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They’re still unpublished because I decided not to roll one out at a time but to wait until they are all done, to avoid any confusion.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

Not such a quick job

Why are things never as easy or quick as you think they will be? A few months ago, I took on ‘responsibility’ for updating the occupational pages on the career development pages. These are meant to be a starting point for exploring career options.

This came about because my colleague Vicky changed roles slightly and it was agreed that I was probably the most suitable person to pick it up.

So initially, all I’ve been able to do is check the links are working and remove any that aren’t. Links are shared via EMJIG (East Midlands Joint Information Group meetings (I have my first meeting at Loughborough University on Monday).

These occupational pages have been (and still are!) a great resource, don’t get me wrong, but I feel that we might be ready for a change. At the minute, I think they are far too long and I worry that students might be put off by the sheer amount of information on there. Have a look at the existing information for Administration.

Administration alone is split up into five sub sections. I’m just not convinced that’s necessary when you bear in mind that these resources are meant to be used for the first steps in career planning.

So, I thought I’d have a look at giving them a makeover. Matt and I met about it and started brainstorming what we could do. (Sorry, should that be ‘thought shower’ now!!) It was then I realised that to really make a difference with how these are used, it wasn’t going to be a quick job.

Matt and I talked about re-defining the sectors. The way we have it split up does have it’s downfalls. We have an industry sector for ‘Scientific Services.’ Would most students know what that includes? Another example is having different categories for ‘Finance’ and ‘Insurance and Pensions.’ It would seem more logical, to me, to have an industry sector for anything related to banking and/or finance.

However, every system of classification I have seen has its downfalls. Prospects for example have ‘Hospitality, tourism and sport’ and a separate ‘Public Sector.’

Surely there must be roles which could be considered to fall into more than one sector? The way I decided that we need to look at it is ‘where would a student look first?’ So, for example, working as a gym instructor in a council owned gym, could be described as ‘Public sector,’ but the point is that most students would probably look under ‘hospitality, tourism and sport’ first of all.

As we were talking about this and how we could cut down on the number of resources under each sector, Martin Pennington, (#martinwhoisnotontwitter) our Executive Administrator, who has previously worked in career development, said something along the lines of ‘Tell me to butt out, but why are you re-inventing the wheel? Graduate Prospects already has this information, all clearly defined, with industry information and further resources.’ We went silent for a minute and then said ‘yes, yes they do.’

Then we sat and stared at the screen for a bit.

So, what we’ve decided is that we don’t just want to link to Prospects and do nothing else. I don’t feel that would be any real improvement. What we’re currently thinking is to have a page for each sector (as defined by Prospects) and link to them for information on industry insights etc, but also make the page much more interactive and push traffic back to the Student Development pages. So we’re thinking about including links to the Alumni case studies for that particular sector. We can also link to relevant volunteering opportunities. We’re even thinking about having an RSS feed of relevant jobs posted on JOBSonline.

So we’ve done a mock up which looks really good (sorry I can’t share it yet!) and we’re going to spend next Friday morning working on this.

These pages could become much more interactive, engaging and interesting. Which has got to be better than a list, no matter how comprehensive the list might be.