LONDON — Prince Harry set the challenge and Northeastern University helped provide the answer.
In May, the Duke of Sussex announced that The Diana Award, an international recognition set up in memory of the prince’s late mother, was launching “Pledge to Invest,” amounting to a call for major corporations to invest in the leaders of the future.
“Far too many young people are locked out of leadership pipelines because we’ve failed to build truly inclusive and accessible pathways,” the prince told Knowledge 2025, a conference in Las Vegas arranged by ServiceNow, an American software firm providing back-end platforms and artificial intelligence agents to industries.
Those words helped set into motion a collaboration between The Diana Award, ServiceNow and Northeastern University, with the school’s London campus providing a digital accelerator pilot program for young people and “changemakers” who had been referred by the royally endorsed award. The pilot was fully funded and aimed at supporting social mobility, with Northeastern assistant professor Josephine Harmon and Hibdigital — a training provider — leading the class.
On Friday, eight students graduated after a five-week intensive course in which they were taught the technical skills to use ServiceNow’s systems — which are deployed in-house by the likes of Uber, Visa and Kraft-Heinz — before tackling an industry challenge, working with a client with more than 17,000 employees.
08/29/25 – LONDON, UK – First students graduate from the digital skills program on Northeastern’s London campus in partnership with The Diana Award and ServiceNow on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
08/29/25 – LONDON, UK – First students graduate from the digital skills program on Northeastern’s London campus in partnership with The Diana Award and ServiceNow on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
An intimate graduation was held at Northeastern’s Devon House for those who completed the intensive course. Photos by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
Jenn Zeng was one of those selected by The Diana Award to take part. The course was part of ServiceNow’s Rise Up program, which is aiming to upskill 3 million people on its platform within the next three years in order to plug what the company says is a skills gap.
Zeng, a 20-year-old from Hungary who is studying for an undergraduate degree in social sciences, said the course had helped future-proof her career prospects.
“As young people today, we need to re-skill for the future,” she said. “Given the rise of AI, the job market could be very different in the next five years. So I think that is why I feel like having some digital training and digital skills would be really helpful. I really wanted to try something new but also, at the same time, develop more skills.”
Northeastern asked Pulsar, a ServiceNow partner that is based at the school’s London startup hub, to set a challenge for the students to undertake during the accelerator course.
Pulsar in turn brought on board Arup, a British engineering consultancy that has been involved in projects including the Sydney Opera House and the MBTA’s Green Line extension in Boston. Arup tasked the students with building a portal whereby new starters in the business could request a laptop and have it delivered to their place of work.
Zeng said it was useful to learn how to create a back-end system that could automate a process to save the workforce time and energy. “We definitely learned a lot throughout five weeks,” she said.
“And actually being able to solve a real-world problem and understand the importance of automation in businesses, that has been super meaningful and super helpful, especially if I want to start my own business and also work in startups in the future.”
08/29/25 – LONDON, UK – First students graduate from the digital skills program on Northeastern’s London campus in partnership with The Diana Award and ServiceNow on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
08/29/25 – LONDON, UK – First students graduate from the digital skills program on Northeastern’s London campus in partnership with The Diana Award and ServiceNow on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
08/29/25 – LONDON, UK – First students graduate from the digital skills program on Northeastern’s London campus in partnership with The Diana Award and ServiceNow on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
Representatives from The Diana Award and ServiceNow addressed the graduates after they had presented on their project work. Photo by Carmen Valino for Northeastern University
Steve Leachman, the service management platform lead at Arup, said he intends to take the students’ work to his supervisors in the business to explore the possibility of using it as a template for building new in-house platforms.
“I can go to my boss and my boss’s boss and I can say, ‘This is what we can do,’” explained Leachman. He said the fact that the students effectively put the laptop request system together in two weeks will help to show that his team could potentially deliver upgrades to the current system while in between other priority projects.
The graduates had not used ServiceNow before but Brett Moir, founder and managing director of Pulsar, said that, after the five-week program, he would be willing to make job offers.
“We definitely saw some very strong individuals,” said Moir. “There’s probably three [of the graduates] who for me right now could walk into the business for us quite easily. And then we’ll see how we can keep fostering these kinds of relationships and how we can help people go from strength to strength.”
During an intimate graduation ceremony at Northeastern’s Devon House, Camilla Elwood, director of programs and partnerships at The Diana Award, said the success of the pilot was “really clear” to see.
“I think it’s quite clear that the confidence, the networks, the sense of belonging — it has been so much more than just the skills that we’ve discussed today,” she said. “We know at The Diana Award that for many young people this access is life-changing. It’s the difference between potential staying hidden and potential being realized.”
Damien Davis, senior director of customer success at ServiceNow, said the students were able to do “real-world, real live-use cases of building out technology workflows that are actually driving innovation. It has been really quite exciting.”
Following the accelerator program in London, there is hope among the partners that the concept could be expanded to Northeastern’s U.S. campuses. Davis added: “This pilot is definitely something that can scale globally.”
The opportunity to put together a fast-track accelerator with international partners and charitable organizations helped Northeastern to keep its teaching offering at the “cutting edge,” said Naomi Goulder, London’s dean for academic development and innovation.
“For us, running these very innovative pilot instances with a select and promising group enables us to hone, drive and develop what we do to meet the needs of current employers and the needs of the new generation of students who are very AI, digital savvy,” said Goulder.
“It enables us to get really up-to-date and to remain cutting edge.”
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