Employability and careers

Through shaping our curriculum, and working with employers and our alumni we are embedding and enhancing employability in every Arts and Humanities degree in our school.

It is our ambition to equip all students with the skills, qualities and experience to assist them to become work-ready. This helps our students enter a broad range of graduate level employment or to go onto beneficial further study.

We support all of our Arts and Humanities students in developing relevant professional attributes through a focus on employability that is embedded into the design, learning and assessment of every degree course in the school. This includes core employability skills and career planning activity, assessed placement and work-like activity and coursework reflecting on their degree in the context of future career aspirations.

Short work experience placements (minimum of 30 hours) in the second year of study are an important element of our degree programmes and have been designed for mutual benefit. Our students share their time, skills, creative thinking and enthusiasm, and the placement organisation provides our students with real life, graduate level work and learning experiences, often resulting in tried and tested talent for future graduate recruitment.

Placements are sourced and set up by our specialist employability staff. Some are also established by academics in the school based on their own professional contacts so they have the added value of being highly curriculum focused. There are over 120 opportunities for students to select from via InPlace, our work experience portal. Placements can also be self-sourced and students will be helped with this process by experienced and specialist staff if they choose this route.

Examples of the range of employers we place students with are:

Nottingham Industrial Museum
Creswell Crags Museum and Heritage Centre
Boots Archives
Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club
Travamigos Ltd
Beeston Film Festival
Ignite Futures
The Dairy Creative Agency
Simbrix
Written in Film
Universal Music Group
Cloud 9 Event Management
Nottingham City Council
Frank PR
Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery
Sky TV
The Co-operative Bank
Nottingham Academy.

For Journalism students, work with regional news brands, commercial radio stations, NottsTV and The Voice newspaper make up some of their work experience provision.

Students are free to explore many different job roles for their work experience to dip their toe in the water, and to see what suits, including the following range of job titles:

PR Assistant
Events Manager
Sub-Editor
Language Café Assistant
Assistant Archivist
English Conversation Group Facilitator
Digital Editor
Museum Assistant
Refugee Services Volunteer
Instagram Editor
Social Media Assistant
Creative Writer
Classroom Assistant
Costume and Set Designer
Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist
Comic Relief Organiser
Social Media Assistant
Teacher’s Assistant
Collections Researcher
Media Intern
Camera Operator
Video and Podcast Producer
Communications Assistant
Marketing Assistant.

Funding to support work experience is available for some students and advice and practical support on sourcing, applying for and successfully completing a placement is provided by employability staff and academic tutors. Support is also given by module tutors to help students reflect on and contextualise their work experience and to articulate how it might influence future endeavours.

Elsewhere in the curriculum, employability is embedded in module content in imaginative ways. Groupwork on ‘live’ projects to briefs set by employers forms the assessed coursework for many modules.

This ranges from providing a language-based service or solution to a brief set by an employer on a language module, to arranging and running an academic conference on an English module, to the production of videos for local community groups on a Media module, to the research and production of a leaflet and exhibition on a local archive by a History student.

We especially enjoy our annual event that celebrates the projects developed by students on the Humanities at Work module where they examine contemporary social issues and communicate their findings in inspirational ways.

Culture

Extra-curricular employability related activity is encouraged with briefs set for groups of students from across the school to work together on inter-disciplinary projects.

Recent examples are a video course during the school’s project week that resulted in video interviews with graduates of Arts and Humanities degrees about their careers; a group of media students documenting an ERASMUS trip to Germany and Romania by 100 NTU students from across the university; students from Arts and Humanities along with students from Art and Design and Social Sciences working with the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery to produce a journal of articles responding to some of the exhibitions at the gallery in the last year.

And finally, a multi-disciplinary arts and humanities group making a video about why the creative industries are so important to NTU students. The resulting material is used in the curriculum as a form of peer education around employability.

Employer links

Employer links are developed and nurtured in our school, with employers setting live briefs for assessed student projects and contributing to curriculum content through lectures and insights into their industry. Regular events link our students with potential employers including ‘Meet the Alumni’ events on Joint Honours Humanities and our TESOL courses, a Futures Day focusing on journalism, media, PR and communications and a number of jobs fairs throughout the year to facilitate placement and graduate recruitment.

Transition into work

Programmes delivered by our employability team like the Steps to Success course, a careers-based qualification called Acceler8, support for entrepreneurship from NTU’s HIVE scheme and access to Emponline, a web-based resource with e-learning materials, will help smooth the transition into the world of work for our Arts and Humanities graduates.

For our third-year students, support in job-hunting, access to our graduate development programmes, attendance at employer-insight events and a number of different job fairs will help them on their way.

And, our students are supported for a further three years after graduating to support their career journey. This is promoted by the FutureYou team when we help celebrate our students handing in of their dissertations. ‘Mocks-fizz’ and bespoke cupcakes help to celebrate the occasion and to focus the mind on where to go from here!

Alumni Fellowships

The Alumni Fellowship Programme is NTU’s university-wide innovative alumni volunteering scheme, allowing valued graduates to give some of their time to support current students, and remain part of the NTU community. Fellows take part in activities such as one-to-one mentoring, guest lecturing, writing blog posts, employability workshops, offering placements, Skype Q&A sessions, contributing to open days and much more.

In the School of Arts and Humanities, the programme is going from strength to strength with around 150 Alumni Fellows supporting the School. Fellows, who all have at least two years of professional experience, draw expertise and knowledge from a wide range of career paths. Employers represented include Sky News, the National Justice Museum, Arts Council England, Boots-Walgreens Alliance, the National Trust, PFK Cooper-Parry, BBC, Cambridge University Press, Tank PR, Impression Digital and many more, along with teachers, police officers, creative freelancers, writers and museum professionals. Learn more about the Alumni and Industry Fellowship Programme.

Scholarships

Our school employability staff and our academics are involved in scholarship around employability too with the publication of text books on careers in the arts and humanities, the presentation of papers and workshops at conferences and writing journal articles with examples of good practice from across the school. We like to think we are leading the way in this area of higher education in the UK. This will impact positively on our students and the curriculum.