Creating a pathway to employability in a Business School: developing professional practice through collaboration

Abstract

Within Business Education, our students study technical skills and gain commercial knowledge which will equip them for their future careers. In addition, our students need to develop the 'soft skills' which employers are looking for when they recruit graduates. To create a pathway to employability, we have used a collaboration between a module leader and a Business School employability consultant to support second year students. We set out how we have included the consultant in planning and delivering specific topics within the module, and in giving formative feedback to students. In this way we have embedded employability skills in the curriculum and built a relational pathway to the Business School's careers support for students.

Team work in business education: history, key concepts, and challenges

“…These organizations have first exerted informal and formal pressures to include, and more recently, to explicitly demonstrate how business schools develop these skills in their graduating cohorts (AACSB, 2008(AACSB, , 2013(AACSB, , 2018ABDC, 2014;EFMD, 2019;Rubin & Martell, 2009). As accreditation bodies and other external institutions ramped up their calls for attention to this issue, business schools started internalizing these pleas by introducing team work in one or multiple courses that were supposed to develop those highly desired team work skills (Bedwell et al, 2014;Leopold & Reilly, 2020;Ritter et al, 2017). Over time, the inclusion of team work in some courses evolved into an informal norm or expectation that most, if not all, courses in business schools should include team work as part of their pedagogical strategies.…”

'Next slide, please': developing students' digital literacy and online collaboration skillsets

“…Teamwork is regularly identified as a key skill needed in the workplace (Jones, 2014) and the employability specialist focused on this during her first session in Week 2. This, an interactive session, had previously engaged students in a team-building exercise using Lego (Leopold and Reilly, 2020). In 2020-21, we needed to find a way to replicate the hands-on experience in a remote setting, while recognising the variability of students' access to digital resources.…”

“…The second session, led by the specialist during Week 3, was on delivering a good presentation. Previously, students had worked in groups to present in the classroom, using a story that they had constructed with non-culturally specific pictures (Leopold and Reilly, 2020). In the new setting online, students continued to create group presentations based on similar pictures, but developed their presentations in virtual groups and then presented them via Microsoft Teams.…”