Session Outline

Fostering employability in undergraduate public health students: Developing a collaboration with employability centre advisors

Genevieve Breau (University of Greenwich); Mamodesan Okumagba (University of Greenwich); Sally Bashford-Squires (University of Greenwich)

In an undergraduate public health programme at a teaching-focused, post-1992 university, the Year 1 personal tutors have had a long-standing collaboration with the Employability Skills Advisors for the faculty, who are based in the university-wide employability centre. Part of this collaboration has involved developing and delivering group personal tutorial sessions on employability topics, to help students engage in their studies and motivate them by considering the diverse career paths they may take.

The sessions included overviews of the services on offer at the university employability centre, developmental sessions on career development and CV development. The centre also held sessions with staff from local charities that can support volunteers from public health backgrounds. These sessions took place throughout the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years.

In October 2024, the Year 1 personal tutors surveyed the public health students across the programme, to gather feedback on engagement with and satisfaction with these employability-focused sessions. In total 75 students took part in the cross-sectional survey. For Year 2 and Year 3 students, only a minority (25.0-40.0%) attended the employability sessions offered as part of group personal tutorials. However, the students who attended were generally satisfied with the sessions, and stating the sessions met their expectations.

Given that the framework from tutoring has changed at this institution, shifting from a personal and pastoral focus to an academic and goal-setting focus, it is important to gauge the impact of the collaboration between personal tutors and Employability Skills Advisors over two years. Given the development of this collaboration, this has facilitated collaboration between programme and module leaders and the staff at the employability centre, to shift the focus to employability throughout the teaching on the programme.

Attendees at the session will learn best practices for collaborations and working partnerships between academic and professional services staff at teaching-focused universities, in order to support student success and graduate outcomes. Attendees will be engaged through a question session at the conclusion of the session, and prompted to consider how tutors might collaborate with other university staff to support student engagement and motivation with teaching.

Personal Tutoring, Moving Beyond the Traditional - Helping Students Create Meaning from Elective Immersive Experiences.

Kat Sethi (Birmingham City University)

Personal tutoring within the nursing department in a faculty of Health Education and Life Sciences historically has had a narrow and limited application. Limited to mandatory meetings with a student in order to sign off clinical placement, or in response to managing student crisis. Therefore, it could be argued that the personal tutor used in this way is not fulfilling the potential of the role, and the student is not gaining the benefits of having this type of personal tutor experience (Chadha et al. 2021; Wakelin 2023).

In 2022 Birmingham City University (BCU) partnered with ‘Flourish’ (West Birmingham Community Health Collaborative), to create a ‘Community and Cultural Immersion’ (CCI) placement pathway for nursing and allied health professional pre-registration students. This pathway provides the opportunity to establish a firsthand understanding of the diverse community we serve as healthcare professionals and the unique needs and challenges faced, with the goal of developing community aware and culturally humble practitioners who have the experience and confidence to welcome, listen and provide the best possible care for all members of our community.

However, in order for students to create meaning from their CCI they needed a place to explore their experience of it through reflection. It is known that reflecting on experiences through guided reflection enhances the reflectors’ ability to explore deeply the meaning of experiences (Clarke, 2024). Having the time and safe space to reflect through guided reflection can enable generation of knowledge of self that can not only lead to transformational change, but ensure our students become reflective professionals as required by the Nursing and Midwifery (NMC) standards for practice. (NMC 2018; Agnew, 2022; Clarke, 2024).

The collaboration with Flourish a third sector organisation, provided a unique opportunity to develop the personal tutor role. It empowered the role to have a place in the student’s journey and become more meaningful within that journey, by using the CCI as a framework for purposeful, personal tutor reflective conversations where students were encouraged to explore and make sense of the cultural knowledge they were gaining. To contextualise that knowledge against their own value set as Schon (1983) would suggest, to understand their own swampy lowlands.

As a result, students developed attributes of cultural humility which would enable them to practice in a culturally sensitive and emotionally intelligent manner.

The objectives of this lightening talk are,

1. Share details of how the personal tutor in a faculty of Health has supported students to make meaning from an elective cultural immersion programme.

2. Demonstrate the importance of the personal tutor conversations in supporting reflection on experience, and development of self-awareness in the student.

3. Showcase how personal tutoring can be utilised beyond its traditional use, towards a more embedded approach within the curriculum.

Personal Tutoring on an online course: Student Experience and the Online Pedagogy of Care

Carly Jacobs (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Learning Outcomes

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