Promoting employability and careers

Careers and employability is a topic that can be promoted through  featured content on existing school and course pages:

• Build up profiles which can then be used to feature an alumni's career path.
  
  
• Create engaging stories. eg. show how a course helped lead to success.
  
  
• Create videos to highlight career opportunities.

Course pages are our most important pages.

Employability/careers content should be available in the Careers tab of course pages eg. Law - LLB (Hons) careers

This is effective as it is in context to the course content. A prospective student is likely to go directly to a course page.

Improve your course pages by adding profiles and videos.

Stories can be entered via a school's news blog. 

They can be filtered by an ‘employability’ category on the news and events page. This removes the need for another system for employability content eg. a separate blog or website.

It brings the content into the fold of the school's website. Content feels integrated and joined-up.

If there are school-specific employability schemes that cannot be represented anywhere else (such as on the About page), an extra page may be possible.

The extra page option should be discussed with the central editor to check whether it is needed.

Additional blogs/domains increase maintenance and may reduce consistency. This can result in a disjointed user journey. 

• Blogs are informal. They are intended as personal or interest group communication platforms. This can work for recruitment at times, such as student blogging about a research interest.
  
  
• Blogs were not created for official, factual recruitment information. Kent blogs even contain this message on all pages:
  “The views expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the University of Kent.”
  
  
• Blogs lose out on the carefully crafted global menu, footer and search which are aimed to help prospective users along their journeys.
  
  

What do I do with my existing employability blog?

Some schools have invested time and effort into 'employability' blogs.

Our recommendation is to gradually bring that content within the school’s marketing/recruitment website through the methods outlined above.

During the process we will link to the blog from the school's site. 

Employability information aimed at current students shouldn't be used on your school's marketing site.

School-specific information for current students should be placed in Moodle. 

Current students should find general university employability information in the employability section of Student Guide.