Through adoption of the Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit project, the University of Bradford took the materials, support and advice available to design and implement a student-led employability audit of undergraduate chemistry programmes at the university. The aim was to find which skills undergraduate chemistry students value in their degree qualification, and if all the skills required from them after graduating were being given enough weight in their degree.

The adoption activities at Bradford were led by Dr Tasnim Munshi (Director of Undergraduate Admissions, T.Munshi@bradford.ac.uk). Find out more details about Bradford's audit process and associated outputs below.

The Audit Process

6 students were involved in the detailed audit of all Chemistry modules in the Division of Chemical & Forensic Sciences, but questionnaires were also carried out initially and targeted at all first and second year students (130 of them) to discover what they thought was important to include in the degree programmes and what they thought they had achieved to date through their studies.

Recruitment of students for the audit was relatively straightforward and students from the second year (2 of them) and third year (4 of them) were recruited. Meetings took place amongst the students after an initial meeting with the project lead and the students carried out the project quite independently.

Audit Outputs

The students' work resulted in a Chemistry Employability Audit Report describing the audit process and findings (including those from the pre-audit questionnaire) alongside a number of recommendations. The report will shortly be made available on this web-page. 

Essentially, from the report it was found that students value chemical skills appropriately but not the transferable skills in the development of their degree, even though the majority of the students take the degree to further their employability. The report shows that the undergraduate chemistry degree could be improved by teaching more transferable skills without losing chemical content.

Changes that will take place as a result of the audit include:

• Using the audit to guide some module changes
• A skills audit for each student to be carried out as part of their Personal Development Portfolio (PDP) so that they can identify any skills deficiencies themselves
• Additional audits to be undertaken by students studying a 4th year module
• The integration of commercial awareness into a green chemistry project on Enterprise

A case study capturing Bradford's experience of, and learning from, the project can  be downloaded below: