Mission Employable- Creation of a Brand!
A quote from Scott Goodson of Forbes magazine: ‘Brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility and experience.’
In the context of the work Amber and I are doing alongside Eleanor Quince and the University’s Career Destinations, the HUMA1036 Humanities Employability Module without doubt serves as our ‘product’. However, following the research that we conducted and having established the nationwide trend towards placing greater emphasis on employability in higher education, we felt the need to expand upon the creation of a product and try to establish something wider that truly fitted this trend.
We wanted to design a brand into which to incorporate the module, which can serve as a credible and clear symbol of a well-supported and established Faculty-wide employability movement. Such a brand would aim to provide students and prospective students with a uniform, coherent, and powerful message concerning the importance of becoming more employable at University. The brand will also serve as a clearly visible image that adds structure and unity to the employability activity across the Faculty of Humanities.
The tagline I eventually proposed was:
Mission Employable: Knowing, growing and showing the skills for career success.
I suggested this as the core aim of our module is to, initially, raise student awareness of the skills they possess and allow them to set objectives for improvement- knowing skills.
Then, we wish to provide them with the knowledge, motivation and relevant resources to independently develop both personally and professionally throughout their degree- growing skills.
And finally, once students have both realised the importance of and further developed the wide array of transferable skills that we at the University of Southampton are able to develop, we wish to teach students how to articulate these skills effectively to employers and successfully build relationships conducive to long-term career success- showing the skills for career success.
In fact, last week we published an introductory newsletter to the Humanities staff mailing list, which contained the brand itself and outlined the main aims of our project alongside our progress so far. Since its release we have received some incredibly positive feedback on our project and we are now definitely even more optimistic of how the module will continue to develop alongside this wider brand!
As Amber mentioned, having met with Fiona Harvey and learned about the importance of digital presence and the incredible selection of resources and websites available online, we are looking forward to further growing our burgeoning brand through these various media outlets and developing our digital image. Charlotte is already doing a fantastic job running our team Twitter feed @HumsEmployable and we see this as the first step in an exciting journey to establishing a strong online presence!
In my next post I will discuss our exciting progress with the module itself. We have recently started working far more closely with Career Destinations and have begun sketching out designs for the structure of the Blackboard module and its specific content! I will also talk about my intriguing, ongoing role in the creation of an External Advisory Board of specially selected employers that will hopefully work closely with the module itself, as well as the students and staff of the Faculty as a whole.
I will now end this post, as I opened it, with the words of Scott Goodson, who states: ‘I believe that building brands now requires a cultural movement strategy. Once you have a cultural movement, you can do anything in a fragmenting media environment, maximising the power of social media and technology’.
‘Mission Employable’ is our employability movement, the technology is at our disposal and the potential is there for us to have a great, long-lasting impact through this project and what it may ultimately yield!