Recent studies have shown that students are comfortable using sites such as Facebook and Twitter in their social lives but feel less confident about applying those skills for learning.
Our own small-scale study, carried out in conjunction with our careers service SEECC, indicates that the same seems to be true for careers research, networking, engaging in discussions, and showcasing achievements – all crucial employability skills for our students in the digital age.
117 Reading students took part in the survey we conducted in February to find out how our students are using social media for employability.
Nearly all respondents (98.3%; 115) stated that they are registered on social media sites. 96.6% (113) of students are signed up to Facebook, 50.4% (59) registered on Twitter, and 33.3% (39) using YouTube, with many students accessing their accounts on a daily or even hourly basis. However, only 13.7% (16) of students who took part in our survey have uploaded a profile on LinkedIn, the professional networking site recommended by many careers experts.
Only a small number of students are using social media for employability. For example, out of 115 students using Facebook only 10.4% (12) are using this site to search for jobs or work experience, 9.6% (11) for networking with potential employers, 16.5% (19) to research companies, 4.3% (5) to engage in professional discussions, and 3.5% (4) to showcase their academic profile.
Reasons for not using social media sites in this way include students’ perceptions of those sites as purely social platforms, concerns about employers seeing their profiles, and uncertainty regarding how social media sites could help them with their careers.
Students come to university already familiar with social media which, with a little guidance, could give them another string to their bows when it comes to finding work experience and graduate jobs, and in their professional development. In February, Em Sowden, Senior Placement and Development Manager here at Reading, ran a session on ‘Using social media for employability’.
As Em explained, recruiters expect applicants to have a professional online presence. Employers are increasingly and actively using social media as an instant, cheap medium to find and recruit proactive job seekers. Em recommends Twitter and LinkedIn to help students and graduates conduct research on companies they are interested in, as well as connecting with recruiters, building contacts and discovering or even creating employment-related opportunities. Her presentation and top tips can be found here.
The Digitally Ready team are working with SEECC to look at ways of engaging students so that they can take full advantage of the capabilities of social media to raise their professional profile.
… and now for a blog about blogs
Blogs providing a solution for a variety of academic projects.
Blogs have been employed for some time within the University by a number of colleagues and more recently these have used as a means of feeding news, events and commentary to University webpages by a variety of departments such as Typography and English Literature.
As the example below shows, these have proven to be a simple, quick and professional means to delivery messages on a variety of subjects and allowing users the opportunity to comment on articles leading to debate.
More recently I have been working with a two academic colleagues from the humanities and sciences within the university, employing blogging as a solution for different parts of their projects.
France under allied attack between 1940-1945
Working with Professor Andrew Knapp – Professor of French Politics and Contemporary History who was looking for a way to convey the output of research on the “France under allied attack between 1940-1945”
The project required a large number of images with descriptive text and acknowledgement of the image owners to be displayed in an “online exhibition”. Another objective was to showcase the work to the public as means of capturing impact for the REF (Research Excellence Framework).
After discussing a couple of the options such as Flickr as a means to present the work we agreed creating a blog would be the best option delivering the following benefits:
Since the blog has gone live we have deployed google analytics to monitor hits to the site as well as added Andrew’s “bombing talk” podcast .
The beauty of using a blog for this piece of work has been to deliver all the functionality above, keep within branding guidelines while present an interesting and high quality product.
Cultivating Common Ground
In this case the blog has been used to publish articles to encourage debate between interested parties, encourage participation in the project as well as updates towards the event. The blog will also serve as a record of the project.