At a recent meeting of our Careers Advisory Board one of our employer representatives related how his international firm had taken a Sheffield graduate into a temporary placement and was so satisfied with him that they offered him a permanent position on a very good starting salary: he turned it down because he wouldn't move to London where the job was to be located.

I remember a couple of years ago asking a final year tutee about his search for jobs.  He said he was prepared to spread the net quite widely - but then added "as long as it's still within an hour's drive of Darlington" (his home town).

A recent Student Union officer observed to me how many students didn't want to leave Sheffield on graduation because they had had such a great time being a student in the city.  He coined the phrase "the Sheffield bubble" and argued that the university nees to do as much as possible to prick that bubble so that students see the possibilities of going elsewhere.

I have tried to persuade students to take languages modules here to broaden their career propsects.  I remember one saying that she'd never been any good at foreign languages, anyway she didn't want to work abroad, and everyone anywhere these days speaks English anyway.  Yet when she was shortlisted for a good job (in London as it happens) she lost out to a Swede who was seen by the employer (and it was a civil service department and not an international company) as having more to offer because of her ability to work in different cultural contexts.

Finally I was talking to a recruitment manager recently who said that her firm, which used to have separate recruitment operations for the UK and for mainland Europe, is now running one integrated operation - and that UK graduates don't stand up very well in that competition because of their narrow horizons.

I have today been starting to draft some consultation papers for the university's next 5-year Learning and Teaching strategy.  I am absolutely convinced that we will be letting our students down if we don't do everything in our power to give them the ambition and the skills (including what our Careers Advisory Board calls the 'cultural agility')  to seek employment anywhere within the global labour market.  And that includes working in the UK because, as one of my earlier examples shows, even if our UK students don't want to work abroad they are competing with foreigners who do - in the UK.

But I recognise that the strongest dose of apathy towards such an agenda for the university will almost certainly come from our UK students who don't want to move out from the blanket of a familiar environment and who don't want to be challenged to think of themselves in wider international ways.  There is a paradox here: we seek to entice students to come to Sheffield because it offers what they have come to expect.  But we need to shift their expectations to new things - to widen their horizons for things they initially are reluctant to consider - and to do it because we have their long-term interests at heart. This will be an ongoing issue over the coming year as we work towards our new teaching strategy.