Career Planning and Decisions: Graduate Employability and Recruitment Trends

This assignment has been designed to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate your achievement of the following module learning outcomes:

1. Define and contextualise employability for graduates in relation to their own career;
2. Gather and analyse relevant career and labour market information

Overview

Prepare a report demonstrating an awareness of the knowledge, skills and experience required by a recent graduate to enter a chosen area of graduate employment. The research required to prepare the report will support you in your future career planning and decisions. This report will provide the basis of the information for your self-reflection and career action plan report – CW2

A) What you are being asked to do 

You are required to identity an area of graduate employment that you would consider for when you leave university. This could be either profession (for example marketing/Finance/Accounting/HR) OR an industry you are interested in (for example retail, sports & leisure, public sector, not-for-profit, travel and tourism.)

Your research should be either in an area you aspire to work within or maybe an area that you want to understand more about. Your research in your chosen profession/industry should include likely future trends in graduate recruitment, and should equip you with the knowledge to write a summary of the key skills, knowledge and experience expected from graduate applicants.

You are encouraged to use both primary and secondary research for this assignment. Primary research might include attending events run by the careers team, and/or events run by the professional bodies, or else through personal contacts. It might also include information from the guest lecturers for the module. You could consider talking to managers at work, if you have a parttime role, or else friends and family to enhance your understanding. Include in the appendix a log detailing who you contacted for primary research.

Having identified the profession/industry, you are then required to identify one current job being advertised that you would be interested in applying for in the future. This will form the basis of the second assignment. The advert should appear as an appendix, which you should refer to as necessary within your report. It is important that this is a graduate level job, and not one for an individual with many years’ experience.

You are required to submit a written report of 1500 words. It is suggested that you use the headings shown in this briefing or you may use your own headings; what is important is that you clearly cover all areas outlined below.