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

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

Through adoption of the Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit project, the University of Manchester took the materials, support and advice available to design and implement a student-led employability audit of degrees offered by the School of Mathematics.

The adoption activities at Birmingham were led by Sebastian Rees (Sebastian.Rees@manchester.ac.uk). Find out more details about Manchester's audit process and associated outputs below.

The Audit Process

Over a period of three months, twelve undergraduate students from the University of Manchester produced a series of documents that assessed and evaluated the current employability skills taught, practised and assessed by different course units comprising the mathematics undergraduate degrees. The students were from all years of study, and from both single honours and joint honours degrees.

Example Audit from Manchester

Before undertaking the audit, the students liaised with a number of employers including PwC, IBM, Deloitte, Teach First and CSC who concurred that the 12 employability skills identified by the original University of Exeter project were desirable ones to audit. The employers also suggested that they were looking for students able to demonstrate skills apart from their academic capability and so a decision was made to audit some of the extracurricular activities run by the School of Mathematics as well (STEM ambassador scheme, mock interview scheme and peer assisted study scheme).

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

Audit Outputs

The students' work resulted in a Mathematics Employability Audit Report describing the audit process and findings and including a number of recommendations:

Manchester - Mathematics Employability Audit Report

The above report includes recommendations for minor changes across course unit and extracurricular activities, alongside some more major proposals:

Minor changes:

1. Varying the content of examples sheets, with the inclusion of more research-based questions

2. Introducing peer-assessed marking

3. Awarding a small percentage of final mark for students attendance at examples classes

4. Increase in opportunities to present orally during examples classes

5. Encouraging lecturers to include greater onus on employability skills

Major proposals:

1. Introduction of a Group Project Module, grouping students with similar mathematical interests to complete a project together

2. Improvement of IT skills through LaTeX classes, delivered either as an optional offering or as part of a module

3. Extension of the mock interview programme to include two presentations for second year students, a mock online test, cover-letter and group exercise

4. Introduction of a real-life business problem which focuses on mathematics students

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

Manchester - Employability Audit Case Study

The audit has been a valuable undertaking that will have a lasting impact upon how Manchester thinks about employability skills within the School of Mathematics.

Of the proposals that have come from the employability audit report:

the group project will be presented to the School Teaching Committee
the extensions to the Mock Interviewer Programme and the Real Life Business Problems will be taken to the School’s Careers Team
LaTex Classes and the suggested minor changes to current course units will be implemented in the 2012/13 academic year

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