Thursday 25th April 2013 - Student employability and making use of alumni

When I first met my final year option class this session, back in late September, I asked them if any of them had a job or postgraduate course already lined up.  Only one of them had.  She turned out to be the one student who had secured a work placemennt for herself the previous year and was now on the degree 'with employment experience'.  

There is a steady stream of news stories from other unviersities about the proportion of their programmes that incude a work placement, or the proportion of their students who gain such experience (the two are not the same thing).  Earlier this week I had lunch with the Vice-President of a major industrial company who said that a high proportion of their graduate positions go to those who have already undertaken work placements with them. 

Today we saw the results of the annual Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey.  I am delighted that Sheffield is in third place (although a little disappointed that we are not top, of course).  We follow East Anglia and Oxford in the overall rankings.  We are top for the Students Union and also in the top five on a wide variety of indicators - including the quality of our teaching, the support services, and the library, to name just a few.  But one measure where we fall short is in students' perceptions of our connections with 'industry', which I take to mean the connections with employment and the wider world of potential work opportunities.  This doesn't necessarily mean work opportunities - it can also mean the connections established through those who use our graduates' skills appearing in courses and interacting with students.

Of course, there are many programmes where there is an intimate connection with employment - Medicine, for example.  But there is a wider message here for Sheffield.  We owe it to our stduents to enhance the ways in which their time studying with us is influenced by considerations relating to potential careers beyond graduation.  There are many ways we could do that, and in some departments we are already doing it well. But we could do more.

Last week I received the regular alumni magazine from the unviersity at which I studied.  There was the usual leaflet asking me to update my personal details.  But one of the key questions there was asking whether I could offer a work placement to any current student.  On another line of thought, I wonder how many departments get recent graduates back 4-5 years after graduation and ask their opinions on curriculum change and the course offer to create programmes that help students to develop the confidence and skills to be successful in employment.

I am setting up a significant project over the next few months to seek to redress that relatively low score on industry connections in the THE survey, and to increase the placement opportunities for our students.

But before anyone comments that I seem to be taking a very instrumentalist view of what higher education is about, let me say that I also want to increase the intellectual breadth of our programme offer to expand stduents' minds. Perhaps I'll blog about that sometime in the near future.

Sunday 21st April 2013 - The International Languages Festival

I don't normally write a blog on a Sunday.  But then I don't usually spend part of my Sundays attending classes in the Hicks Building.  This weekend has been the International Language Festival, organised by the Students' Union, so exceptions have been made. Over the two days around 150 1 hour taster sessions of different languages from around the world have been offered.  The organisers told me when I left for a late lnch today that by the end of the weekend they estimated that 'several hundred' people would have participated in the sessions.

Each session was 50 minutes long and organised with some common themes - where the language is spoken and by how many, something about its origins, the alphabet it uses, the sounds it has, and a 'get by' introduction to some set phrases.  After the sessions I attended I can now say (among other things) 'Good Evening' and 'Thank you' in Romanian, and 'My name is Paul' in Magyar (Hungarian).  There were 10 at the Romanian class I attended and 7 in the Magyar class - even on a Sunday morning - and these were competing against Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Farsi, Urdu, Begali, Korean, Braille and a host of others being offered at the same time.

When Sheffield's International Language Festival was launched two years ago I believe it was the only one in the country.  It is a fantastic opportunity to learn a little bit about communication in a different part of the world.  I thoroughly enjoyed my morning there today.  And the students who put on the classes about their own languages were well prepared and motivational - despite the fact that most are in Sheffield to study subjects ranging from Medicine to Engineering and in most cases they have never taught their language before.

But from my observation of the others present there was one under-represented group among those taking part - students from the UK.  There were people from the Sheffield region, international students, overseas undergraduates and postgraduates, but although there were some UK students attending they were in the minority.  (I will be delighted if later analysis on the part of the organisers shows that I was wrong.)  I think we all continue to struggle with the fact that many UK students do not seem interested in reaping the benefits of being in an international university, and of widening their cultural competence to face new situations in other countries or with people who are not like themselves. 

Wednesday 17th April 2013 - How to get you job application rejected

I am involved in a considerable number of appointment committees for a wide variety of jobs.  This afternoon, with others, I have been shortlisting candidates for a new appointment.  As so often in the current economic climate, the advertisement attracted a much larger number of applicants than one would ideally like.  People sometimes say to me that they are delighted with the huge number of applicants for jobs they have advertised. Ideally I would prefer about four applicants for any post I am involved with - but with each of them outstandingly able to do the job.

The truth is that for any advertised post it seems to me that a significant proportion of applications can be almost instantly discarded. Two things really stand out.  Firstly it is amazing how many applicants do not proof-read what they have written - or perhaps if they have proof read it then they are leaving an indication that they can't spell and / or don't know the rules of grammar. I am not saying that those attributes are universally important - there are many jobs where that will not be the case - but for the jobs I am involved in the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in writing is usually crucial.

But the second fault with many applications is perhaps more severe - a failure to acknowledge the job specification in constructing an application letter.  If 10 aspects of the job requirements are identified then a good candidate will show how s/he fits each of those ten.  The poor candidate instead produces an unstructured account of themselves with no reference to the post in question.  The poorest candidate will include clear markers that the letter they are submitting is a scissors-and-paste exercise from a previous unsuccessful application - for example (as in one case today) indicating a task they will be performing in the future, except the date given was over a year ago.

As regular readers of my blog will know, an exercise I get my students to do is to mark each other's essay drafts against the set marking criteria.  They all say they learn a lot from doing so.  Some say it's the first time they've really considered the criteria and how they can be used to help structure their work.

Several of the applicants we considered today could, I am sure, benefit greatly from being issued with two or three applications from other candidates and being asked to score them against the job specification for the post.  That way they might recognise how to rewrite their own applications so that they provide a more convincing argument for shortlisting.