Introducing the External Advisory Board

The External Advisory Board will serve as one of the key initiatives we intend to establish alongside our module in order to improve the Employability of our students here in the Faculty of Humanities. The formation of this board, alongside the development of our Humanities Employability Module, will be one of my main priorities over the next 3 weeks of our project.

The board will be formed of employers who will act as external partners who offer advice and guidance to the Faculty on: our current offer to students; our image among employers; the standing of our graduates among employers; our place in the community; how we might improve our industrial relations and anything else we may wish to consult them on.

Ultimately, we want this board to help us build effective, ongoing relationships with external partners that can benefit the Faculty in terms of funding and, perhaps most importantly, the creation of placement and employment opportunities for our students.

Initially, we plan to invite a group of 20-30 employers to a ‘launch event’ during which we will look to meet this broader pool of potential partners and select around five to be invited to form our core board. The other invitees not in this core group would continue to serve a more peripheral advisory role while the core members would attend an annual meeting and be more directly involved in on-campus events, presentations, workshops etc. as well as hopefully being able to work with the module coordinator to provide employability-related opportunities for our students.

With this plan established, I am now faced with the challenging task of creating the relevant documentation to send to our desired invitees as well as actually deciding on and compiling a list of who we wish to invite!

To begin with, I will need to create a Terms of Reference, outlining the proposed scheme, its purposes, benefits and desired functions. In addition I will need to create a role descriptor focusing more specifically on the responsibilities of board members which includes all the relevant details. Alongside these documents, I will be composing an invitation letter as well as a handbook, outlining Humanities and our current employability activity in order to give invitees the wider context of who we are and what we do. This should prove an interesting task as the letter will need to be more formal and strictly informative while the handbook will need to contain promotional elements- a significant shift of tone that may be difficult to execute!

Overall, as highlighted, much remains to be done and things are getting incredibly busy here for Mission Employable as we approach ‘crunch time’ in our project, preparing our various initiatives and products for review and finalisation in 2 to 3 weeks’ time.

In my next post I will include more updates on my general progress in all areas of this multi-faceted, challenging and hopefully rewardingly fruitful project. Until next time!