Saints Skills Spotlight Award – a success story
In this post, Ricky Shek, one of our Careers Advisers, reflects on the success of the Saints Skills Spotlight Award, which ran for the first time in 2023-2024.
The need for skills articulation
As careers professionals, we frequently receive questions from students about how they can effectively showcase their skills to employers, whether on a CV, application form, or during an interview. This common concern inspired us to create a new initiative to address these needs.
Developing the Saints Skills Spotlight Award
Working with our colleagues in CEED (Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development), we developed the Saints Skills Award to help students develop and articulate their employability skills. While CEED focused on the Saints Skills Builder Award to help students develop new skills, the Careers Centre aimed to create a self-directed learning programme—the Saints Skills Spotlight Award.
The Spotlight Award structure
The Spotlight Award was designed to simulate a mock recruitment process that a typical graduate employer would adopt. Students were asked to submit the following:
- A job description based on a job of their choosing.
- A tailored CV and cover letter for that job.
Students who passed the initial CV and cover letter screening would then complete a recorded online video interview. Successfully passing all three elements earned students the Spotlight Award, which was added to their HEAR records and a digital badge for their LinkedIn profile.
This initial application stage really challenged the students to articulate their skills in multiple formats.
The Assessment Centre
We had the difficult decision of choosing the top performing students who were invited to an employer-led assessment centre, hosted by our sponsor Q2 Solutions, a leading drug discovery and development laboratory services organisation. This stage required students to complete a group exercise and a one-to-one interview.
Site visit to Q2 Solutions
Our sponsors had the challenging task of selecting the top-performing students. Ultimately, three were chosen and given the opportunity to visit Q2 Solutions at their premises in Livingston. The visit included a tour of the facilities, their testing laboratories and medical testing kit departments. The students also had the opportunity to speak with various professionals, gaining invaluable insight and career advice.
Employer feedback
Feedback from last year’s sponsors included:
- “The students worked really well together. They all worked cohesively as a team and really listened to each other’s ideas before building on them. Some really great ‘out of the box’ creative thinking.”
- “They really demonstrated their skills and abilities during the one-to-one interview stage, using wide and varied examples to evidence the competencies we asked them about.”
- “The assessment centre format was well-run and followed a very similar format to the one we use.”
Student feedback
We were delighted that our students also gave us positive feedback about the Spotlight Award. They all agreed or strongly agreed that the Spotlight Award helped them articulate their employability skills, improve their knowledge of how to write a CV and cover letter, and increase their confidence in video interviews.
Read blog posts of students who have completed the Spotlight Award:
Conclusion
Overall, we were thrilled to create a learning programme that both challenged and developed students’ ability to articulate their skills in a simulated recruitment process. With this experience, students can now confidently apply for any future opportunities.
Apply now!
Fancy putting your skills to the test? Sign-up for this semester’s Saints Skills Spotlight Award on CareerConnect Pathways.
Semester 1 deadline: Sunday 20 October 2024 at 23:59.