A primary goal of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) is to produce an exceptionally skilled workforce for the province’s industries. Recognizing the important role international education plays in achieving that goal, the school turned to Ascribe to help develop a global engagement strategy that would serve as a roadmap to guide its internationalization efforts.

How Ascribe helped

In late 2022, NAIT engaged Ascribe to develop its first-ever global engagement strategy: a document outlining the school’s vision and approach to international education, as well as the actions and initiatives planned for 2023–2027 that will help foster a diverse talent pool of industry-ready graduates.

Following a kick-off meeting with NAIT’s director of global education and partnerships, we reviewed numerous background documents prepared by NAIT staff describing the three proposed pillars for the strategy: bringing more international students to campus, fostering intercultural competencies among students and staff, and creating opportunities for partnerships with like-minded institutions around the world. We also reviewed the feedback that emerged from stakeholder consultation sessions held with the broader NAIT community to validate the strategy’s principles and pillars.

With this information, we developed a content outline and structural approach for the strategic plan. We then crafted questionnaires and conducted a series of interviews with NAIT directors involved in areas such as enrolment/recruitment and continuing education, helping us fill in any content gaps related to the plan’s commitments and action items. From there we wrote the 20-page strategic plan in full, which described why internationalization is a priority for NAIT and Alberta, followed by a deep dive on the three strategic pillars, the main objectives associated with each and the actions required to achieve them.

The NAIT 2023–2027 global engagement strategy was published in March 2023 and was very well received by our direct client, who called it “a document the school is proud to call its own.”

Deliverable: Strategic Plan

Our process:

• Background material review
• Detailed content outline
• Questionnaire development
• Content-gathering interviews with executives and subject-matter experts
• Writing and revisions