September 14, 2021, by jhillary1

3 Tips for Boosting Your Employability Using the Careers Website

By Bryony Adshead, final year English Student and a student ambassador for the Careers and Employability Service

Boosting your employability can be hard during the pandemic – many opportunities for work experience have been cancelled, there are fewer part-time jobs on offer, and even the practical experience offered by our courses, such as in-person group work and discussions, has in many cases become virtual. However, all is not lost!

With almost everything online anyway, this is a great time to make use of the Careers and Employability Service’s website, which offers a whole host of workshops, advice, and courses to boost your employability and give you skills no employer could resist. Whether you have never even looked at the website before, whether you are a devoted fan who checks for updates every day (which, going out on a limb here, I’m going to assume most readers of this are not), or whether you are somewhere in between, the Careers and Employability Service has something to offer everyone.

1. Attend a careers workshop

My first tip is to look into the wide range of careers events on offer including workshops, spotlight events, and recruiter presentations to name a few. You can search these using MyCareer (which some of you may know better as the service that is used to book the university’s Covid-19 tests) to find the workshops which best fit your interests and timetable. If you are mainly interested in learning more about certain jobs or careers, you could attend some more general recruiter presentations, but if you are keen to build your employability skills you could participate in a more interactive workshop where you get the opportunity to practice what you are being taught.

2. Do an online course

Online courses are a great way to increase your knowledge of the big bad world of careers and give your employability skills a boost. The Careers and Employability Service offers a wide range of courses to help you make the best possible job applications (especially important in the increasingly competitive job market we find ourselves in). If your CV could do with a bit of tweaking there’s a course for that, or perhaps it is interviews that you struggle with? If you have an assessment centre coming up but don’t know where to start, why not take this short course? Or if application forms are your stumbling block, then this course might be the one for you!

3. Magpie

Magpie is an online learning engine that works with you to give you personalised content and learning tools matching the employability skills you want to develop. Based on not only your career goals and current skill levels, but also your learning style, magpie recommends a range of blogs, courses, articles, and videos covering many different careers skills, including time management, leadership, teamwork, and project management, to name just a few! The Careers and Employability Service has even curated playlists of resources aimed to help you. If you want to use magpie but aren’t quite sure where to begin, this blog points you towards some courses offered on magpie which are of particular use at the moment.

Don’t forget that you can book a careers appointment with a careers adviser to discuss or get advice on any aspect of your career journey. Or you can explore the different opportunities on the Careers and Employability website.

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