Paul Redmond (Liverpool University Head of Careers)
‘Academic study gets your foot in the door employability skills pushes it open wider’ Charles Macleod Price Water House
- Employability BC (Before the Crunch)
- Employability AD (After the Downturn)
Assessment tests = weapons of mass rejection
Crunchanomics
The graduate jobs Formula E = Q + WE + S x C
Employability = Qualifications + Work Experience + Skills x Contacts
Sarah Cockburn (Barclays recruiter)
Questions which make graduates think about their University experience
- Can you explain your final year project/dissertation?
- Tell me how you spend your week
- What was it about your degree that makes you employable?
5 skills / attributes
- Focus and drive
- Commercial awareness
- Emotional Intelligence
- Innovation
- Integrity
Yesterday Charlotte Jones, Helen Thomas and I went to Birmingham to attend the first meeting for the CRA supported PDP project. As a result of the meeting we have changed the title and summary of our project. Here’s the revised version:
Using e-portfolios as a catalyst for change: how does the e-portfolio change students’ views of their academic and employability development at university?
University of Kent is currently implementing a new employability strategy which includes provision for a new e-portfolio (based on Mahara) to support students’ PDP. This project will record and evaluate developments in the student experience (curricular and extracurricular) as a result of these two initiatives. The project will use the e-portfolio as a mechanism to gather and disseminate new PDP practice. It is hoped that this will ensure shared practice between all PDP and employability ‘providers’ throughout the University and therefore enhanced PDP and employability opportunities for students. The outcomes of this project will be a series of student testimonials describing how use of the e-portfolio has changed their experience at university and a collection of case studies describing a variety of practice using the e-portfolio for employability and PDP. There will also be a paper written evaluating the e-portfolio’s effectiveness in initiating new PDP and employability opportunities.
If you would like to find out more please email ljf@kent.ac.uk
Outduction: SEDA workshop 06/09/11
This one day workshop led by the Universities of Kingston and Bradford focused on the concept of outduction i.e. how universities can help students with the transition out.
1. Example from Swinbourne Australia
Swinbourne is a new University which has a good record on employability of its students. It started a new initiative 5 years ago to maintain its lead in employability. The project is across the university it develops real world projects with businesses which get groups of final year students working interdisciplinary groups to solve issues for business. Examples include business strategy projects, car design projects and PR marketing projects. The feedback from students and employers has been very positive the main thing that students requested to support this work was dedicated space. They have made a group work hub in the basement car park. The most useful space is group booths with computer plus large screen. http://www.research.swinburne.edu.au/industry-investors/
2. PDP in the final year: The autonomous learner
This session established some of the characteristics of an autonomous learner and then posed the question when should students exhibit these characteristics? Bradford has developed a list of autonomous learner characteristics and is trying to ensure that students are introduced to the concept before the final year so that they can reflect on their development in these areas and prepare themselves for autonomous learning and then professional development in their next step.
3. Faculty-based online support for employability: Art, Design and Architecture
This session showcased an initiative at Kingston University in the faculty of Art, Design and Architecture which has created an employability website for its students which includes interviews with recent graduates about how they secured graduate employment, students can upload their own profiles and there’s information on jobs available. http://www.kingstonfutures.com/index.php/page/news This is a great resource for students and now that Kent has MyFolio it would be a very good way to extend its use and usefulness.
In general it was an interesting workshop the main ‘take home’ for me was that we should not forget to focus PDP and portfolio use in the final year and that the e-portfolio could be a really useful tool alongside a final year project or dissertation to make the students process more transparent to them and for use in their next step.
The concept of lifewide learning encompasses all of the experiences that a student has whilst at University including, paid and voluntary work, home life, sports and other activities as well as their academic endeavours. This symposium show-cased some interesting work on the themes of:
Lifewide learning, co-created curriculum, strengths-based approach to learning
John Cowan: keynote. He termed the e-portfolio an electronic shoebox because in its simplest form it is a place for students to store a record of their achievements. He emphasised the value of unintended learning outcomes and of students directing their own learning emphasising the role of the tutor as facilitator and resource. He described an interesting employability module which could be done using an e-portfolio.
Employability module 15 credits
- All students enrolled on this course must be in some form of employment (e.g. stacking shelves at Tesco)
- Students blog about 1 Critical Incident per week and reflect on what they can learn from this (not assessed, formative feedback)
- From these CIs they choose their 3 best and write about why they value them (25%)
- Conceive a plan for enhancement of a work activity write it up as a SMART action plan (25%)
- Gain employers approval for the enhancement and put it into practice
- Write a short report (50%)
Phil Gravestock: University of Gloucester described a different approach to recognising students’ employability achievements. UoG is running this scheme as part of the HEAR pilot. It is non-credit bearing but it will be verifiable by the University.
Employable Gloucestershire Graduate Scheme (EGGS) The name of the scheme is a source of amusement but it is also easily memorable and the students like it. http://resources.glos.ac.uk/tli/eggs/index.cfm
One of the purposes of the EGGS is to support students to recognise, and be able to discuss, achievement resulting from activities such as (for example):
- volunteering;
- Students’ Union activities (including society membership);
- being a Course Representative or a Student Ambassador;
- part-time work;
- unpaid research work with a member of staff;
- acting as a scribe for a student with dyslexia;
- organising events.
Claims for verification should be submitted using a Personal Statement of Achievement (see below).
The achievement(s) should be mapped onto the following grid:
Example of student-led development
University of Exeter are getting students to write their own academic development guides for example a group of Bioscience students have written their own guide to essay writing.
This is a conference all about PDP. The sessions that I attended were all interesting but there are a few things I want to highlight here. Firstly a new PDP resource developed by Dr Alison James at the London School of Arts called PPD http://www.arts.ac.uk/ppd/ it’s a really good resource for students to use when they are thinking through any aspect of PDP. It’s very interactive and visual.
The other presentation that was really useful was by Liz Warr from the University of Essex. She has been working on a project called the ‘Big E’ http://www.essex.ac.uk/bigE/ This is a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging students to develop their employability skills. The emphasis is on celebrating the existing opportunities and successes of students doing volunteering, work placements, mentoring, etc. It also provides students with support so that they can make sense of their experiences at University.
Another initiative that UCLan showcased at the SEDA conference was cross curricular projects aimed at giving students opportunities to work on projects that contribute to their studies as well as to their employability profile. These included a project by students in the department of English/Media Studies and Photography with local schools linked to schools in developing countries to write letters to each other and to publish them in a book with photos. This was a highly successful project where students gained academic credit and employability skills. http://www.uclan.ac.uk/information/uclan/employability/index.php
Employability UCLan model
There were two sessions at the conference which are of relevance to the Employability agenda. The first session was led by Janet Lange from UCLan http://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/16_Lange.pdf The University of Central Lancashire has been piloting two employability initiatives the first is to identify existing employability skills in the curriculum. This has been done by classifying 14 separate employability skills:
• Personal Development
• Work Experience
• Subject Skills
• Research Skills
• Team Working
• Career Development
• Reflection
• Project Planning and Evaluation
• Innovation
• Communication Skills
• Problem Solving
• Business Skills
• Sector Skills
• Social and Cultural Awareness
These have been described at various levels of achievement (from fail to distinction) and colour-coded and are now being used by academic departments to help make employability skills more transparent to students. This might be a useful way forward at Kent, taking the recently written skills and attribute from the Kent Employability Strategy which identifies 10 employability skills
• Communication
• Report writing
• Team Working
• Planning and Organisation
• Project Management
• Leadership
• Enterprise
• Problem Solving
• Reflection
Once these skills are described at each level students and staff will have a much clearer idea of how they are working towards developing employability skills. These skills can also be written into the new Kent MyFolio (e-portfolio tool) https://myfolio.kent.ac.uk/myfolio/ giving students a space to record, reflect upon and showcase their employability skills. This also is aimed at making the employability skills that students gain whist at Kent more visible both to the student and to prospective employers.
The main purpose of this event was to bring teams together to talk about evaluating their projects. The first activity was to share updated rich pictures of where the teams are up to so far. This was a useful exercise as we focused on 3 main achievements. Ours are the CAMEL event that we held in Medway in the Spring. The conference presentation that Kate and Sam did at the CRA international PDP conference and the establishment of this blog. We also looked at key challenges, for us it was making time for the project and co-ordinating meetings across two campuses. Time seemed to be a major issue for all the other teams too.
The next session Emotional Intellegence and project work was led by Alan Mortiboys. He helped us to understand the feelings involved in working as a team and in encountering resistance to our projects. His main message was to aknowledge feelings in order to use them to help you understand others.
Steve Outram led the session on evaluating the projects. The HEA has provided a template to help us structure the evaluation. I have a paper copy of this I am hoping that Steve can send it electronically so that we can all contribute to filling it in.
Over all it was a useful event. I think it was designed to spur us into action to evaluate the projects so prehaps the next step is to try to do that as a team then think about writing it up.
I thought yesterday went well too. The Video taxi was great quite a few people have asked for a link to this so here it is http://i-vox.co.uk/cabcam/ I thought the last session of the day which encouraged us to think about the future for HE in ten years time was interesting. Hopefully we can organise another similar day at Canterbury to continue that conversation.
I’m just reflecting on our event today and it was interesting to see the different groups of people interacting and chatting with each other about the four project elements: employability, eportfolios, learning journals and threshold concepts. It was pretty clear from having to drag people away from the employability table that it was quite a hot topic and there is definitely more to be explored on that front. It was good to have two employers with us today. I spoke to Paul from the voluntary sector in the Prison Service before and he said he was worried that he wouldn’t have much to contribute to the discussion. He needn’t have worried as he had plenty to say.
It was nice to see people who don’t normally think in a PDP-way starting to engage and think about what was going on.
The taxi seemed to be a big hit with participants and students who were handing in essays and it was nice to have a chat with the two Learning Technologists who had joined us for the day about how we might be able to do something similar on a more fixed basis.
Steve Outram’s plenary session was quite a thought-provoking one and so many people expressed how impressed with what a great speaker he was. It was a shame that he couldn’t speak about the HE policy context because of the election and government-forming still wrangling on but he did give us something to reflect upon.
There was lots to think about and it was nice to be able to have that space to do it in. I think we’ve just started the discussion and now need to work out how to take it forward with all those who came today.
