Top tips for getting a job: 8 employers speak!

One of the aims of our Jisc embedding project was to build on the positive outcomes and outputs of our original webinar project and to highlight the key employability skills identified in webinars by the employers who took part.

Below is a short video that contains some top tips for applying for a job, CVs and participating in an interview. It would be a useful starter for a tutorial on CVs or interviews. The clips are taken from the original 8 student run webinars we recorded during our first phase of the project.

 

We hope you like the video, please do share and let us know if you have found it useful!

ALTC 2014 Learning to Ride: Putting the pieces together

Below is the Prezi from our session earlier today. Thank you so much for all the feedback and helpful comments on our Moodle course.

Help wanted! Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation

Last week, we attended the Jisc Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group meeting in Bristol.

Ellen Lessner and I were invited to present as part of a session on projects from the Jisc FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme - Embedding Benefits strand. We used the opportunity to present our draft Webinar Skills Course and to gather feedback about the design and usability of it.

Draft Webinar Skills Course

We ran our session: 'Help wanted!  Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation' twice and received some really helpful and insightful feedback from the participants. Below are a number of initial changes we are planning on implementing in response to the feedback:

1. Produce a screencast showing how to navigate the course.
2. Merge the 'Resource' section into the other sections.
3. Highlight the importance of group work.
4. Include screenshots showing the 'tutor view' of each section and the 'student view' (the course is built in Moodle with some resources and sections hidden from student view).
5. Display brief instructions on how each resource/activity can be used.

We would like to thank all the participants who attended our session. We greatly appreciate all the help and feedback you have given us.

Emma Procter-Legg

Project Manager

Let the planning begin!

Earlier this week we were in London for a meeting with Owen Hanmer, from Jisc.  The purpose of the meeting was to start planning our course on learning to set up and run a webinar. Owen ran a number of training sessions on webinar skills during the original Students4webES project and was an obvious choice to help us in the planning of this course.

We arrived in London for our meeting and the first thing that struck me about the meeting room  was that it was all set up perfectly for webinars and teleconferencing.

In the middle of the room, suspended above the table was a microphone, perfectly placed for capturing everything being discussed and on one wall a set of screens and a video camera again perfectly arranged to capture the meeting and fully support 'virtual participation'.

Fuelled by a number of cups of coffee we managed to put together a draft outline of the course. It is clear that it will continue to evolve over the coming weeks, but it is great to have a first draft down on paper (well actually on a shared Google Doc)!

The course will be built as a downloadable Moodle course with resources and activities for a blended learning delivery. We estimate the course will be about 20 hours of learning, but this could well change once we start to investigate getting the course accredited for funding.

Next stop: another meeting, this time with a video editor to look at improving the webinar recordings and to produce a more polished version of the top tips student produced video.

FELTAG Report and funding cuts

Having presented during the FE strand at ALT-C 2013 when the FELTAG open consultation session was run we were eager to read the Report that was published last Monday. FELTAG is the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group, convened by Minister of State for Skills and Enterprise, Matthew Hancock at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

Obviously a report that discusses the future use of technology in FE is highly relevant to our project. The timing of this report and the announcement that the government is cutting funding to ‘low value’ courses will allow us to reflect on both of these points whilst shaping the webinar employability course that we are designing for L2 and L3 students.

The aim of our course will be to teach a technology skill; the setting up and running of a webinar. We feel that the hard and soft skills needed to do this will help students be more successful in looking for employment both now and in the future. Our goal is to find a way to make the course fundable by validating the delivery through an awarding body accepted in the post-16 community. As the FELTAG report suggests, a proportion of the course will be delivered online and we are looking at putting the assessment online as well.

FELTAG recommends that “the funding system must fully support the adoption of new digital technology and learning methods….” (p. 23). This short course should tie in nicely with many of the recommendations for funding. We will keep you posted on how we get on.

Students4Webes Embedding Benefits (S4WEB)

Our first week of the project started with a flurry of activity including deciding on an appropriate abbreviation of the project name - S4WEB - which is a nice Twitter hashtag! We have a number of meetings planned over the next few weeks and will be posting regular updates here about our activities.

This week I found a blog post about a Jisc Learning and Teaching Experts Meeting that Ellen and I presented at last year. The post was written by another Jisc funded project The DIAL project - Digital Integration into Arts Learning - who presented at the same meeting. In the post they discussed the potential for using some of the material as part of the DIAL PoI project which is about Professional Online Identities or the possibility of setting up another DIAL project using a similar approach to ours.

As our new project is all about embedding benefits, it would be great hear from anyone who has seen our blog or attended a presentation and decided to use webinar software in some way. Why not leave us a comment and let us know?

Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill

Ellen Lessner and Emma Procter-Legg will be speaking at the Jisc RSC Event "Technology, Innovation and Success - A conference for ACL and WBL" on the 28th March 2014 at Senate House, University of London.

Our session "Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill" will look at the lessons learned from our original project on webinars and employability skills run at Abingdon & Witney College. It is also a chance for us to showcase our (draft) blended learning course on setting up and running a webinar as an employability skill. The development of this freely available short course will form one of the major outputs of our embedding project. The funding for this is from the Jisc FE and Skills Embedding Activity Programme.

Why not come along to our session and have a chat with us about our project!

Student Produced Video

Students4WebES update, below is a student produced video about the key points on employability skills from the employers involved in our project.

Video produced by Ben Robb, a media student at Abingdon and Witney College in 2013. Although a bit rough, it shows that employers had similar ideas about what employers think are key employability skills.

Slides from Elesig 2013 webinar on Evolving Digital literacies: inductions to employment skills

Elesig 2013 webinar on Evolving Digital literacies: inductions to employment skills from lessner

ELESIG webinar: Evolving Digital Literacies – inductions to employment skills

We will be talking about the Students4webES Project on Thursday 20th June 2013 from 1-2 pm in an ELESIG webinar.

The webinar will be presented by Ellen Lessner and Emma Procter-Legg and will focus on our experiences of running 2 student centred projects in FE which aimed to have students shape the content and structure of the project. 

To find out more about ELESIG (Evaluation of Learners' Experiences of e-learning Special Interest Group) click here.

Update on the Pizza Hut 140 second interview

A few posts back I wrote about Pizza Hut running 140 second interviews at a recruitment event to find a new social media director. My understanding was that they would then run a second round of interviews via Google Hangout to get to know the candidates a bit better, it turns out I was wrong.

They did run interviews via Google Hangout, but only for people who weren't able to make it to the face to face interviews held on the 10th March. These Google Hangout interviews took the same format as the original interviews - to sell yourself to the panel in 140 seconds! This really does require an additional level of skill, not only requiring a level of confidence that the technology is going to work, but the skills to set it up right. It is crucial that the audio levels are right so that your 140 second pitch can actually be heard!

During our webinar project, we found that although it might seem easier to run a webinar (or Skype, Google Hangout etc) without wearing a head set, using the built-in microphone and speakers, the audio does really suffer and often leads to people having to repeat themselves - if you only have 140 seconds your certainly don't have time to do that!

To read the article in full about the Google Hangout Interviews, click here.

NUS webinar

Last week Jesse Scharf, from the National Union of Students (NUS), spoke to students at Abingdon and Witney College via Blackboard Collaborate.

Jesse Scharf, Student Switch Off Project Officer, NUS

This webinar had an extra layer of complexity for both Jesse and the students involved, as it was the first time we had run a webinar where the guest speaker wasn't supported 'in person'. This meant the student moderators had to explain clearly how everything way going to work. Having completed the Waitrose webinar earlier that morning, all the students felt well prepared for the additional level of complexity. To find out more about the running of this webinar do check out our other blog post, by clicking here.

Do watch the webinar, we hope you will agree with us that it was a very successful event, thanks for watching!

First webinar completed!

On Monday we successfully ran our first webinar with an employer. Head of Staff Services at Abingdon and Witney College, Kelly Boast, gave a short presentation and took questions from students via Blackboard Collaborate.

The session was introduced and moderated by students from the core group and Kelly was supported in her office by another student from the core group. This was the first time that the students had put into practice their knowledge gained from the advanced webinar training session.

Below is a recording of the webinar, this is a screen capture recording of it as we had an issue with the Blackboard Collaborate recording not capturing the slide transitions. We only had a couple of minor technical issues during the recording, one when students posed questions via a speaker phone which caused an echo, however this was quickly resolved. The second issue was again with the sound, but this time a voice was slightly muffled towards the end of the recording, this was due to the microphone on a headset slipping.

We think our first employability webinar was a great success, we learnt a number of important lessons and feel confident that the following ones will be equally successful too!


Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Advanced webinar training

During the last two weeks of term, we ran two sessions on advanced training on Webinars for the core students involved in the Students4webES project. The first session was run live with the presenter, Owen Hanmer from the JISC RSC SE in Kent, presenting to the group using Blackboard Collaborate. The session covered how to run a webinar via Collaborate including moderator settings and the chance for students to moderate a practice webinar. The whole session was recorded and used during the second session to train the other half of the core group. 

Students participating in the advanced webinar training session

All the students who attended the three hour training session received a certificate of participation. We are now ready to put our new knowledge into action and get started with our first webinar with an employer.... watch this space!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Happy New Year - 1 month of blogging

Having started the project blog at the end of November, now seems like the the ideal time to write a quick update about the blog, with the New Year only hours away.
To date we have had over 300 views with visitors from around the world following our progress.

Currently our most popular post is 'Infographic of baseline data on webinars' which has some great stats about students use of and access to technology and their knowledge (or lack of) about webinars, if you haven't seen it why not check it out!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

First batch of letters are in the post!

As part of the Students4webES project, the core group of students have been compiling a list of employers that they would like to run webinars with. As the project is about employability skills, we tasked them with drafting a letter, initially written by one student and then reviewed by the rest of the core group. After a few tweaks here and there by the Project Manager and Project Lead, the first batch of letters were dropped in the post today.
The bulk of the letters will be sent out in early January, followed by phone calls to arrange dates for the webinars which will take place during January and February. We will keep you posted on our progress!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Introduction to Webinar sessions

There are many challenges to running a JISC project in a FE college. For one thing, it's difficult to find a common time for people to meet. Unlike a university, where many/most students can get transport back to their halls or flats fairly easily, our students are dependent on parents, friends, buses to get home and often work as well as study.

We are using Moodle, SMS and email to communicate and we have weekly meetings during a 45 minute lunch break.

The good news is that we have had 3 weeks of an Introduction to Webinars for L3 students in the second year of the Professional Futures programme. The presenter, Owen Hanmer from the JISC RSC SE, along with an 'employer', Phil Robinson, also from the RSC, were in Kent, presenting to 3 groups in 3 different rooms while I did the introduction and summary in a 4th room, using Blackboard Collaborate. This gave the students a demonstration of a webinar platform, its use as a skill that might increase employability and useful information on what an employer looks for when hiring new staff. That reduces the number of students who didn't know what a webinar was!

Post by Ellen Lessner
Students4WebES Project Lead 

Consent forms and photographs

The first major task for the core group of students involved in the project was to research and produce a consent form for participants in our up and coming webinars. The consent form covers a number of areas, including the recording of webinars for future use and photographs taken during the project.

Students hard at work researching potential employers

Having had signed consent forms back from a number of students, I can post our first photo of students on this blog.

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Infographic of baseline data on webinars

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager