Dr Paul Redmond is Head of the Careers & Employability Service (CES), where issues around employability, graduate employment and the impact of Internationalisation are having a major impact on the work of the service.
This is a crucial period for the Careers & Employability Service. Nationally, a challenging economic environment, coupled with an increasingly competitive and globalised recruitment market, means that their work is rightly attracting higher levels of scrutiny than ever before.
Here, Paul describes a day in his busy schedule:
7.50am – arrive at campus and prepare for the day ahead – after a cup of tea of course!
8am –a film crew is here to film me for a postgraduate conference, no students will be present as it is a bit early for them! The film will be shown at a conference later in the month. Feeling like a bad X Factor contestant, with only a cameraman for company, I launch in to my opening spiel. Total and utter silence, fortunately, as a parent of teenage children, talking to myself comes easy.
9am – filming over, it’s time to give a welcome address to a new cohort of graduates, who over the next fortnight will be joining our in-house career management course. I am always blown away by how talented and motivated our graduates are.
10am – I have a telephone interview with a national newspaper on research I have been working on called Generation Y, which is the demographic group born from 1980 onwards , and as the world’s first digital natives they are having a profound impact on the world of work. The journalist also wants to talk about how the proposed changes to university funding will affect students’ attitudes to careers.
10.30am – off to a management meeting. The workload of the team has escalated in recent years particularly in terms of building links with local and national employers – we are now one of the top-20 targeted universities in the UK proof of how much employers value our degrees.
12.30pm –it is important to meet and get to know as many graduate recruiters as possible and I am having lunch with two senior ranking army officers, both just back from active service in Iraq and Afghanistan, suddenly the concerns of the day no longer seem quite so pressing.
3pm – Liverpool has a thriving MBA programme, attracting students from across the world, today I am giving a lecture to MBA students on how organisations are using brand-management techniques to attract new groups of consumers.
5.30pm – I am meeting with five enthusiastic second-year students who are preparing to enter a competition run by a big energy firm. To attract the best students, many organisations run competitions for teams of students to compete in – as well as looking good on a CV they give students a taste of what it’s like to work in a real team situation.
Text taken from Daily Post article with kind permission of Dr Paul Redmond