a casual user knows they are interacting with a real institution, student, faculty member or alumnus.

Right now we have managed to create the first edition of AppliedHE FUTURE, but we look forward to developing it in the months and years to come with new features that help you, our audience, work, connect, collaborate, learn… and everything in between!