Using relationships to bring employability skills to first years
Katie B. , Anna Glaze-Krayer and Christian J. will be presenting at AGCAS Annual Conference on how the 英国诺丁汉大学 are embedding employability skills for first-year students. In this blog, they preview their session, share practical tips and highlight the importance of leveraging relationships with academic staff.
Curriculum transformations are prime opportunities for careers and employability professionals to influence the skills and attributes students are learning and graduating with in the future. But there are challenges in getting there which will be familiar to many of us.
Responses to a survey by Adobe and WonkHE in 2023 from academics and professional services staff suggested that employability skills should be both embedded within the curriculum and sit outside in the wider student experience. And even though there was cynicism about embedding in curriculum, there was a feeling that programme or module leaders should be the ones to take responsibility for embedding careers skills over staff within professional services.
This presents an interesting landscape for careers and employability services and staff. Our academic colleagues may well recognise the value we can add to their curriculum but may be reluctant to share precious core hours to help students learn and reflect on the development of the skills we can teach them.
Spoiler alert: this blog post, and our conference session, are not going to provide quick hacks to making friends and influencing programme leads. We’ve got three different approaches to getting employability skills in front of first-year students in some of the schools that sit in our faculty. Our results have come from years of patience and persistence, and we think they’re worth sharing with anyone who’d like to be involved in curriculum transformation conversations.
How deep is your (purely professional) love?
We map our working relationships with staff in our faculty on a continuum between those that are purely transactional to ones that are more transformational, strategic and equitable. Not all relationships have to be deep and meaningful. There can be benefit in an ad hoc transaction.
Where do your relationships sit on this continuum? Where do you want them to be? How helpful or influential is your friendly academic in the wider context of getting employability skills to students? Is there someone else you could be talking to?
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Testing, testing…
Now employability skills are included in sessions for first-year students, we needed some way of seeing if what we’d been talking about had stuck. A variety of assessment methods have been used including a pass/fail assignment structured on the STAR framework and a reflective portfolio where students score themselves over time against a range of subject and transferable skills.
Look to the near future
By the end of their degree course, we want students to have the career readiness and confidence to achieve their future success, but in first year they are just getting to grips with being a university student. Coming in with questions about life after graduation is likely to scare them off and shut them down to what you’re trying to embed.
Reframing the skills they’re developing as a ticket to being a better student resonates more strongly. Showing them job descriptions can work, but focusing on where these transferable skills link into their tasks for next term is more effective. This is where knowing your programme or module lead is really important, and even if your sessions are “bolted on” after a core module, it feels embedded.
Curriculum transformations and embedding employability skills don’t happen overnight, it’s a long process. But good relationships with key staff, persistence and taking time to understand first-year students’ short-term priorities does pay off. Our first-year students might not have immediately understood why the careers service was contributing to certain sessions, but their reflective logs show a greater awareness and application of their transferable skills in other areas of their course.
Find details of this session in the conference programme and book your place by Friday 24 May: https://www.agcas.org.uk/training-and-conferences/agcas-annual-conference-2024-/16060?OccId=23021