Business Information Systems is a hybrid discipline that blends knowledge of business and technology and equips students with the skills and knowledge required to develop, manage and use information technology systems and solutions in a variety of business environments.

Motivation for this project comes from recent surveys with BIS students and discussions with secondary school career teachers, which revealed that students often lack awareness of the programme, who they can be and what they can achieve after graduation. We believe a low female: male (24:76) intake ratio is also linked to professional identity, female students may not see themselves as working in IT, despite evidence that female students on average outperform male students in the programme.

Research by Dr Syliva Dempsey reveals that students begin to develop their sense of professional identity when they work placements in year 3, we hope that interventions can accelerate this. To achieve this objective, the project will follow a design thinking methodology and build on professional identity research, extant literature, and a series of discovery workshop sessions with stakeholders.

The proposed framework of intervention will focus five professional identity attributes, namely; Actions and Behaviour, Knowledge and Skills, Values, Beliefs, and Ethics, Context and Socialization, and Group and Personal Identity (Anita Fitzgerald, Professional Identity in Graduating Nursing Students, Journal of Nursing Education, 2021)

Interventions are likely to include: Strategies for EDI, internationalisation, marketing, co-curricular and extra-curricular experiences, and work placement. Engagement strategies for secondary schools, graduates, industry-based coaching, and employers.

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• Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)