What’s all the Pluzz about?

It’s not just all about knowledge 

‘My experience is that BUas students are strong at presenting. This is such an important skill, as is the broad perspective you need to be able to make connections. The plus of BUas students is also in their approach - they are enterprising and they go exploring. Taking control themselves, that’s a real added value in a dynamic business.

I mainly see the cross-domain approach of BUas as a plus. Because that’s how it works in practice. I studied Facility Management, and now work in logistics with real estate, infrastructure, innovation, IT and data in my portfolio. I studied together with hotel students in one building. We did financial management for a restaurant, learned about good hospitality; cross-pollinations like those were already there. And that’s a good thing, because that’s what the market demands, that you are able to operate in a position where everything comes together and that you can explain things. I hammered at these skills during the accreditation process for the Applied Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programme. There are plenty of techies out there, but you have to be able to translate things into ‘ordinary people’s language’ in order to make decision-making at executive level possible.

Being able to make that translation to other contexts is crucial. This is where the new programme of BUas must be distinctive. In my opinion, that’s where the plus has to be. It’s not just all about knowledge; learning to communicate is important too. And I like to help with that, in whatever form. I can’t wait to take on the first graduates!’

Rick Pardoel from the Netherlands, Chief Strategy & Information Officer at DPD Netherlands