Staff pages revamp

By dannyasmith

I'm struggling to find time to think about our staff pages, which are desperately in need of a revamp. I'm hoping that putting up a quick blog post will help me gather my thoughts and perhaps gain some inspiration from helpful commenters...

I've had a quick look at: Durham's, Lancaster's, Manchester's and Warwick's (some of you will know why I started with these ;) I didn't get many ideas from them but it has made me think we need to make our DLHE data more prominent (currently it's tucked away in the Career Development pages for students). Also, advice for personal tutors (Durham) seems a good idea, as does a link to JobShop (Manchester's Jobs On Campus). But the best site I've found for staff pages is Exeter's, which includes:

• a staff guide to employability
• how they work with colleges/departments
• a section for Careers and Employability Reps (we call ours Careers Tutors)
• they also have some materials for group tutorials - but I need to figure out how they use these

So, I might be borrowing some of these ideas. What else do we need?

New front page progress

Since putting up a post about We need a new front page and getting lots of useful comments, Matt and I are much closer to the finished article now. There's a screen shot below - the main changes have been:

• getting rid of the three themes above the images which looked like they should relate to the images below but didn't (thanks Steve)
• added space for an additional 'featured' image (thanks Marta), which we'll change every week
• changed 'what's hot' to 'featured' (thanks James)
• reduced the size of the 'follow' links (thanks Jonny)
• also added some explanatory text underneath each of the three audiences (this is draft - would be interested in opinions)

Need to decide on the portlets to the right now. Are there any other changes we need to make at this stage?

Being the one with their foot in the door

Richard put a copy of PwC's employability guide on my desk earlier in the week, it's titled Being the one with their foot in the door. I was interested in it because I'm trying to think about how to identify employability in the curriculum and wondering whether competencies will help. In the introduction to the guide the Chairman of PwC says:

[...] this Employability Guide [...] explains the different competencies you need to join us. You might have developed many of them through your studies. Others could have come from part-time work or summer travel. Or from somewhere else altogether. What’s important is that you can recognise the skills we’re looking for, and then come up with a good example (or two) to show you’ve got them.

Later on their Head of Strategy and Talent says:

Academic study gets your foot in the door; employability skills push it open to a far wider range of opportunities. They make your potential contribution to our business unique. Consider these skills and experiences your personal business card.

What's really useful is that not only do they list the competencies they are looking for in any potential recruits, they also suggest where they might have been developed. So here are PwC's 10 Competencies and useful prompts to help potential recruits think about where they can find the evidence for these and identify any gaps.

Competency	Prompts
Coach and develop yourself and others	Have you pushed yourself to achieve things that go above and beyond? Have you ever changed the way you did something after getting feedback? Have you taken the time to feedback to others? Have you had work experience or done voluntary work? Have you developed new skills outside of your degree?
Communicate with impact and empathy	Have you made something simple for others to follow? Have you used your powers of persuasion to get funding or agreement for a proposal? Have you presented on your course or to a club or society? Have you ever spoken in front of an audience? Have you written speeches, manifestos or business cases? Can you think of a time when you made a point of taking on board different opinions?
Be curious: learn, share and innovate	Have you used your initiative to achieve a goal? Have you made time to learn something new outside of your course? Do you go to events that are all about knowledge sharing or learning? Have you shared what you know with other people on your course? Have you ever come up with a new and better way of doing something? Have you been to employer presentations or skills sessions to explore your future career?
Lead and reinforce team success	Have you been adaptable in order to work better with others? Have you taken part in a voluntary project that relied on everyone pulling together? Do you belong to a sports team, club or society? Have you led a group? Can you think when you worked in a team to achieve a common goal? Do you know what qualities you can bring to a team?
Build and maintain relationships	Have you got to know your careers advisor or course tutor? Have you networked with people from other courses or universities? Did you get to know a customer really well? Have you built good relationships with others? Do you go to a club or society regularly, rather than once a year? Have you made (and maintained) useful contacts on a work experience placement?
Show you have courage and integrity	Can you think of a time when you worked well under pressure? Ever undertaken a mundane task with real enthusiasm? Do you always turn up on time? Do you put 100% into every application form? Have you handled conflicts or differences of opinion well? Have you kept your cool when dealing with a difficult customer?
Manage projects and money	Have you juggled different priorities to meet a deadline? Have you handled lots of different pieces of course work at the same time? Have you adapted positively to a new process at work? Have you ever put a backup plan into action? Have you looked after an organisation’s finances?
Be open minded, practical and quick to adapt	Have you taken on board suggestions from others? Have you picked up a shift at work at short notice? Have you been happy to stay late to get things done? Have you adapted to changes at work? Have you put yourself in a situation you’re not used to? Have you tried new things that are outside your comfort zone?
Build and use commercial and technical know-how	Have you looked into the kind of professional qualifications you might do with us? Have you thought about who your dream client would be or what it would be like to be a CEO? Have you gone the extra mile to understand how a company or industry operates? Do you take an interest in business and current affairs? Are you curious about what makes a business tick? Do you understand how your degree could make a difference to our business?
Caring about client service	Have you come up with ways to do things differently? Have you thought about how you can make a club or society better? Do you take a real interest in your parttime job, how the company works and who its competitors are? Have you looked into how PwC operates as a business? Do you work hard to make things better? Have you ever gone out of your way to do something positive for others?

Table text (c) 2010 PricewaterhouseCoopers LPP

Of course not every graduate wants to work for a professional services company (thankfully) but many of the competencies do seem to be transferable. I'm wondering if a synthesis of these and the SHL competencies would be a useful framework to help us identify and develop employability in the curriculum. And I think the questions to prompt students to think about where they can find the evidence will be useful for students, departments and us as a careers service to help us to think more broadly and more strategically about what interventions are required.

What do you think?

Careers support from Corporate Services

I attended our Heads of Departments meeting on Wednesday, which is a meeting of all heads of academic departments (the clue's in the name), plus the Registrar and various other senior managers, chaired by the VC. My colleague Richard Wilcock and I were presenting some ideas from a conversation we'd had with Geology about what they are doing to support the employability of their students. The basic message was: employability is a priority (everyone knew this) and a shared responsibility, Geology have some good ideas, have a look at them and see what's transferable to your own department.

Heads of department presenation.pptx

View more presentations from Stuart Johnson

One suggestion that came from the meeting on Wednesday was nothing to do with academic departments though but instead to do with the involvement of Corporate Services staff in supporting students. I'm not sure how many staff we have in Corporate Services at the University of Leicester but I do know they represent a wide range of professions (you can see a structure chart here), including:

• Finance
• Estates
• IT services
• Marketing
• Planning
• Human resources
• Conferencing
• Student support
• Legal services

So the suggestion was - could we make use of staff in Corporate Services to support students in pursuing particular careers? We already do this via our Leicester graduate internship programme but the suggestion was about a more informal, mentoring sort of role. It could be as simple as creating and maintaining a list of staff who are happy to provide advice to students that we then refer interested students to. It could be that some staff training would also be required.

Do you think this is an idea with legs? Are you or any other institution you know already doing it? What are the possible pitfalls? Just thinking out loud...

We need a new front page (again)

Back in July last year I blogged about our new front page for Student Development. At the time Alan made this comment...

I understand the problem, but it's a bit busy for my liking - too much text to scan, too many distractions. [...] If it were me, I'd go for less, but allow people to drill down easily. Sorry, I know you worked hard on this [...]

I think Alan was right (you can see the current page here) but I didn't want to change it again so soon after coming up with the redesign (not least because it was a big improvement on the previous version and that was the main thing at that point). My response at the time was that I'd let it run for a while and then revisit it - well now we have chance to revisit it, not least because of the renaming thing. I've had a look at a number of other similar services at other institutions including Manchester, Warwick, Lancaster and Durham, and as you will see if you click on the links they all use a similar structure at the top level, i.e. students, employers and staff - which I think is spot on. So that was what I discussed with Matt a couple of weeks ago and this is what he's come up with, which I think is great (he's blogged about it here)!

This is only a first draft though and I'd be really interested in your comments. We can use portlets on the left or right hand side to include contact details and news items but the main part of the screen is what you see above. The 'What's hot' bit we can update on a frequent basis (not sure about the name but you get the idea). The 'Follow us' links can link to the individual accounts or pages with multiple accounts listed (for instance - I might set up a Twitter account solely for jobs and internships advertising in addition to our current one). We also need to think about what we do with the next level down: Students and Alumni can link to a page which is broken up into succeed in your studies, gain experience and develop your career; the Employer section can link to our Employer Liaison pages (we'll be revamping these shortly); and the staff section can link to what is currently a very embryonic staff folder (I'll need to develop this pretty quickly). I'd also appreciate suggestions of what I could replace the nasty banner image with (see below - I've never liked it but changing it hasn't been a priority up to this point), maybe something a bit like the Environment Team's (not the fridge magnet idea but the separate images idea).

One concern I have is that, other than the 'What's hot' box, we've used the whole of the centre of the page for static items. Is that ok or should we put a dynamic news feed in? It looks quite fresh now but it could quickly feel dated if it remains relatively static.

I should also probably run all this by my colleagues in Marketing to check they're happy (note to self).

All suggestions gratefully received :)