Employability Conference

Within the Business and Management degree, PASS (Professional and Academic Skills for Success) is a completely new core Level 4 accredited module, and it is believed through the whole university. The concept grew from various factors including NSS scores, feedback from students, the high number of academic offences within the business school and post covid student wellbeing. The module is delivered across TB1 and TB2. Personal Tutoring is core to the module as well as delivering the right student experience as students join the University of Portsmouth. 

The module begins from day one by introducing Employability and the Hallmarks of being a University of Portsmouth graduate. The module is designed to be a good grounding for what every student needs to know to be a successful student and gain skills through their whole degree. The module is designed to take into account Home as well as international students and to give equal opportunity to both. The module is also a demonstration of working across the university and various stakeholders have been involved from the beginning in designing and will be part of the delivery team. 

This includes the Careers, Placement and Voluntary services, also the faculty librarian as well as the faculty study skills support team.

In 2022/23, we launched Planning Your Professional Journey as a core Level 4 module on the LLB Law with Legal Practice degree. This was one of our responses to student, alumni and employer feedback that students need employability support and information much earlier in their course if they are to engage seriously in the placement and graduate recruitment process. This new module represented a significant step-change in our approach to employability in the Law School and was a key pillar in our strategy to embed and scaffold career management learning from Day 1 of the course. The module was developed with close support from our Faculty Careers Advisor, and with input from alumni and employers. The design of the module was also supported by brilliant colleagues in AcDev via an EnAble workshop. From that workshop, we developed our mission for the module which is “to empower aspiring lawyers to make confident and informed career choices as they develop their professional identity, underpinned by an innovative and applied curriculum that is developed and delivered in collaboration with law firms and alumni.”

Key elements of the module include:

• information interviews with early career alumni in the legal profession;

• regular ‘employer insight’ lectures;

• assessments with clear ‘real world’ relevance;

• practical and personalised support to develop commercial awareness for interviews;

• focus on developing essential skills for early career lawyers, alongside career management support;

• opportunity to compete for a place in the national client interviewing competition;

• in-class support to get ahead with applications for first year insight days;

• early access to placement advice and support; and

• visits to our student-led legal advice clinic to see the ‘law in practice’ and meet our final year student-advisors.

This case study will present an overview of the key features of the module and its assessment strategy; key themes from the student feedback; our learnings from the first year of delivery; and our development plans. Given the increasing shift towards embedding employability from Level 4, these learnings will have wider relevance to colleagues teaching on both degrees with clear links to practice/professions, and those where graduate career paths might be less clear.

Key elements of this talk include:

• How employability becomes a signpost at L4 via modules that deal with broad issues

• Alumni are invited to talk with existing students to share good practice

• Assessments that encourage engagement with industry at a high level 

• Assessments encourage consistent reflection on personal development skills 

• Standardised approach to consistent CV and covering letter generation 

• This support and required study convey how much staff care about student employability, and it create a network of support

• L4 focus leads to awareness of placements, and ScreenSkills insist that students should face curriculum that prevents the side-stepping of real world work

• Student confidence is exponentially increased by academic encouragement to engage with employers and artefacts are a true testament of their gains, whilst overcoming fears