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

Adopter Universities - Doing an Employability Audit > Employability Audit - Birmingham

Through adoption of the Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit project, the University of Birmingham took the materials, support and advice available to design and implement a student-led employability audit of civil engineering degrees at the university.

The adoption activities at Birmingham were led by Professor Andrew Chan (Professor of Computational Engineering, a.h.chan@bham.ac.uk). Find out more details about Birmingham's audit process and associated outputs below.

The Audit Process

Through their employability audit, the University of Birmingham looked to achieve the following objectives:

Identify any skills that are not covered by the degree programme

Assess which skills are covered, but more focus could be given

Make suggestions on how skills found to be lacking can be enhanced

Utilise the methods that allow some skills to be taught well to improve those that are lacking

Radar Graph from Audit

9 students were involved in conducting the audit, drawn from across first to fourth year studies. Initially, a review was carried out of the modules students were currently studying in their year. Data was collected for each year and at a module level; each module, in each year, was scored out of 10 for how well it covered the 12 employability skills set used by the originating University of Exeter project. The scores from each module were then combined to give an overall rating for each skill for that particular year.

These results were then used to create a series of radar charts. These radar charts visually show the level of skills represented in each year and those skills which are adequately included or under-represented can be identified readily.

Students captured their experience through the audit process using an online blog.

Audit Outputs

The students' work resulted in an Civil Engineering Employability Audit Report describing the project’s rationale and findings and that includes, on pages 17 - 22, a case study of Birmingham's experience of, and learning from, the project:

Birmingham - Employability Audit Report & Case Study

A key finding outlined in the report is that, for all year groups, more of a focus on career management and commercial awareness is needed. In the first year, an additional lecture on career management could be added to the Design and Professional Skills A module. This is a module that currently provides the skills that are needed when entering the professional world of Engineering and would be a suitable place to meet this need.

However, this skill needs to be carried through the rest of the degree programme, building on basics taught in first year. As such, additional lectures, that are compulsory, need to be included in each year. Though there is support available to students through the careers service, there is no guarantee that this will be used by all students. Experience has shown a reluctance to attend career-focused lectures and thus the importance of these lectures needs to be shown to students.

Crucially, the findings from the audit will:

1. Feed into the module review process currently being undertaken in the School of Civil Engineering

2. Feed into the programme review of the School with the view to considering the balance between the various employability skills and its distribution throughout the curriculum, as well as the involvement of visiting lecturers in the school

3. Be of interest to the School's Industrial Board, as it provides industrial comment and input into the curriculum

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