Ways in which Careers Network can help

• Tailored individual advice and guidance from careers professionals to explore career plans and support with finding and applying for jobs, internships and further study
• Access to work experience, internship, mentoring and graduate opportunities
• Career development workshops and a range of skills sessions
• Dedicated support for international and postgraduate students
• Opportunities to network with employers through careers fairs, sector specific events and informal drop in sessions
• Skills programmes including the The Birmingham Award (formerly the Personal Skills Award) and Birmingham Project
• Freelance and start-up support from the B-Enterprising team
• Ongoing careers support for graduates now and into the future

Find out about the dedicated careers team and useful information on support, events and resources available to students in your college.

• College of Arts and Law
• College of Engineering and Physical Sciences
• College of Life and Environmental Sciences
• College of Medical and Dental Sciences
• College of Social Sciences

If you’ve got any questions about employability in your college, or are interested in holding a careers event in your college or school, you should contact your College Careers team.

Careers Network have created a referral form that is designed to be a simple and quick way of referring those students who would benefit from careers support in a timely manner. Personal Tutors are encouraged to refer any student, including PGTs, but primarily penultimate and final year students, who meet the following criteria:

• Struggling to figure out what they want to do after graduation;
• Have not engaged with careers support before; 
• Need a confidence boost in relation to their options;
• Have no work experience.

There is now one Tutor Referral Form for all colleges. This will ensure we have a consistent way that academic staff across the university can refer students to each College Careers Team for follow-up and additional support.

Please remember:

• Earlier referrals increase the likelihood of careers engagement 
• Your support will benefit the students and the school in relation to Graduate Outcomes and TEF

The referral is not intended to be a fast track appointment service for already motivated students, or as an alternative to all the other comprehensive careers support available via Careers Network.

To find out more, or get support from Careers Network related to the tutor referral process in your college please contact your College Careers Team.

Careers Network’s Learning Development Consultant and Enterprise Educator can support you to embed enterprise and employability education, contextualised for your discipline.

• Working in partnership to co-develop enterprise education modules, which help students to develop enterprise and entrepreneurial skills, mind-sets and behaviours, and provide them with experience of solving problems creatively.  Examples of modules that we have supported the development of include Global Enterprise Project (Modern languages) and Learning Entrepreneurial Skills (Liberal Arts).
• Consultation on experiential learning (e.g. off-campus placements) and authentic assessment design.
• Working with you to review the content of existing programmes and modules, to ensure that students are able to recognise and articulate the transferable skills developed in their degrees, and to identify ways to embed activities that will encourage students to engage in early career planning.
• Consultation when you are developing new degree programmes and modules, to explore ways that they can be designed with employability and enterprise in mind, and to suggest activities that will ensure employability and enterprise is visible in your programmes, grounded within your disciplinary context.
• Support with the development of new modules related to the New Academic Teaching Year, for example PAT modules, to help students to engage in career planning while developing the skills of a practitioner in your discipline. 

Contact the Enterprise Educator or Employability & Enterprise Learning Development Consultant

• For further information, or to set-up a meeting, please contact Helen Hook (Enterprise Educator) or Matt Edwards (Employability & Enterprise Learning Development Consultant).

Further information

• For discipline-specific information on transferrable skills see the QAA Quality Code Subject Benchmark Statements; for further information on enterprising behaviours see the QAA Guidance for UK HE providers on Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education.
• For ideas on ‘authentic assessment’ see Gulikers, J.T.M., Bastiaens, T.J., and Kirschner, P.A., (2004) ‘A five-dimensional framework for authentic assessment’, Educational Technology Research and Development, 52 (3), pp. 67-86
• The Academic Skills Centre support skills in the curriculum by offering workshops and/or online resources that can be tailored to meet the assessment requirements and learning outcomes of your module or programme.

Education Enhancement Fund funding has provided Careers Network with the means to develop five employability-focused courses in Canvas, to be embedded in undergraduate and postgraduate modules, and which can be used to support bimodal teaching. The asynchronous courses include written, video and interactive content, and could be compulsory or optional components of modules. The courses include links to LinkedIn Learning, and focus on the following topics:

• Creating a Professional Profile (CV and LinkedIn)
• Employability in and Beyond Your Degree
• Managing Group Dynamics
• Responding to Feedback
• Speculative Approaches for Placements

Each course takes approximately four hours to complete, and so are intended to be roughly the equivalent of one week’s teaching, if you wanted to use them, in this way. To find out more and view a demo of the courses please contact our Digital Experience Team: cninfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk

Careers Network has created a suite of resources which can be used by personal academic tutors to deliver an interactive group tutorial focussed on a range of careers topics. Each resource includes a short video and pre-tutorial task for students, a tutor outline for “off the shelf” delivery of the session and a resource list to ensure signposting to further support from Careers Network.

The resources are accessible from the HEFi Personal Academic Tutoring Gateway and cover the following topics:

• First-year UG: discovering and making the most of university, and exploring your options
• Intermediate-years UG: how to prepare for, gain, and make the most of workplace experience
• Finalists UG: identifying the skills developed at university and making the most of your network
• PGT: postgraduate skills and action planning

To find out more, or get support from Careers Network related to these resources please contact Jayne Sharples j.s.sharples@bham.ac.uk or your College Careers Team.