Industry Readiness Program
A structured industry-readiness layer, run alongside a student's existing curriculum and evaluated by practitioners.
Students complete work they cannot always explain.
A finished assignment or project does not always tell you whether a student understands what they built, can defend the decisions behind it, or could adapt it if the requirements changed. IRP is built to test that gap directly.
An industry-readiness layer, not a course.
IRP runs alongside a student's curriculum rather than replacing it. It is not a workshop, not a certificate programme, not an online course, and not a placement guarantee. It is a structured way of building and evaluating one piece of real, evolving work over four weeks.
Solve, submit, defend, adapt, get feedback.
One evolving project across four weeks.
Students work on a single project that evolves week over week, rather than four disconnected assignments.
Extract
Validate & Reconcile
Integrate
Operationalise
A 90-minute panel, every week.
Each week's panel session runs to a fixed structure, so every student gets the same shape of evaluation.
| Segment | Detail | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Context | Shared framing for the panel | 4 min |
| Individual defence | 4 students × 13 min each | 52 min |
| Live adaptation | 4 students × 5 min each | 20 min |
| Cross-comparison | Practitioner-led peer comparison | 10 min |
| Close | Shared wrap-up | 4 min |
| Total panel session | 90 min | |
72 minutes of direct evaluator interaction.
~72 minutes
Across the four weeks, each student gets approximately 72 minutes of direct, individual evaluator interaction — individual defence time plus live adaptation — of which approximately 20 minutes is live adaptation.
~40 minutes
In addition, each student gets approximately 40 minutes of practitioner-led peer comparison across the four weeks (10 minutes per week).
The remaining shared time in each session — context at the start and close at the end, roughly 32 minutes across the four weeks — is shared framing, not individual evaluation, and is not presented as a benefit. Students are also present for the panel time spent on their peers' defence and adaptation; that time has real value as observed learning, but is not quoted as a number here, and it is not evaluation time for that student. The total time a student spends attending the panel across four weeks is not the same figure as their individual evaluation time, and should not be read as such.
Students may use AI as professionals do.
IRP does not ask students to avoid AI tools. It asks them to be able to explain and adapt whatever they produced, with or without AI assistance. Live adaptation tests whether a student understands their own work well enough to change it under panel questioning. This is not a claim that the process is immune to preparation — it is a claim that the format makes surface-level preparation harder to pass off as understanding.
Five dimensions, assessed separately.
Each dimension is scored on its own. IRP does not produce a single composite readiness score.
Technical Understanding
Problem Solving
Implementation Quality
Communication
Adaptability
Baseline and post-programme assessment.
Measurement uses the institution's own assessment framework and assessors, with a baseline taken before the programme and a comparable assessment after it, plus an optional comparison group. This is a proposed pilot design, not a validated measurement approach — the pilot itself is how it gets tested.
Records the institution can act on.
- Participation and completion records
- Evaluation records for each panel session
- Student progression across the four weeks
- Pre/post comparison against the baseline assessment
- Weakness patterns surfaced across the cohort
- A cohort report at the end of the pilot
A staged pilot, not a one-off run.
IRP is deployed at an institution as a staged pilot framework.
Student selection
The department and placement cell identify a cohort of approximately 15–20 students. TEK Strata can advise on selection criteria; the decision rests with the institution.
Baseline assessment
Conducted before Week 1, using the institution’s own assessment framework and assessors wherever possible. A comparison group may be included if the institution agrees.
Four-week task cycle
One practical task released each week, forming a single sequential build, with defined deliverables and a fixed weekly deadline.
Weekly panel evaluations
90-minute panels of four students: individual defence, live adaptation challenge, and practitioner-led cross-comparison.
Continuous feedback
Structured written feedback after each task, issued before the next task begins so that it can be applied immediately.
Post-programme assessment
Repeated after Week 4 in the same format, on an equivalent but different problem.
Outcome report
A cohort-level report covering participation, completion, evaluation results, progression across the five dimensions, the baseline-to-post comparison, common weakness patterns, and student and faculty feedback.
Joint review
A review session with institutional leadership to examine the findings together and decide jointly whether and how to proceed.
Considering IRP for your institution?
Start an enquiry and we'll walk through what a pilot would look like for your cohort.