Information for staff
Embedding Careers and Employability in Your Course
GOAL 1 - Foster Purpose and Agency
- Career exploration
- Sense of purpose
- Professional identity
- Self awareness
GOAL 2 - Develop Skills and Real World Context
- Authentic experiences
- Work integrated learning
- Networking
- Employer voice
GOAL 3 - Support Transitions to Work
- Graduate applications and interviews
- Resilience
- Long term view of career
Key recommendations
- Focus on students’ understanding themselves and their future career opportunities – encourage proactive career development.
- Develop technical and transferrable skills throughout the course – make them explicit and authentic.
- Maximise career development opportunities presented within Work Integrated Learning and final year capstone experiences.
Following are a range of career resources and services to support JCU staff incorporate career development and employability within their subject or whole of degree program.
The Career Ready Plan lists twelve key strategies to assist students maximise their employability and achieve their career goals.
Each strategy has a detailed list of recommended actions. A PDF overview of the Career Ready Plan is also available for distribution.
JCU Career Ready Plan - Strategies
- Explore your options, clarify your goals
- Aim for academic success
- Show initiative, get involved
- Build your contacts and networks
- Identify employer expectations
- Gain career relevant experience
- Develop your skills
- Develop your professional identity
- Fine tune your application skills
- Find graduate jobs and programs
- Evidence your strengths
- Pull it all together
Academics may also choose to use these strategies to signpost specific career development learning occurring within their subject or degree program.
For example:
Develop your skills – use the subject outline to draw the students’ attention to the skills they will be developing and their application in future employment context.
Evidence your strengths – incorporate ePortfolio, resume or LinkedIn profiles into assessment tasks.
For more information on how to signpost or incorporate career development learning within your subject or degree please email careers@jcu.edu.au.
The Employability Edge program is a series of self-paced modules developed by JCU Careers and Employability to assist JCU students with career exploration, employability and transition into course relevant and graduate employment.
The modules can be self-accessed or incorporated into subjects as a gateway task or to support an assessment task.
Employability Edge modules and approximate completion times
- You and Your Career (120 mins)
- 21st Century Work Ready (90 mins)
- Boost Your Skills (30 – 90 mins per skill)
- Maximise Course-Relevant Experience (120 mins)
- Graduate Job Search (90 mins)
- Develop Your Professional Identity (120 mins)
- Master Written Applications (120 mins)
- Interviews and Recruitment Processes (120 mins)
Each module contains a fillable pdf activity book that requires students to respond and reflect on the content of the module.
The activity books can be uploaded into the LearnJCU Grade Centre as hurdle/assessment/validation items, as well uploaded into ePortfolios.
For more information on how to utilise these modules within your subject or course please email careers@jcu.edu.au
The Big Interview program provides online training and practice to assist students improve their interview techniques and build their confidence.
Registration is free for JCU students, staff and alumni.
A number of JCU degree programs have integrated Big Interview into subject assessment tasks or professional development requirements.
Access Big Interview via the JCU Careers and Employability site to receive the free login.
Big Interview includes:
- The ability to record, rate and share interview responses with staff or peers for feedback/evaluation
- The ability to incorporate customised interview questions relevant to your subject, into the program
- Virtual mock interviews for all experience levels in over 20 industry areas
- A database of thousands of interview questions with tips on how to respond
- Comprehensive video training and written training modules covering all interview techniques.
Careers and Employability will assist you with developing customised interview questions relevant to your subject requirements. For further assistance email careers@jcu.edu.au
JCU Careers and Employability work closely with JCU staff to deliver tailored career workshops/webinars/presentations within lectures, tutorials and other course related events.
Presentations can run from 5 minutes through to 120 minutes depending on your requirements.
Topics include:
- Career Ready Plan for … (First Year, Middle Year, Final Year)
- Build Your Career in … (degree area)
- Winning Job Applications
- Interview Preparation
- Marketing Myself
- Developing My Professional Identity
- Getting Started on LinkedIn
- Networking
- Successful Job Search Strategies
- Transferrable Skills and How to Develop Them
Got another idea? Get in touch and we can develop something for you.
Career Snapshots – provide course specific information to complement the Career Ready Plan.
The Snapshots are two-page PDFs providing information on graduate opportunities, career paths, registration requirements and strategies to increase employability.
Course-Specific Resumes – graduate resume examples for each course. General graduate, part-time, postgraduate, and higher degree by research resume examples are also available.
Reinforce learning, inspire, and motivate your students using industry insight and experience. Below are ideas on how to quickly add current industry insights to your subject.
- Lecture slide examples - No space in your subject for a guest speaker? Use these slide examples to quickly deliver slices of information to underscore your teaching.
- Job of the Week - Tips and examples on how to develop industry awareness through job vacancies.
- Alumni profiles - Elements to include in slides to give an insider’s view of work for a new graduate.
- My Career Snapshot - Content guide for guest speakers - tips on what students want to know.
The Careers and Employability team have access to the Graduate Outcome Survey (GOS) conducted by Social Research Centre and funded by the Australian Government Department of Education.
The GOS is completed by graduates of Australian higher education institutions approximately four to six months after finishing studies. The GOS measure short-term employment outcomes including full time and part time employment rates by study area, median salaries by study area, skills utilisation, further study activities and graduate satisfaction.
Please contact us for further information or assistance in accessing this data.
Alternatively, the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) website, funded by the Australian Department of Education provides the following information:
- Student Experience Survey (SES) - measuring teaching and learning outcomes and reports on multiple facets of the student experience.
- Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) - providing information on the labour market outcomes and further study activities of graduates.
- Graduate Outcome Surveys – Longitudinal (GOS-L) - supplementing the GOS by measuring the medium-term employment outcomes of graduates, approximately three years after they have completed their course.
- Employer Satisfaction Survey (ESS) - providing information about the quality of education, the generic skills, technical skills, and work readiness of the graduate employed in their workplace.
The ComparEd website provides individuals the ability to search and filter the QILT survey data.
Career Development is the "process of managing life, learning, work, leisure, and transitions across the lifespan in order to move towards a personally determined future."1
Career education and development at university is about providing ‘learning experiences aimed at building students’ personal and work-related knowledge, skills, and understanding so that they are empowered to make informed career decisions and constructively manage their own career pathways” (McCowan et al., 2017, p26)2 .
Graduate Employability is a "set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy" (Yorke, 2006, p8)3 .
Employability Skills are the skills required to gain employment and may be transferred from one situation to another. They are often referred to as transferrable, generic, or soft skills.
1 CICA. (2019). Professional Standards for Australian Career Development Practitioners.
2 McCowan, C., McKenzie, M., & Shah, M. (2017). Career Education and Development: A guide for personnel in educational institutions in both developed and developing countries. In House Publishing.
3 Yorke, M. 2006. Employability in Higher Education: What it is – What it is not. Learning and Employability Series One. York: The Higher Education Academy.