Your Employability Journey

Each person will have their own employability journey - as students in the School of English, you will gain a wide variety of transferable skills during your degree, and these skill will be just one aspect of your employability. 

The word 'employability' can sometimes make you think of a mysterious set of skills and experiences that you must have to get a job. This adds a lot of pressure on you to know what these skills and experiences are and know how to get them. 

This site is looking to change this idea of 'employability'. What if I told you that you are already employable? That you have 'employability' already? And I say this, not because I know who you are, but because you are a student in the School of English, with your own skills, interests, passions, values, priorities, and experiences - you have a lot to offer. 

Employability is not something you have to gain, but something you already have. It is a concept that you are at the centre of - who you are, what you want, what you need are all key aspects of your employability. The graphic below shows this:

Using this thinking, that you are at the centre of your employability, you can now start to think about your own personal development to help your professional development. The aim of this site is not to give you a career to pursue, but to help you figure out what kind of work/role/career/industry will work for you. Each person will be different but that is okay, an English degree doesn't train us all for the same job, it gives you the chance to figure out what you are good at and transfer these skills to a huge range of jobs - all you have to do, is figure out which job will suit you best! 

A starting point for everyone, no matter what stage of your degree experience you are at, is thinking about what your perception of your degree experience might be. How do you imagine the pressures changing/developing throughout your degree?  Does it feel like the pressures you face are always building? The graphic below explores why this happens and how you can change this thinking to make these pressures feel more manageable:

By changing this perception of the pressures you are facing, you can begin to break down your degree experience into different stages.  These stages can help you focus on specific topics to prevent the pressures of your whole degree from becoming overwhelming. This site helps support you through these stages and gives you the tools and resources to feel confident with each topic.  

You can see each Year as being a different stage of your journey; however, you do not have to split this journey into Year stages if you are already part-way through your degree. You always start your employability journey at whichever Year you are in, and then review previous Year stages to fill in any gaps you need. A graphic of this journey can be seen below:

Use the navigation bar on the left to find information, tools, and resources to support you wherever you are in your degree experience and your employability journey. You can always look backwards and forwards through the years/stages to find the support you will benefit from the most right now.