» Southampton Opportunity Project Away Day Mission Employable

As Charlotte has mentioned in her previous post, the Mission Employable team are contributing to the Southampton Opportunity Project.

All the interns who are involved in the project meet up fortnightly to discuss what they have achieved so far and the problems they have encountered. There are interns from across different faculties and campuses, including the National Oceanography Centre and the Winchester School of Art. Therefore the fortnightly meetings are great for catching up, comparing experiences, and giving advice.

At one of these meetings it was suggested that it would be great if we could have an away day in order to develop our project-management and employability skills. What better place to host the away day than Winchester School of Art, a beautiful campus which many students had yet to visit.

The day started off with a Skills Audit where we learnt about how our own personal skills fit into various comfort zones of competency. Many of us often choose to remain in the zone which allows us to use the skills we feel most competent in. However, the act of stepping outside of our comfort zone and strengthening our weaker skills is often a time when the most effective progress is made. Reflecting on the internship so far I can safely say that I have been stepping out of my comfort zone and can feel my weaker skills strengthening as a result!

We also had a talk from our digital literacy expert Fiona Harvey about various concepts such as our safety and security. Fiona alerted us to the importance of vetting the information we upload about ourselves on the Internet and of constantly updating our passwords. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking things she showed us was a video about what people can access on Facebook accounts. But don’t take my word for it, try it for yourself: www.takethislollipop.com/

In addition, she taught us about how to develop an effective online profile, as almost everyone is on the Internet, whether we like it or not. Nevertheless, everyone should be encouraged to take advantage of their power to manage their online presence. This linked closely with how to get the best out of sites such as LinkedIn.comwhich is effectively an online public CV, where you can form business connections. If you have a moment, check out the Mission Employable teams’ Linkedin pages:

An away day would not be complete without some team building activities which happened across the day. One of the highlights of the games was learning three facts about all the other interns and then recalling them, which thus improved our communication skills. Another game was trying to create the tallest structure to support a mobile phone using marshmallows, spaghetti, two elastic bands, an envelope and two pieces of string. This required a lot of team work and negotiation of ideas, but was definitely good fun!

Bradley, Georgia and Sarah presenting their mobile phone support

We also had an inspiring talk from an enterprising University of Southampton alumnus, Steve Bedford. He enrolled as an undergraduate student at the University 40 years ago, and since then he has had many careers and worked in a wide variety of businesses. Now he is turning his attention to the Hartley Circle, an initiative created for the alumni to get involved with current students. Steve also answered many of our career-related questions over lunch about what steps we should take after graduating.

There was also an opportunity to look over some of the examples of the opportunities we had already compiled, and we were able to discuss informally the opportunities and offer advice on how best to present them.

Fiona Harvey finished the day with a presentation showing us great tools for active learning such as Twitter and Storify and for delivering presentations like Prezi, and Haikudeck. We are already on board with a Mission Employable twitter account – so please follow us at: https://twitter.com/HumsEmployable

We finished the day taking in the beautiful sights of Winchester while having a refreshing drink at one of the local pubs, which gave us a chance to reflect on all that we had learnt!

That’s all for now!

See you next time,

Verity

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