Occupational pages

Back in April, I blogged about starting to overhaul the occupational pages on the Career Development site.

They’re still unpublished because I decided not to roll one out at a time but to wait until they are all done, to avoid any confusion.

However, the relevant people in the Career Development Team have now seen the pages and think they are much improved so I can now share them with you!

As I blogged in April, previously the pages were a list of useful contacts for that particular industry. However, they were very long and although useful, not very interesting. Our worry was that you would need to be very, very dedicated to finding what you wanted, to even persist with the list. Here’s what they looked like:

For more information about why we wanted to change them and our thinking behind it, see ‘Not such a quick job.’

So this is a screenshot of the new layout:

So instead of just a list, the pages are now much more interesting, engaging and interactive! Rather than big long lists of useful contacts, I am just mentioning a few key organisations that may be useful for research, and then linking to Prospects where students can find a wealth of further information about that sector if they want.

Given these pages are meant to be a starting point, we wanted to give students an idea of what the industry was really like. To do this we link to information about what our own Alumni are doing (which links in nicely to a continued Alumni project that our Employer Liaison Team are working on.) I have also embedded a few iCould videos, which are case studies of people doing related jobs. These are really nice, take a look.

Given the focus on East Midlands graduate retention, I also thought it might be a good idea to mention a few local employers. The logos link to their careers or recruitment website. This might be something that we could look at being an incentive for local employers to work more closely with us.

Should a student then be interested enough to volunteer in that field, we also link to our volunteering pages, where students can see what kind of related projects are available.

Finally, we have an RSS feed that lists all the related JOBSonline jobs that are currently being advertised. This bit is definitely courtesy of Matt. Read his blog about these RSS feeds here.

So there you have it! I am really confident that these pages will be much more user friendly and the feedback we have had from other colleagues in Student Development is definitely positive. Now Matt and I have come up with the template, I just need to do all 21 industries. I can copy the HTML for each one, so that I don’t have to re do the tables etc, but for each page, I have to change the links to the correct Alumni profiles, change the key organisations and employer logos, embed new iCould videos and change the feed for the related JOBSonline RSS. Which is a pain. Because every time you do anything on the page, it knocks out the iframe for this. So I have learnt to do this last! Otherwise I end up doing it five times.

They’re probably taking about an hour each, which isn’t that much. But I’m probably only doing one a day at the minute, mainly because I have other things to do, but also because it’s become quite tedious!

I’m aiming to get them done and live before the end of July (my own little deadline) but given the time of year, it’s probably not the end of the world if it’s later than that, as long as it’s before the new academic year starts.

What do you think of them? An improvement? Do you have occupational pages? What do they look like? Always interested to hear points of view 🙂