The University provides many opportunities for career development both within and beyond degree programmes.
As a Personal Academic Tutor you can remind students about these opportunities and encourage them to make contact with the Careers Team wherever appropriate. The main Careers web pages have information on some key services, including:
- 1 to 1 Careers Appointments
- The ‘Careers Connect’ vacancy database
- Active Student Volunteering
- Mentoring programmes
- Beepurple entrepreneurship support
The Careers Team say “We’ll help you to get as much as you can out of your time here, so that you can go on to find – or to create – work that excites and rewards you.”
Your tutorial discussions will also play a role in helping students to reflect on their own strengths and areas for improvement, and to begin to think about what they want to do after they complete their degrees. In job applications, what often marks out one candidate from another is not just their skills and knowledge, but the ability to articulate these clearly and link them to the needs of a particular role.
The Careers team have produced a Career Skills Workbook which is a great resource to get students thinking and writing about their skills.
Try to find time within your tutorials to help your students to explore their plans, to think about what they are learning from any extracurricular activities and how else they might build up the evidence to achieve their aims. If your course includes explicit elements on professional practice or personal development planning then this will probably be built in, but even the more generic planning and reflection tools in the Resources to Use with Students section of this site will help them to start taking a more proactive role in their professional development.
You could also remind them to explore the various mentoring opportunities available. Beth Thomas-Hancock, Social Mobility and Mentoring Manager in the Careers and Employability Team has shared this PowerPoint introduction. Mentoring Info 2023-02-03 15_10_42
