The Mission Employable Working Group

In my last post I promised to fill you in on what’s happening with the Mission Employable Working Group. The aim of the Working Group is to bring together all the feedback and development ideas for the initiatives that the intern team, the Faculty, and Career Destinations are in the process of building. Student engagement is the focus of the group: we want to encourage Humanities students to be partners in the development of both the curricular and extra-curricular activities of the Mission Employable initiatives. These opportunities will allow current students not only to showcase their talents, but also to provide students with valuable transferable skills.

The logistics of the Group, particularly regarding the involvement of SUSU representatives, are still in discussion with both the SUSU Vice President for Education, Sophia D’Angelico, and the team. However, the Working Group will hopefully include the following members:

• Humanities academic societies Peer Mentoring/Employability representatives;
• Humanities Academic Presidents;
• First-Year Humanities Course Representatives (to contribute remotely through feedback to their corresponding Academic President in advance of each meeting);
• SUSU Humanities Faculty Officer;
• Dr Eleanor Quince, Director of Employability, Faculty of Humanities (Chair);
• Representative from Career Destinations;
• Charlotte Medland (me!), Research Assistant to Dr Eleanor Quince.

What exactly do we want to gain from the Working Group? Well, ideally we would like to:

• encourage student engagement in the new Employability initiatives;
• work in partnership with Humanities students to raise their awareness to the availability of Employability development opportunities throughout the University to rest of the student body, and thus identify existing gaps in provision and create new activities to fill them;
• monitor student feedback on the Employability initiatives, and amend future developments accordingly;
• review the success of the initiatives and create a plan for continuing success and/or improvement during the 2015-16 academic year.

Our hope is to work in partnership with Humanities students to develop new and engaging employability-related activities for all levels of study.  We have already had an overwhelmingly positive response from the Humanities academic societies and SUSU, and I am confident that students will embrace this opportunity to have an active role in the development of employability activities that will be beneficial to their peers.

If you have any feedback on this or any of my previous posts, please do not hesitate to contact me via Twitter or email at C.J.Medland@soton.ac.uk. Keep checking the blog for my next post, when I’ll tell you how my plans are coming along for a ‘reflective tool’ to raise students’ awareness of their employability skills!

Charlotte