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They’re still unpublished because I decided not to roll one out at a time but to wait until they are all done, to avoid any confusion.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

Graduate Success Programme

Last year, the Career Development Team here in Student Development launched the ‘Graduate Success Programme’ (GSP). It’s billed as an intensive support package for students graduating in 2011 and provides tailored help through the last few months of University, into the crucial few months after graduation.

Last year, the focus was Graduate Success Week; “a week of employer led career development workshops focusing on success in career planning, applications, interviews and assessment centres.” We had 15 sessions, 10 of which were with employers such as Deloitte, Logica and Asda.

We are still having this week of workshops (16th – 20th May) because they were well received last year and students like to see employers on campus. We are cutting down slightly, to 8 employer sessions and 3 sessions hosted by the Career Development Team themselves. Having slightly fewer sessions to chose from might increase student attendance at each session. We are not running any sessions on the Friday this year as, historically, these are always the ones that don’t do very well with student attendance.

The Employer Liaison Team have done a fantastic job (again!) of getting some really great names on board including Accenture, FDM Group and Teach First. They always do really well in ensuring a nice range of sector representation at events like this so there’s something for everyone.

One tip I would say for any student reading this is don’t be too influenced by the employer hosting the session. Obviously, a session with Teach First about assessment centres is a must if you’re going to apply to the Teach First scheme, but after sitting in a lot of sessions last year, I’d say nearly all of them will provide you with useful tips, hints and opinions regardless of the sector you wish to go into. So even if teaching isn’t you for, I guarantee you’ll still learn something useful about assessment centres.

As part of the Graduate Success Programme there is also a Job Hunting Guide and Top Ten Tips for Job Hunting (courtesy of Matt Mobbs) all of which we had last year. If you click on the image you can view the Flickr slideshow.

In addition to these events, we’ve got a Leicestershire Speed Networking Event (LSNE). This is a networking event that takes the format of speed dating. There will be 10 graduate employers in attendance and students will be rotated around 5 employers with a 6th rotation where they can pick any remaining employers to network with. I was really impressed with this idea from our Employer Liaison Team. This event is on Monday 16th May. There are two separate networking sessions, one for finalist and one for all other students.

To make sure we get the numbers we need on the day, we have decided to use a deposit system. It’ll be £10 per student to guarantee your spot and you’ll get the £10 back if you attend. We’ve handled deposit systems before ourselves, simply by asking the students to come and give us the cash and returning it to them on the day of the event. Given the numbers we’re dealing with for the LSNE , all of a sudden this didn’t feel manageable.

So after some quick meetings that Jon Parry, our brilliant Employer Liaison assistant arranged, we’ve got the lovely people from http://shop.le.ac.uk/ to handle our deposits online. Students will now need to pay their £10 via the online shop and will get it refunded after they attend the event. Not only is this much more secure than us handling the cash, it makes life much easier. Plus personally, I think it’s much more professional. Well done to Jon for taking this up!

Last year we had a Careers fair in the Summer, the BET (Business, Engineering & Technology Fair.) This year, the Summer Careers Fair will form part of the Graduate Success Week and is on Tuesday 17th May. The Employer Liaison Team have, after much careful consideration, decided to go with a ‘general’ fair (i.e not subject specific) because it will appeal to a wider audience.

Last year, I was actually part of the Career Development Team. (I noticed earlier I am still on their pages as staff. Must rectify that!) I did various bits and pieces for the GSP, including hosting employer led sessions, general admin tasks like room bookings, some publicity and the web side of things. I was a newbie to web development and Plone so the web side of things was very basic. I was happy with my efforts at the time,  thinking back, I was probably very proud! But this year, my ISPP role (Information Systems, Publications & Publicity Team) means I do a lot more web development, mainly project work like Stand Out Week.

So, Matt Mobbs and I got together to start thinking about the website for GSP. I learnt a lot about planning from our work on Stand Out Week (I had to do things more than once because I didn’t plan properly) and this really came in handy for GSP.

The main ‘issue’ with the web for the Graduate Success Programme is that it could, if not planned and thought out, be very confusing. We’ve got a main event of Graduate Success Programme, a ‘Week’ within this, a networking event, a fair, a job hunting guide and offers of further support.

This is what we’ve come up with http://www.le.ac.uk/graduatesuccess

The main image theme came from the ‘rocket lolly’ image for the Summer Careers Fair that had already been decided (partly by our Facebook & Twitter audience!)

So for continuity purposes, Audio Visual Services here at the University, based their image designs around that. I have to say I was very impressed! I love the balloon image and all the colours work great together. The website is really eye catching, which can be difficult to do.

My key learning areas for this project would have to be improving my Photoshop abilities. I used Photoshop to manipulate the AVS images to form the scrolling images in the middle of the home page. Although I already use it quite a lot for image manipulation, I got to play around with layers more which was fun. And also frustrating!

The other thing I learnt was how to create the image map that forms the timetable, using Dreamweaver. Matt did one for Stand Out Week and I looked on, but this time I actually understood. I was surprised how straightforward it was.

More than anything though, I feel I am really building up a good solid knowledge of planning and logical thinking. All the ‘messy things’ as I call them, such as planning a folder structure are really becoming second nature. Sometimes I stop and wonder (in a good way!) how I got here. If you would have told me 12 months ago that I would be doing web development, using HTML, Dreamweaver e.t.c I would have laughed! It’s now something I really, really enjoy. Testament to that was when Matt said I was no longer a ‘normie’ but a geek. I was pleased as punch.

Now the website is up and running, the next thing is to push on with the publicity. I’ll be doing the usual Facebook and Twitter campaign and well as an email to our MailChimp list (See Stu’s blogs about MailChimp here) We’re currently up 4,467 subscribers so this has become a really useful tool for reaching students.

We’ll also have banners and stands out on campus nearer the time and we’ve got some postcard sized flyers to distribute, but as a department, we’re really cutting down on our printed material, so these are really a secondary measure.

If you have any ideas of publicity avenues we might not have thought of, please let me know!

So, as you can tell, this years Graduate Success Programme is bigger and better than last year. There’s so much going on and it’s great to see some emphasis on finalists and supporting them through the transition from University to work.

Update on SD student blog

As mentioned a while back, I’m keen to start a Student Development student blog. (See original post here)

The idea is that I start with one student blogging about issues like their career, exams, experience, employability etc (basically anything we deal with here in SD) with the plan to add more students as we become more established.

I’ve got a fantastic student on board and we’re days away from releasing our first post. I won’t name him until we go live!

Last time I blogged about possible ways of handling the blog. After our initial chat, we decided that we would keep this blog completely separate from the students personal blog by creating a separate SD blog, which I ‘own’ and give contributor rights to each author as needed.

I will also set up tags for each contributor so content from each author will be easy to find. My first contributor is eager to be named, he realises the importance of having a digital footprint. (If you’re interested in this more, see my notes on the  ACGAS social media course I attended.)

I explained that I want this to be a truly student blog, so I don’t want to write or interfere in content at all. I will however have to review each blog before publishing, but will endeavor to only amend things where absolutely necessary, and even then, run all changes past the author.

Matt (in his role as Learning Technologist) and I then made a decision that it will live in a portal on the SD web pages (yet to be decided at what level) and we will tag posts with content relevant to say, careers, volunteering etc so the latest blog post can become a news item within that part of the SD website.

After a few hours of playing with WordPress themes, I think I’m nearly there. I’ve chosen Coraline, the same as I’ve used here. This is only because it was pretty much the only one with a custom header and three columns, both things which I was eager to have.

We’ve got our first blog post all sorted thanks to the (currently secret) blogger and his much appreciated eagerness.

Copyright is something that has come up. I was putting off really thinking about it because I’m really not sure how to tackle it.

I can appreciate that, as the author of the posts, the student blogger is keen to own the copyright. However, as he is blogging on our behalf, it would appear the intellectual property is ours. (Thanks to Matt Mobbs for his help with this part!) I also have to consider that if the author had the copyright, they could, in theory, insist that we remove a post, which obviously we do not want.

My instinct was to see look into Creative Commons, which Matt also referenced. If we propose a joint creative commons with attribution, this would mean that the student can reproduce and adapt anything written, as long as they reference the original post. It also means we can reproduce the content through other mediums as well. However, we would keep the right to publish material as the ‘intellectual property holders’. (Thanks again to Matt here!)

So, this is all new to me really and I would appreciate your thoughts. Do you do something similar and if so how do you handle copyright? Is the idea above feasible? All input greatly received! 🙂

Oh, and you’ll be the first to know when we release our first post!

The Graduate Market in 2011

I received a magazine this week from ‘High Fliers Research.’ It’s basically an annual review of graduate vacancies at Britain’s leading employers.
It’s seriously interesting reading! I thought it might be useful to share some of the key findings.

The report is based on a study of graduate recruitment at the organisations named as The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2010. The research was conducted in December 2010 and examines the recruitment period for 2010-2011.

I’ve followed their lead and split the points up into more manageable sections. I hope you find it interesting!

VACANCIES

•    Leading employers are planning to increase their graduate recruitment by 9.4% in 2011.
•    Three fifths of employers expect to recruit more graduates in 2011.
•    The largest recruiters of graduates in 2011 will be PwC (1200 vacancies) Deloitte (1000 vacancies) KPMG (900 vacancies) Teach First (780 vacancies) and Ernst & Young (740 vacancies)

•    However a third of entry level vacancies ACROSS the board are expected to be filled by graduates that have already worked for that organisation.
•    The top 3 places to find graduate vacancies for 2011 are (in order) London, the North West and the Midlands.
•    The worst hit sector of the recession remains the chemical & pharmaceutical industries. They are now down to nearly half the graduate vacancies they had pre 2007.

PAY

•    The average starting salary for a graduate position remains unchanged from 2010, at £29,000.
•    The most generous starting salaries are with investment banks (average £42,000) law firms (average £38,000) and energy companies (average £32,000.)
•    Outside of the city, the highest starting salary is Aldi, which pays graduate trainee area managers £40,000.
•    Only 2 ‘major’ employers are paying less than £20,000.

RECRUITMENT

•    52% of graduate employers have a similar recruitment budget to that of 2010. 32% have a budget that has ‘increased a little’ or ‘increased significantly.’
•    The top 5 universities targeted by the largest number of leading employers for the 2010-11 period are, (in order), Cambridge, Warwick, Manchester, London (refers to Imperial, LSE and the University of London) and Oxford. This is the same top 5 as the year before, just in a different order. (Previously Manchester, London, Warwick, Cambridge then Oxford.)

APPLICATIONS RECEIVED

•    Half of employers said they had received more completed graduate job applications during the early part of this recruitment season than in the previous year. 17% said they had received slightly fewer or ‘many fewer’ application, but there isn’t an industry pattern here.

•    The average number of applications per job in 2010 was 45. With the increase of applications received so far this period, it is expected that this figure will rise for 2011.

WORK EXPERIENCE

•    More than three fifths of employers are offering industrial placements or vacation work during academic year of 2010-2011.
•    Just 6 employers are not offering any work experience at all.
•    Together there are over 10,000 work experience placements available to recent graduates or students; 10% more than 2010.
•    Three fifths of employers said it was:

“not very likely’ or ‘not likely at all’ that a graduate who had ‘no work experience at all – either with their organisation or at another employer – would be successful during their selection process.”

•    Across all employers, around 32% of this year’s graduate vacancies will be filled by applicants that have already worked for the employer.
•    The sectors where this number increases are: Investment Banking (52% of vacancies are filled by people with experience there), law (50%) and oil and energy companies (39%).

AND FINALLY

“Despite some encouraging figures, graduate recruitment remains below pre-recession levels. Across all sectors, recruitment in 2011 is still 6% below 2007 figures.”

And there it is. I didn’t mean to end of a downer and over all I think the figures are really encouraging! I intend to make some proper comment on these figures at some point, but I’m sure some of you will get in before me!

Oh and sorry for the crappy graphs, I didn’t have much time!

Getting beyond the ‘likes’?

When our Deputy Head of Student Development, Stuart Johnson, took on the role of ‘Acting Head of..’ I started to pick up more responsibility for our social media and general publicity.

When I picked this up, in August/September 2010, the accounts were already well formed, mainly due to Stu’s hard work. We had around 1728 ‘likes’ on Facebook and a high of 376 monthly active users. We were also followed by 598 people on Twitter.

I am happy with how we are progressing with sheer numbers; as of today, we have 743 followers on Twitter, an increase of 24%. Today we have 2120 Facebook ‘likes,’ which is an increase of 23%. Interesting to see that both have grown at pretty much exactly the same rate.

I think the really interesting figure is our Facebook monthly active users. In August 2010, the highest number was 376. The average for Jan 2011 is 1261. This is a whooping increase of 235%.

All this obviously shows we are doing something right. I wonder whether it was our decision to stop sending so many automated posts by decoupling our nifty events feed, back in October 2010. We still feed news items to Facebook and Twitter, but there are rarely more than two a day now, as opposed to up to six automated messages a day in September 2010.

Our ‘Impressions’ are better for the personally written items. On Jan 24th 2011, our average impressions on automated items was 1929 in comparison to average impressions for personally written items at 2466. Same pattern on Jan 28th; impressions on automated items = 1307, impressions on personally written items = 1842.

There could be other reasons for the increase; I am careful with the basics. I don’t post too often (maybe 2 updates a day on average?) so we don’t flood timelines. I try and keep the tone and language informal, see post below.

I also try and keep the posts relevant to what students might need/want at that time. The other key thing I try to do is respond promptly.

The main issue I’m facing however is this ‘getting beyond the likes’ thing. Stu blogged about this back in May 2010. Over the last three months or so, I have tried to make the accounts (especially Facebook) more engaging. I am posting questions rather than just statements and trying to get debate going. Ideally, I’d like to get Facebook especially, a genuine forum for question, discussion and debate, as well as a place to find out what we have going on etc.

At the minute, it’s extremely hit and miss. Some days I will pose a question and get a relatively good response…Other times I will get nothing in reply…

Then sometimes I ask something seemingly random and get inundated!

The only thing I seemed to have learned (apart from the randomness!) is to try and pose questions where people get to pass on their views, opinions or tips. These seem to work more often than not.

So, I have now started planning what I post where possible. So for big events like Stand Out Week I have a schedule of things to mention that have been considered and appropriately timed. I still intersperse these with other items that might be less ‘thought out.’ We’ll see how this goes I guess.

Any thoughts??

Student Development student blog??

I’ve been thinking for a while now that I would really like to incorporate a student blog into our website and/or other social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

I do a lot of digging around what other universities are doing with their website, appointments and social media (be warned!) and have taken inspiration from a few.

The University of Manchester have a lovely ‘blog family‘ (very cute!) but I feel that 8 blogs might be a little unmanageable! Furthermore, I’m not convinced that you necessarily need that many!

A few other universities ‘careers service’ or similar do have blogs, but as yet, I cannot find one that is written just by students. The University of Manchester have a ‘student blogger’ tag but it seems that they blog in addition to the staff and on average, about every 2-3 months. The definite focus are the staff written pieces. Although this has it uses and advantages, I personally think that if you want a piece to engage students and talk to them directly, who better to write it, than another student.

My idea is to have one student (initially) blogging about their time at university, their career, employability, gaining experience, enterprise, basically anything we do here in Student Development. This can serve as a genuine source of ideas and discussion for our students, as well as publicising the support that’s available from us.

It may well be that if this proves popular we could move to having more than one student blogging. We might, on the other hand, find that student like the input of one student that they feel they can ‘get to know.’

So I put the feelers out and approached the Student Communication Team here at UoL and had a response from a student that already blogs and feels passionate about student use of social media. I won’t name him yet; we’re meeting later today to talk about how it might work.

There’s a lot to think about. Do we create a new blog and have this as a permanent presence on our website? If so, it would would need a certain amount of moderation. (I would keep this to a bare minimum otherwise we’re starting to defeat the point.) The advantage would be there’s room to develop this and possibly add numerous other students down the line.

Alternatively, we could have the student carry on with his blog as per usual, and ask him to tag certain posts that might be of interest to students and just feed those ones through Facebook and Twitter. The main downside to this, for me, is that it only gets pushed out through those channels. Although we have around 3,000 students following and liking us, it’s not as far reaching as our website. Also this doesn’t have much scope for development.

So, I’m meeting our potential blogger this afternoon, I’ll let you know how it goes!

AGCAS Social Media Course | 26 Jan 2011

Delivered from the University of the Arts, the course was based around “supporting students to use social media.. for networking and finding opportunities.” Part of my role at the university is to provide 1-1 feedback advice to students on all aspects of the application process. I am also heavily involved in our use of social media and feel very strongly about it’s potential, not only for us a service, but for students and graduates.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to secure a place and chuffed when I found out our Learning Technologist, Matt Mobbs was coming too!

I’ll skip over the hell-ish journey to London from Leicester at rush hour. I don’t think my nerves could take re-living it anyway.

We started with a session called Digital Footprints with Judith Baines and Matt Lingard from LSE. Digital Footprints is a session they deliver to their students on the importance of having an online presence. Take a look at their presentation on Slideshare.  I was aware how useful the likes of Facebook and Twitter can be for researching employers and improving commercial awareness but I don’t think I fully understood how important it is to have an online presence, as a student or graduate, from an employers point of view.

It’s a great way of showing an employer that you’re proactive and for certain industries, such as what I’d call the ‘creative industries,’ it’s absolutely essential to show an employer that you’re out there being active. They will get to see your writing style, not to mention give them an insider view of your personality/motivations etc. The interesting thing that Matt and Judith said was that in their experience, this practise of checking out a students online presence is really starting to expand and it’s not limited solely to employers within the creative industries.

It was interesting to hear that this doesn’t necessarily mean keeping a blog or networking through Twitter or Facebook. Simply starting to comment on other blogs, articles and news items or writing a (sensible!) Amazon book review will start creating your digital footprint.

Matt and Judith talked a lot about protecting yourself and ‘Netiquette’ (I love that phrase!) but one of the main discussion points was the ‘line’ between public and private and whether it’s necessary to have separate accounts. More on this later!

I found it really interesting to see how hard Matt and Judith are working so hard to educate students on their digital footprint and think it’s important that we at the University of Leicester do the same. Matt Mobbs and our Leicester Award Co-ordinator, Zara Hooley, currently provide a session on networking and social media as part of the Leicester Award programme.

For me, the way forward is to develop this into something we deliver via other routes too, most sensibly through the careers service/team. Like we provide advice on traditional CVs and effective networking skills, I would like to see us firstly beginning to provide 1-1’s and workshops on improving your digital footprint and eventually moving to support this, by way of proving feedback on say LinkedIn profiles, blogs and online networking.

After a quick break we then went on to have a ‘lab’ on LinkedIn and Twitter with Helen Buzdugan, Careers Consultant at the University of Manchester. The first mistake I made was to declare myself as a ‘guru’ along with Matt Mobbs. I’m not big headed. Honest. But I do use social media every day without fail, so thought I was probably classed as a  ‘guru’ rather than ‘fairly competent.’

I went on to feel like a bit of a lemon when we started to explore LinkedIn and I had never used it before. In all fairness, I think I picked it up pretty quickly. Much to the relief of my stress levels.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that, as of March 2010, only 9% of University of Manchester students had a LinkedIn profile. Like the other 91%, I too had no idea of it’s potential. Furthermore, I’d looked at it briefly before the course and to be honest, just didn’t get it. And that coming from someone that uses social media everyday. Imagine looking at it as a newcomer. Not hard for me to imagine being completely baffled.

For that reason, this session was absolutely great. Helen was a really good facilitator (I would recommend going to any of her sessions) and she really clearly demonstrated exactly how powerful it can be. If you’ve not used LinkedIn before, join up and have a look at Helen’s PowerPoint presentation.

Unfortunately we did need a bit longer for people to explore Twitter properly. As a self confessed ‘guru’ alongside Matt (try that for feeling out of your depth!) we tried to help the people on our tables get to grips with it, whilst Helen tried to get round the room, answering questions. As a huge Twitter fan, it was very interesting to see how the majority of the other people there couldn’t quite see the benefits it poses for students, when compared with LinkedIn. That might have just been a time issue though.

After lunch, we went on to have a ‘panel’ session with two graduates and two employers, to find out how they are using social media. The panel was made up of an Accenture employee, Tim Mitchell of timothycreative, Claire Strickland; a graduate and bespoke Milliner and Reem Kanj, graduate and professional blogger. (See FiveFiveFabulous)

The overwhelming message from the discussion was that all panel members agreed just how important it is for students and graduates to really exploit their digital footprint.

Accenture and Tim Mitchell had similar but slightly different points of view. The Accenture representative told us that although she would be impressed by a prospective employees good online presence, showing commitment and enthusiasm, she wouldn’t Google or ‘Facebook’ any individual. Tim of timothycreative pointed out that although ‘noble,’ this definitely isn’t a general rule to go by. It was agreed that a lot of employers will indeed check out your online presence and so we were back to the question of having multiple accounts or not.

All the panel agreed that Facebook is still seen as a social area that most students do not want to use as a networking platform. However, everyone was in agreement that you need to be very careful with your privacy settings. My feeling was that the un-spoken consensus was keep the likes of Facebook as a social space that is strictly access limited and have a ‘professional’ space, such as LinkedIn.

Given my complete u-turn over LinkedIn, I was especially enthused to find all panel members thought LinkedIn was the way forward. The Accenture representative especially, saying she ‘was surprised’ by how many students do not have a profile saying it’s the ‘CV of the future.’ Anecdotally throughout the day, we were given examples of people being head hunted via LinkedIn.

The graduates points of view were really useful. They both said they wouldn’t be where they are now, if it wasn’t for new media like Twitter. I was really glad to hear such overwhelming support, given that I felt there will still a lot of skeptics in the room.

I came away feeling really positive. The panel discussion was especially useful and really confirmed a lot of my thoughts. However, it did really open my eyes to the uses of LinkedIn. At a service level, I feel we’re already doing some good work promoting the importance of digital footprints but more could be done. The nice thing is, given a bit of time and a few more people on board, it’s seems achievable.