Careers blog written by: Hilary Neary, Information Assistant, Careers

You’ve probably heard the Employability Tutorial mentioned many times if you have ever been to an event run by Careers or looked at our website. You may not be entirely sure what it is or how it can benefit you. The aim of this blog is to try and uncover some of the ways the Employability Tutorial can help you when it comes to thinking about life after University and what happens next.

What is it?

The Employability Tutorial is an online tool to assist you on the path to figuring out what it is you want to do next.  It does this by providing a structure and pointers for your thinking. The tutorial is divided into three broad sections:

• Understanding myself
• Understanding my options
• Understanding the way forward.

Below I’ve summarised what you can get from each section.

Understanding myself is all about self-awareness so this section will help you answer questions like “What am I good at?” and help you identify what factors are important to you in making career choices.  The first fundamental step in thinking about career choice is to understand yourself. It’s easy to get swept along in the current if many of your friends are making applications, going to careers talks and getting interviews, added to that perhaps you’re feeling pressured by deadlines or family. Try to take the time to stop and take stock.

This section has the facility to pick and choose your priorities, and helps you explore what motivates you. The personality questionnaire assesses your preferences in terms of skills used in the workplace and how you like to approach tasks. At each point in this section there is space to record your thoughts and if you wish, you can add these to your action plan and set deadlines.

The My Skills section will help you identify and give evidence of your skills and also help you understand which skills employers value. The two exercises help you to think about what you are good at, how confident you feel about those skills and also what evidence do you have of the skills you’ve identified. There is a section where you can write down examples and this is helpful for getting it clear in your head and useful for interviews and applications when you have to give evidence.

If you’ve identified some areas for development, the action plan section will help you decide what action to take to change some of these. Pencil in some time frames for when you are going to have achieved change.

Understanding my options

This section is about researching potential career options. It includes tools to help you list and think about skills you have gained from your degree and it provides space to record evidence and examples of the skills you have listed.  This section also focuses on industry sectors and entry routes plus further study. Again you have the option to start to compile a list of sectors and job roles that appeal to you or further study options you are interested in.

The action plan and the how to research career options section are useful because if you are like me, you’ll have lots of ideas but actually pinning them down and working out how you might find out more can be the difficult and elusive part. The action plan provides a framework and gives you some structure on how to take your ideas forward and again there is space to record and set a timeframe.

Understanding the way forward

Decision making can be one of the hardest parts of your career planning, but this section introduces decision making tools and techniques. You are encouraged to think about your priorities which you set back in section one of the employability tutorial. The tutorial then details several different approaches you can use for decision making. This is really helpful and there are links to further information and worksheets so that you can find a method of decision making that suits you.

The Employability Tutorial provides a focus for your thinking, and a plan to work through. It can be helpful whatever stage you are at in your career planning and you can use it as much or as little as you like. Career planning can seem like a daunting and insurmountable task but the tutorial’s strength is that it breaks this down into smaller, manageable tasks. You can use it as a guide to help trigger ideas and direct you through the career planning quagmire.

On the other hand, if you already have a career path you want to follow, the tutorial is a useful place to record your experiences and skills so that when you start to complete applications and go for interviews, you have already started the process of thinking about your skills and how they can be applied to the workplace.