A REAL CLIENT, AND AN INDUSTRY NOBODY HAD HEARD OF

B&H Worldwide has collaborated with Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Business to give Communications and Media Management students hands-on experience of working with a genuine industry client. Over twelve weeks, Year 2 students were required to research aerospace logistics, identify a story angle, interview subject matter experts, and produce and publish a ten minute podcast documentary. The brief was developed jointly by B&H Worldwide’s global marketing team and Temasek Polytechnic lecturers, and formed a graded group assignment rather than an optional extra.

The company provided students with access to subject matter experts across its global operations, allowing them to put questions directly to people doing the work. Students explored cross-border logistics, supply chain disruption, risk management, the people behind global logistics, and the balance between speed and safety. They were also required to consider their target audience and develop a promotion strategy for the finished documentaries.

A SECTOR THAT IS INVISIBLE WHEN IT WORKS

Underneath the warmth of the exercise sits a real problem, and it is worth naming. Aerospace logistics is a business whose success is defined by absence: a part arrives, an aircraft is not grounded, and nothing happens that anybody notices. Aircraft on ground work in particular is measured by the disruption it prevents rather than by anything visible it produces. That makes the sector genuinely difficult to explain and, more importantly for its employers, genuinely difficult to recruit into, because school leavers cannot aspire to a career they have never heard of.

Wei Koon Goh, Group Head of Marketing at B&H Worldwide, framed it in similar terms. The collaboration, he said, gave students a genuine business-to-business challenge in an industry many of them had never encountered. Aerospace logistics can be complex, he said, but the students showed that with curiosity, research and creativity they could turn specialist knowledge into stories people want to hear. He described opening the organisation to students and allowing them to learn directly from the people doing the work as particularly rewarding.

The choice of audio is well judged for the same reason. A podcast requires the student to explain the subject to a listener with no prior knowledge, without diagrams, jargon or a slide to hide behind. It is a demanding format for technical material and a good test of whether the researcher has actually understood what they were told.

THE AWARDS, AND WHAT WAS IN FACT LEARNED

The project concluded with the B&H Worldwide and CMM Audio Production Podcast Awards, at which students, lecturers and company representatives gathered. The finale featured a showcase of the leading productions, a fireside conversation on creativity, storytelling and the future of audio content, and awards for the top three.

Li Yann Long, Course Chair for Communications and Media Management at Temasek Polytechnic School of Business, identified the value in the process rather than the outcome. Students had to step into a sector unfamiliar to most of them, she said, ask better questions, understand complex subject matter and then turn what they learned into a story worth listening to. Working with a real industry partner, she noted, gave them an experience difficult to replicate in the classroom. The awards were a celebration, she said, but the real achievement was watching students stretch themselves, develop new skills and produce work they could take into their portfolios and careers.

For B&H Worldwide, which appointed Matt Silverberg as Chief Executive earlier this week, the collaboration sits alongside a wider industry concern about workforce renewal. Research published this month by IFS identified project knowledge management as one of the three leading applications for AI in aerospace and defence, driven substantially by the retirement of experienced staff and the loss of undocumented expertise that goes with them. Bringing students into contact with the people currently holding that knowledge is a different answer to the same problem.