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

Adopter Universities - Doing an Employability Audit > Employability Audit - Newcastle College

Through adoption of the Student-led Employability Audit Toolkit project, Newcastle College took the materials, support and advice available to design and implement a student-led employability audit of computing foundation degrees at the college.

The adoption activities at Nerwcastle were led by Michael Richardson (HE Business Development Manager, michael.richardson@ncgrp.co.uk). Find out more details about Newcastle's audit process and associated outputs below.

The Audit Process

A group of 6 students were chosen from Newcastle College to perform an employability audit on courses in the Computing area. The audit assessed the level of employability skills that Computing graduates leave with, with the following courses assesed:

Level 6 Computing
Computing Foundation Degree 1
Computing Foundation Degree 2
Computing Foundation Degree 3

The audit involved each student performing a review of all the modules on their current course. Each module was assessed against the top 12 employability skills identified by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Once reviewed, each module received recommendations on how each skill could be incorporated and / or improved.

Newcastle College Audit Report

In the earlier stages of the study, students were asked to complete an employability skills worksheet; this required each student to identify the top 5 skills they believed an employer wanted, as well as to assess whether or not they believed their current course incorporated these. Emails were also sent to current IT employers to ask the top 5 skills they wanted when looking to employ someone in a graduate level position.

As part of the audit, each student generated a spreadsheet showing how each module faired up against the 12 employability skills, rating them from 0 - 3: 0 being not considered, leading up to 3 which is optimally considered. This gave an overview of the current courses, showing how well they incorporated the 12 top employability skills.

Finally, all results were consolidated and compared with the list of skills acquired from employers, to provide recommendations on how to better integrate any less evident skills.

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

Audit Outputs

The students' work resulted in an Computing Employability Audit Report describing the project’s rationale and findings including all the documents produced during the audit, the recommendations and blog posts:

Newcastle - Computing Employability Audit Report

The findings have been disseminated amongst staff across the college; in September 2012, the key findings will be presented to senior management and recommendations will be made as to how the practice could be adopted in different subject areas.

The project may move towards a model where academic credit is achieved through undertaking an audit on behalf of the student body in different subject areas. Hence, sustainability wouldn’t be reliant upon funding to support student payments. These plans however are provisional and will be evaluated in the new academic year.

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

Newcastle College - Employability Audit Case Study

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