Work, and work Based learning

Work-based learning (WBL) provides experience that is vital to a student's personal development and employment prospects. All undergraduate programmes should ensure their students to gain work experience, and ensure students graduate with ideally two different pieces of work experience.

Work-related learning (WRL) is learning based as closely as possible on real work situations (e.g. case studies, research projects, simulations and enquiry-based learning). 'Authentic' activities and assessments provide students with opportunities to develop an understanding of how their knowledge and skills can be applied in real-world contexts.

Types of work experience: work experience can be credit and non-credit bearing. At Reading credit-bearing work experience is called a "placement"; non-credit bearing work experience usually an "internship".

When to gain work experience? It is recommended work experience to be build up progressively starting as early as feasible. Careers are facilitating a number of work opportunities such as for example credit bearing placements, the Reading Internships Scheme, UROP (academic work experience), Campus Jobs  (on Campus work experience) and can advise academics and students on the full range of extracurricular work experience opportunities students could pursue (for a short overview of open market opportunities have a look at www.ratemyplacement.co.uk)

co-curricular modules

The new policy on careers learning moves away from a requirement to have 5-credits of career management skills at Part 2, and instead moves to align with current best practice, which is to embed employability throughout every undergraduate programme.

There are numerous examples at the University of Reading of Careers Learning modules, where career management has been integrated within a larger, enquiry-based learning module. These encompass stand-alone study/research, and careers modules which encompass 5 credits of career management skills. A clear advantage of this approach is that the value placed on skills development is very visible to the students.

Benefits

Careers Learning modules such as these provide excellent opportunities for students to:

• Integrate and reflect on discipline-specific knowledge and skills from other modules
• Reflect on and articulate what they have learned

This makes them useful 'capstone' modules. Embedding Employability does not mean that modules such as these should not exist. On the contrary, introducing similar 'capstone' modules at one or more levels of the programme is one way in which Employability could be more fully explored across a programme.

Caveats

Co-Curricular options must be considered as part of a whole, and integrated with the Employability developments suggested for the programme level. Careers Learning modules may not be timely for all students. Students may also miss the relevance of what they are learning if skills development is perceived to be divorced from the discipline. This can lead to a lack of student engagement and skills development being compartmentalised. Students may struggle to apply what they have learnt to the rest of their programme, let alone their future career.

Stand-alone modules also do little to accommodate the 'slow' learning required for the development of the wider range of employability skills, and in particular those under the Curriculum Framework category of Personal Effectiveness and self awareness: self-efficacy, adaptability and resilience.