Even after rising in London to the top of his profession, Damion Taylor pined to return to the Northern English roots still evident in his distinctive accent.

Which is how the former head of finance at the British Post Office and active co-founder of a startup in the hot field of renewable energy came to be teaching finance, banking and financial management to undergraduates at his hometown alma mater, Sheffield Hallam University.

“All of that stuff I plug back into my teaching,” said Taylor, pointing to a lecture theater normally crowded with students who come to hear the stories he tells from his career. “It’s about giving examples they can relate to.”

Sheffield Hallam wants to be known as the world’s leading “applied university,” a mantra splashed on the construction fences outside its new state-of-the-art business school building going up in the city center and scheduled to open next year.

Among other things, the university focuses on having students learn from people like Taylor, who work or worked in the fields they teach. It even has a catchy word to describe these practical academics: “pracademics.”

“It’s what we’re about at this university: practical application,” said Taylor, who had just received a thank-you from a freshly minted graduate he’d helped to get a job — “another byproduct of me staying plugged into industry,” he said.

“This is what we do here. This is how we work. We make it real.”

American universities have pracademics, too, of course. They’re among the more than 710,000 part-time and non-tenure track faculty who now make up 61 percent of all faculty, according to the American Association of University Professors. Other adjectives for them include “adjunct,” “casual,” “contingent,” “external” and “occasional.”

U.S. universities have tended not to boast about the people in their classrooms who also work outside of them, whatever they’re called. Many barely acknowledge them at all. But as consumers increasingly call for educations that lead more directly to jobs, the pracademic trend in other countries suggest that this could change, with the word itself a symbol of newfound respect.

Read the full article about pracademics by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.