IN her regular column in the Hereford Times, Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, president and CEO of NMITE, talks about the impact coronavirus is having on Hereford's new university.

As we have settled into another week we can see the huge impact Covid-19 is having on everyone's lives.

The higher education world is feeling this too. In the past couple of weeks, universities have had to move to online learning, professional bodies are looking at how to accredit degrees without final assessments and the whole sector watches closely as we anticipate the impact of the student number cap announced last week.

Here at NMITE, all of our team has been remote working from home for three weeks and continuing to progress our plans and I am really proud of how our team has adapted at speed to this new way of working.

In some ways, we are fortunate that we are writing our blueprint for this now rather than having to change existing structures or templates.

Our entire team continue their focus on building a robust, challenging and innovative programme. However, it is not yet clear what the potential medium to long-term impact will be on higher education and future learners, and it is challenging to understand how everything will look later this year and beyond.

We are, of course, in touch with many different partners and parties both here in Hereford and in government listening and sharing our thoughts on how this situation might affect NMITE and its key stakeholders.

We will continue to consider the implications as the coronavirus situation develops and scenario plan accordingly.

A key part of our mission is to provide an employer-led academic model and our team here is actively working on how best we might be able to support our local and national employer partners and their staff through, for example, new continuing professional development (CPD) courses that address how the future might look for them post-coronavirus in terms of their future skills needs.

Many of our immediate plans for activity locally has, of course, had to be put on hold, but we will adjust and have elements up and running as soon as we are able.

In the meantime, we are committed to giving back to a community that has been so generous to this project and to that end, we are providing free business advice to businesses in the county and beyond, while our engineers explore our capabilities to produce visors for people in the front line.