A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

108 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
CV is fine, I hire people, I don’t want to waste time on this’. Academics and careers service
staff will appreciate that such comments are potentially short-sighted, but if the module
is compulsory these students may be disruptive. Where the module is an elective or option
some students who really need career support potentially miss out.
It may be helpful to consider what is unlikely to work with students. One-off events
can be great fun and get good feedback on the day, but they fade quickly in people’s
memories, as will anything where students are not required to follow up with a piece of
personal research, reflection and writing. Placing information about employment in the
curriculum in the final year can be unhelpful, as by this stage it is too late to find a
placement or internship, many application deadlines have passed, and examinations and
assessments are distracting.
Assessment for modules or units with a career and employability focus must be at least
as demanding and comparable with parallel discipline assessments. Creating a
curriculum vitae and letter of application in response to a specific advertisement is a
standard assessment, but a relatively mechanical activity, with support and advice
available at universities and online. Arguably, it deserves a relatively small proportion
of summative marks.
Employability assessments should give participants opportunities to practise the skills
recognised as having employability dimensions. Group work, researching using the web
and written sources, developing interview and assessment templates, researching career
areas in general and particular organisations in detail to compare and contrast workplace
cultures and processes are all appropriate. The style of assessment can develop posters,
web pages, scenario development or research reports, ideally produced in groups. There
is merit in mirroring assessment centre activities where there is pressure to produce group
solutions quickly with instant poster and PowerPoint presentations. These activities
prepare students for assessment centres and show them that they can work quickly to
meet deadlines.
WORK PLACEMENTS
Work placements and experience appear in many university strategies with different
emphases reflecting the nature of the institution. The relevance of work placements in
non-vocational degrees is always a source of debate (Nixon et al., 2006). Pressure to include
such experiences comes in part from government initiatives. Universities UK (2007)
recommendation 17 is ‘Work experience, either as part of a programme of study, or as an
external extracurricular activity, should be recognised in some way and formally
accredited where possible’. The National Council for Work Experience is a major source
of expertise in this area. This enlarges on the useful point that most students have
paid employment in term-time and vacations; many have undertaken voluntary work at
home and increasingly abroad during gap experiences. There is plenty of material for
these students to reflect upon and trawl for examples of employability skills and
attributes.