City shares what’s behind its Career Activiation Programme, which won Best University and Employer Engagement Strategy at ISE’s Awards.
At City, we celebrate that our students come from diverse backgrounds. This can often mean they have to overcome a unique set of obstacles that disrupt their ability to prepare for their future careers.
As a result, for some of our students, career success is influenced in part by their personal circumstances.
Recognising this, the City Careers and Employability department created the Career Activation Programme.
Implementing the Career Activation Programme
Implementation of this ambitious, institutional strategy was completed in 2022/23. All of our undergraduate courses now have ‘career focus’ education and professional experience as core, credit bearing components.
Our strategic vision was based upon the large scale DfE research Planning for success: Graduates’ career planning and its effect on graduate outcomes which examined determinants of long term success in the labour market.
Whilst the vision of the Career Activation Programme is institutional, its implementation is personal as most students are able to choose the format and timing of professional experience that best suits them.
For our students, that ensures they enter the job market in a uniquely strong, competitive, and confident position. For City, that means that we are offering a one-of-a-kind value proposition to students.
Innovation
The Career Activation Programme is innovative in three respects:
1. Flexibly meeting the needs of our employer partners
The breadth and creativity of our suite of work-based learning modules means that we have a multitude of options for our partner employers to engage with our diverse student body. They are so diverse that they can be hard to reach outside of the curriculum due to competing pressures on their time.
These options include engaging individual students for placements of different lengths, working with teams of students (either in single subject or inter-disciplinary groups) on consultancy projects, volunteering assignments or bespoke modules that are co-designed and co-delivered to meet a specific skills gap in the organisation.
2. Sector leading
To our knowledge, we are the only large UK university to have embedded employability education and professional experience as two distinctive, core elements in all of our under graduate programmes.
The scale of the Career Activation Programme is notable; achieving consensus for change to the core curriculum for programmes in six academic schools.
3. Institutional vision, personalised delivery
The content of all ‘career focus’ modules are bespoke to individual programmes and the sectors students from that subject typically enter. For example, our politics module ‘Practical Politics’ highlights policy roles in diverse sectors and the skills employers such as the Civil Service look for. All 41 career focus modules are core and credit bearing.
Inherent in our commitment that all undergraduate students complete professional experience during their studies is enabling students to undertake professional experience in a format and at a time that suits them.
We have created an innovative range of 15 credit professional experience modules which reflect diverse career paths relevant to the nuances of what employers in different sectors look for, implemented with the institutional commitment that students complete one.
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