As the Vice President (Activities) at Kent Union I have launched my first campaign, Futureproof. The campaign revolves around the idea that you need much more than just a degree these days to get a job and emphasises the need of softer skills like communication, teamwork and leadership etc. Futureproof tries to encourage students to get involved in activities and student groups as these groups can offer you chances to build these skills – and co-curricular activity is something that employers and graduate recruiters want to see more as they move towards competency and strength based style interviews.
Above and beyond this, Futureproof attempts to embody all opportunities that offer skill creation and the logging of them all in one package. This includes the involvement in student groups, buddy scheme, volunteering, getting a job through jobshop etc, and then the logging of any volunteering hours and skills via the toolkit. We are also looking at how we can directly impact the employability of students by offering different opportunities.
We launched the campaign during Freshers’ Fair and spoke to some groups about it and got them to think about the skills that their groups can offer.
The scheme is being supported by both the Employability Points team and the Careers and Employability Service.