{"id":2472,"date":"2022-09-16T10:53:09","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T09:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/itl\/?p=2472"},"modified":"2022-09-13T13:21:13","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T12:21:13","slug":"2472","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/itl\/2022\/09\/16\/2472\/","title":{"rendered":"Applied Employability: Giving students a picture of their future selves."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"JackieJackie<\/b> is Professor of Statistical Literacy in the Department of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. In 2022 she was awarded a University of Manchester Teaching Excellence<\/a>. In 2020 Jackie was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship from Advance HE and an industry accolade as \u2018One in Twenty Women in Data\u2019. She publishes and speaks internationally on her Data Fellows programme which she developed to create opportunities for social science and humanities students to gain paid work experience prior to graduating. She is passionate about creating equity of opportunity for all, with over 70% of the 330 data fellows she has placed being female, and 25% from under-represented groups. She works to connect education and skills to workplace needs, championing social science routes into data careers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In Sept 2021 I took on the role of School of Social Sciences Employability lead. Something that strikes me through the work I do \u2013 connecting students to employers through the Data Fellowship programme I have developed – is how our students struggle (not just undergraduates) to articulate their skills and knowledge in a way that helps them talk the language of employers. This is important to help them gain access to graduate careers, including further study. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this over the years and in my book \u2018<\/a>Work placements, internships and applied social research\u2019, I developed frameworks for this. The first is based on the British Academy\u2019s \u2018The Right Skills\u2019 Report which I used to create a set of Analytical and Research skills. For the second I used McKinsey and LinkedIn industry reports to highlight the seven top \u2018Professional Skills\u2019 sought by employers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I decided to take this work one step further and talk to some of our own UoM Social Sciences alumni to understand what it was about their degree (Bachelor\u2019s, Master\u2019s or PhD) that they can now reflect on as having relevance to their current role.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This resulted in my interviewing 18 alumni in the space of a fortnight and writing up their stories. The result is this publication \u2018Social Science Alumni Stories: Pathways into Policy\u2019<\/a>. I focussed on policy careers, as the funding for the booklet was made available through Policy@Manchester, and because I am connected to lots of alumni in policy roles.\u00a0 I used the frameworks I developed in my book to elicit the Analytical, Research and Professional skills that the alumni spoke about \u2013 through reflecting on their time at Manchester.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are some key findings from these stories that I think are worth drawing out:\u00a0<\/p>\n