Education and Skills Survey: Work Readiness and Career Aspirations

Skills and Character Development

The Confederation of British Industries (2019) undertook an education and skills survey of 190,000 employers and work-readiness was a major theme, in which over a 1/3 of employers felt that young people were not work ready. In addition, they also found that there were “three consistent themes that unite every attempt to define ‘work readiness’ - knowledge, skills and character.”   

Your degree journey will cover the knowledge, but the PPD units in your degree will help you understand the skills and character elements! Throughout this module we will be identifying and reflecting on these so that we can support you to be as competitive as possible to realise your career aspirations!  

You will draw from the activities which you have undertaken throughout this module, through your self-awareness of your skills and behaviours and then your self-management of developing an action plan to ensure that when you come to apply for your aspirational work placement/internship that you have put yourself in a competitive position to secure this!  Of course, you will also need to illustrate your great academic skills in the research, referencing and presentation elements too.

ASSESSMENT TASK

To showcase what you have learnt, reflected upon and developed, your assessment is for you to prepare and deliver a pitch presentation outlining your reflections on how you map to your chosen work placement, internship position, a career progression role or a career change role.   You will need to present this as a pitch to persuade us that you would be the perfect candidate for this position.

HERES THE IMPORTANT BIT:  You develop no more than 6 slides to cover what you want to say; not everything you say has to be on the slide in text.  Think about using a range of modes, e.g. verbal, text, images, videos, live showing of LinkedIn etc.

As a minimum we would expect to see the following in your pitch presentations:

• Outline of the position you are applying for, including what drew you to this;
• An outline of your research findings on the industry that the company sits within, drawing from a range of credible academic sources;
• Reflection and discussion around your self awareness in your skills mapping related to the position you are applying for; clear examples need to be shown of how you know you have these skills, for example, work experience, volunteering, sports, student rep, college opportunities etc;
• Reflection and discussion around your self awareness of the psychometrics and other skills and behaviour surveys you undertook, showing how these illustrate a good match to the job role you applied for;
• An outline of how you have developed your LinkedIn profile and CV to reflect the necessary requirements for this job/industry.
• An outline of extra self-development activities that you have undertaken, e.g., networking, job fairs, guest speakers, LinkedIn Learning etc.;
• Discussion of the development plan you wrote from your analysis of your skills audit, identifying challenges to your career aspirations.  This should include either SMART or HARD goals showing at least 1 x short term goal (end of L4), 1 x medium term goal (end of University) and 1 x long term goal (first promotion);
• This is a pitch - so ensure you leave us with the final reasons as to why we should choose you!
• Your last slide should then be your bibliography using Harvard Referencing style.  You should also include Harvard referencing in-text on your slides too.
• For those on a refer only -  please ensure you complete a small reflective section of what you learnt from the feedback on your initial attempt.
• Your video presentation must be produced using Panopto (See the Assessment tab on our SOL page for guidance on the link that states how to download panopto). No other submission methods will be accepted.

• If you make a mistake while recording, then it is acceptable to correct yourself and continue without having to re-record the whole presentation! Alternatively, you may wish to record the presentation in sections, pausing it at the end of each section to take a break and collect your thoughts.
• In addition, a copy of your slides must be uploaded to the submission link on SOL.

Please note that there is only 1 assessment for this unit, which you will need to pass otherwise risk not proceeding onto Level 5 or gaining your Honours degree.  You will have been supported through formative/summative assessment checkpoints. Activities are interwoven throughout the module so it is vital to engage in all activities and ask questions!  In this way, you will have done most of the preparation for this assessment as you go and not only given yourself the best chance for success on this unit, but also enabling you to progress along the journey towards your aspirational role.

The intention is you use the knowledge and outputs from this assessment to assist you in further job/placement/internship opportunities and you will build on this again on the PPD unit at Level 6.

Assessment criteria

See Grademark table at the end

Learning Outcomes

This assessment will enable students to demonstrate in full or in part the learning outcomes identified in the Module descriptors.

Late Submissions

Students are reminded that:

i.If this assessment is submitted late i.e. within 5 working days of the submission deadline, the mark will be capped at 40% if a pass mark is achieved;

ii.If this assessment is submitted later than 5 working days after the submission deadline, the work will be regarded as a non-submission and will be awarded a zero;

iii.If this assessment is being submitted as a referred piece of work then it must be submitted by the deadline date; any Refer assessment submitted late will be regarded as a non-submission and will be awarded a zero.