Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit > Adopter Universities - Doing an Employability Audit

Adopter Universities - Doing an Employability Audit

Due to the success of the Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit project, the project leaders (Dr Barrie Cooper and Chloe Cunningham of the University of Exeter) gained additional funding from the National HE STEM Programme's Practice Transfer Adopters scheme to support the roll-out of student-led employability audits across STEM disciplines at other universities.

Five institutions were successful in their bids to adopt support from the project, as follows:

The Adoption Process

The adoption process looked to support the adopter universities to implement student-led employability audits of chosen STEM disciplines back in their own institutions and in doing so, enabling collaboration between students, graduate employers and staff in order to audit the extent to which employability support is currently integrated into degrees. The overall aim was to equip graduates with employability skills by embedding them in the curriculum.

On 13th February 2012, an initial meeting was held at the University of Birmingham where adopters were given guidance in how to carry out their own student-led audit and how to tailor it to their needs.

The below support documents were distributed on the day:

Employability Skills Audit Sheet

Employability Skills Student Worksheet

The creative media company Dovetail were at Birmingham to document the day and to interview the adopters about their intentions for the project. These interviews can be accessed via the 'Employability Skills' section of the CreativeSTEM website.

Following the meeting, the adopter universities were challenged, over the coming months, to:

Recruit, and train, students to undertake an employability audit of a STEM degree
Capture learning through an online blog
Produce a report outlining recommendations as to how employability skills might be further embedded into the curriculum
Disseminate findings around their institution

A meeting closing the adoption process was held on 8th June 2012 at the University of Exeter. At this meeting, the adopter universities presented their outputs and learning from the project and shared good practice.

The project leads have written a meta-evaluation which captures the adoption process and which draws out the key learning from, and impact at, the adopter universities. This meta-evaluation can be downloaded below:

Employability Audit Adopters - Meta-evaluation

Staff involved

Dr Barrie Cooper
Project lead, University of Exeter

Abel Nyamapfene
University of Exeter

Amanda Arthur
University of Exeter

Amy Boylan
University of Exeter

Chloe Cunningham
University of Exeter

Dawn Evans
University of Exeter

Fiona Dyke
Teach First

Greg Craft
Nationwide

Holly Geipel
University of Exeter

James Baxani
Teach First

Jodie Sherman
JP Morgan

Julie Hawkings
Centrax

Kathryn Edwards
Airbus

Lee Stott
Microsoft

Mohit Malik
RBS

Paul Hartley
Devon Education Business Partnership

Richard Whinnett
University of Exeter

Rowanna Smith
University of Exeter