Career planning – market awareness, applications, presentations, interviews, CV construction.
That still seems to be a reasonable list of elements, with a planned progression of student activity:
Year 1 – self-awareness and undertaking reflective reviews
Year 2 – job-awareness through careers workshops, and a personal end of year review
Year 3 – career planning including CV construction.
Indeed, this is closely reflected in our current definition of ‘Employability essentials’.
By 2007 I was still valiantly working to get schools to make changes and to implement these
elements of PDP. One or two small encouraging signs of change were appearing, such as a biology
laboratory report assignment which also asked students to reflect on their first semester, but
generally there was little enthusiasm or engagement with the idea of PDP. Most science staff didn’t
get it or see the point, and, as explained by John Peters and Sue Burkinshaw , there was no simple
directive as to how PDP should be implemented. They wrote in an earlier CRA publication: The
problem is that while the cross-sectoral agreement to implement PDP is clear about the purpose
and claims for this approach, it has explicitly encouraged individual HEIs to implement PDP as they
see fit. The result is that the implementation of PDP differs markedly from institution to institution
with different emphasis in terms of:
Key Purpose, e.g. employability, skills development, career management, learning to learn,
professional development, etc.
Methods, e.g. throughout the curriculum, through personal tutoring, in discrete modules, using
e-portfolios, etc. and
Models, e.g. based on learning cycles, reflective practice, record keeping, action planning,
coaching or counselling, etc. (Peters and Burkinshaw, 2007).
Drawing on student perceptions
Of the methods they identified, the most desirable I believe is ‘throughout the curriculum’, but at
the time the one most accessible to me was through discrete modules. Direct input to a module
had much greater likelihood of success than simply running workshops on a topic, often attended
by only a handful of staff. I began with a skills module in Biological Sciences where I knew the
module tutor. This, like other skills modules in the sciences, was largely academic skills; just one
session was allocated to PDP, and I was able to appropriate this. I developed a scheme whereby
students were given a hand-out defining and describing the five elements of PDP referred to earlier
(Lumsden, 2005), and a short presentation on the national background to PDP and the importance
of emotional intelligence. They were then placed in groups of three to five and carried out a skills
audit, the outcomes of which were discussed, collated and displayed on a flip-chart/white board.
Finally, the groups were given the task of representing their ideas and perceptions about PDP,
focusing on where and how the various elements might occur and be supported during their time
at UCLan. These representations invariably took the form of drawn images. At the end of the
session students also wrote on individual post-it notes, stating ‘one thing I am going to do/address
as a result of today’.
THE CENTRE FOR RECORDING ACHIEVEMENT 104 -108 WALLGATE, WIGAN, WN3 4AB |
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