Employability Conference

Historically the Dental Academy has maintained a strong employability metric, but a recent breakdown of NSS feedback highlighted that students felt they wanted more focus on employability and graduate opportunities, and we realised that embedding employability throughout our curriculum needed an extra boost to highlight the employability and bring it to the forefront of our student’s minds. Thus, our departmental Careers Day and Preparing for Employment sessions were developed. 

The objective of the Careers and  Preparation for Employment Days was to provide dental nurse, dental hygiene and dental therapy undergraduate students with valuable insights into different new and innovative career paths within dentistry, foster networking opportunities with professionals, and offer practical guidance to navigate the job market successfully. Introducing employability within dental care professional training is important to enhance dental care professionals' overall competence and readiness to enter the workforce. It incorporates practical skills, professional development, and job-seeking skills alongside the core clinical training.

Outcomes:

The Careers Day yielded several positive outcomes, including: Enhanced Career Awareness: Students gained a comprehensive understanding of various career paths within dentistry, allowing them to make informed decisions about their future endeavours.

Networking Opportunities:

Interaction with experienced professionals expanded students' professional networks, leading to potential mentorship and collaboration opportunities. Engaging with these stakeholders also allows undergraduate programs to stay current and relevant, ensuring that dental care professionals are equipped with the skills employers demand.

Motivation and Inspiration:

Keynote speeches and discussions inspired students to embrace challenges, pursue excellence, and maintain a lifelong commitment to professional growth.

Conclusion:

The Careers Day was an invaluable event that offered a multitude of benefits to participants. This event catalyses undergraduate students' success and growth as they embark on their professional journeys by providing opportunities for career exploration, skill development, networking, and job placement.

Current trends in engineering have been recording major changes in the mode of operation that require close alignment with academia to ensure the suitability and successful outcome of graduate student employment. In an ever changing environment traditional “hard” aspects of engineering knowledge are essential but do not, by themselves, ensure a graduate candidate’s suitability for a particular post. Increasingly, the industry is observing a “divergence” between academic teaching and industrial practice in terms of the necessary “soft” engineering skills.

This paper identified and quantified the difference of opinion between students and industry professionals and illustrated the differences in what each perceive as important and difficult leading to a better understanding of the changes in terms of curriculum delivery and expectation management to avoid integration issues of graduate engineers in the industry.

The changes and demands in the healthcare landscape has accelerated the evolving roles of pharmacists. The recent change to the standards for initial training of pharmacists by the regulator General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) included ‘Leadership’ learning outcomes. The use of the national recruitment ORIEL platform for Foundation Training Year was introduced in 2021. Students must apply in their third year and one of the tests they must take is a Situational Judgement Test (SJT) which sets out to test our students on certain professional attributes, some which are also mentioned in the ‘Top 10 skills of 2025 by World Economic Forum’. The newly accredited MPharm course also has more placements than before. By teaching leadership skills to all year groups, it will help prepare students better for their placements, the ORIEL recruitment, and their future roles as pharmacists to improve patient care and outcomes in the new healthcare landscape.