Careers and Employability Services

Student Voice Week Activity

Friday 19 November - 4:00pm - 5:30pm - X1 Focus Group Session on Adobe Connect (1.5 hours)

Careers and Employability Services (CES) Session:

Could Career Action Plans from individual careers consultations be more useful?

We warmly invite you to take part in a fun-filled Focus Group Friday 19 November 16:00-17:30 to explore Career Action Plans, their purpose and value for you, whether they meet your needs and how they may be improved. This interactive online session will be delivered via a range of group participation activities, such as polls, quick-fire quizzes, and digital thought boards (such as Padlet), focused around discussions with other students and people from your careers team. We’d love to have a diverse mix of different opinions and experiences, backgrounds, identities, races and cultures, mental and physical health conditions, abilities, and disabilities. Take this opportunity to have your voice heard.

What are Career Action Plans and how can you influence them?

Every individual consultation between an OU student and OU Careers Consultant results in an Action Plan. It’s where the Consultant summarizes the action points agreed during your discussion for handy reference. These will usually be the next steps to achieving your goals – whether personal progression, discovering where OU study might take you, exploring career pathways or making successful applications. We want to hear different student voices from all stages of the student journey and career journey.

We want Careers Action Plans to be as useful to you as possible, so you’ll have lots of different, interactive ways to:

Share what you think the purpose of careers action planning should be.

Tell us how valuable you think they are and how they might be made even better.

If you’ve had a careers consultation, share your personal experience of the OU’s careers action planning.

Share with us the impact careers action plans have had on your career management and progression.

Whether you have used the OU’s Careers and Employability Services frequently or perhaps just once for a careers consultation, you can help us ensure that the service meets your and other students’ needs, so share your voice during this focus group.

Why join this focus group?

You’ll be able to influence the way consultants and students collaborate to produce Career Action Plans during career consultations as well as their design and improvement and ensuring they’re fit for purpose.

Participation in an Open University focus group builds and demonstrates your collaborative skills and eagerness for personal development, which in turn supports your employability. On request, we can provide evidence of your participation to support job applications, interviews, or other professional engagements.

It’s a simple way to be more involved in your University community, gain more awareness of other students’ perspectives and knowledge of good practice.

We can share the main findings of the focus group and how your insights will help us further develop and improve the service.

This is a great opportunity to have your voice heard and make a difference, so please do come and join us on Friday 19 November 16:00-17:30.