Helping our students to kickstart their careers

At The Open University, we’re not just focused on giving our students access to higher education. Making sure they have the best opportunities and skills to kickstart their careers is at the heart of what we do.

Here’s an update on some of the work our employability advisers have been doing recently to get our students ready for work.

Coaching and mentoring

Our advisers are focused on providing one-to-one coaching to our students. In the last year alone we’ve delivered 152 mentoring and coaching sessions. From initial chats about the support we offer, right through to making an action plan with the student’s goals, our advisers are there to support them.

‘The advisers have been extremely kind and supportive all along’ said Mabel, one of our students. ‘I have had the best experience when interacting with them. After studying remotely, this was an amazing help that I did not expect and I'm so lucky to have received.’

Reaching our students

We know that emails can get overwhelming. It’s all too easy for our students to miss the support that’s on offer to them.

So, this year we tried a direct-mail campaign to reach people in rural areas of Wales. We sent out personalised postcards to promote our employability work and let our students know the ways we can support them with starting their careers.

Our new module: OU SkillsTracker

Our new skills development module helps people find and define skills they already have. While many of our students have a range of life and work experiences, they often struggle to identify the skills they’ve gained and make them relevant for job planning and applications.

The module has been useful in guiding these conversations and helping our students to reflect on the skills they’ve gained, allowing them to build their employability and confidence. To date, it has already been used by 152 OU in Wales students.

I really like it because it's made me stop and think about the skills I've gained.

Student tester of OU SkillsTracker

Supporting entrepreneurs in Wales

Last year we ran two eight-week programmes alongside Welsh ICE, the ‘5-9 clubs’. These aimed to help entrepreneurs to move forward with their business and social enterprise ideas. The workshops and mentoring sessions offered all kinds of support – from branding to legal considerations.

This activity was part funded through TESS and the Research Wales Innovation Fund (RWIF) allowing us to help 10 students and graduates in the first program last autumn. They had some great things to say about the sessions.

‘The course was very helpful,’ said one of our TESS supported students. ‘As a person who was really interested in starting a business but had no idea how to go about it as it felt like a great big unknown, the 5-9 course gave the perfect practical and psychological blueprint to start. And it was so great to do in such a positive, encouraging and kind environment.’

It’s been a great year for our employability initiatives, and we’ve helped many of our students take another step towards getting a job they love.

We’ll continue with these programmes, and plan to support even more of our students and graduates alike to kickstart their careers.