City of Westminster College students studying Level 3 OCR Diploma in Business visited leading coffee maker Lavazza’s UK headquarters in Uxbridge recently to improve their Italian language skills and participate in focus group and project work.
The visit included an interactive workshop in the art of coffee making – all conducted in Italian. After this, the students participated in a focus group session in English with Lavazza’s UK Sales and Marketing Director David Rogers.
This focus group session asked the students to explore ways in which real roasted coffee could be presented in order to make it more relevant to a young UK audience. Following on from the focus group session, the students were asked to develop ideas for marketing and advertising to a younger audience and then submit these to Lavazza.
Lavazza UK Sales and Marketing Director David Rogers says: “City of Westminster College students tackled the tasks set for them extremely enthusiastically. Their feedback on the day and with the subsequent project has given us real insights into younger consumers.
“Everyone at Lavazza found this to be a very useful exercise and it was particularly good to see the students engage with the challenges set for them and grow in confidence during the course of the day.”
The Lavazza UK visit was organised as part of the College’s involvement with the LinkedUp Award Scheme. LinkedUp - which is sponsored by Association for Language Learning, University of Leicester and Links Into Languages - encourages projects that build language skills. City of Westminster College has devised a programme that enables OCR Diploma students to develop their business skills within the context of using other languages.
OCR Level 3 National Diploma is a two-year course that incorporates areas such as customer service, communications, finance, marketing and law. It also includes a European language. Successful completion of the programme qualifies students to study at degree level.