Just one of the words students used to describe group mentoring with our project. Other students cited the group sessions as “inspirational”, “enlightening”, “motivational” and “Insightful”. 58 students participated in group mentoring prior to the allocation their one to one mentor matching, resulting in us receiving overwhelming positive feedback on the sessions and them taking away great practical actions to improve their employability. Thanks go to Aamir, Adam, Baguiasri, Chris, Douglas, Durgha, Fareena, Haroon, Joe, Jolanta, Keith, Steve and Steven for their time and mentor insight!

Welcome to our January 2018 edition of our Employability Mentoring newsletter. It’s been a brilliant start to the academic year for our project and it’s been non stop. We are working with more students than ever before, offering a wider variety of experiences and have successfully hit more milestones sooner resulting in better outcomes for students.

We’ve seen an exponential increase in students engaging with the project this year with many more students sharing an expression of interest at events such as the University Careers Fair, The Legal Networking Event hosted by the Business and Law Faculty and through presentations in lectures. There has been a full on exploration and focus on employability this year making clear distinction between it and ‘employment’. Mentoring students has helped many to alleviate fears, encourage self worth, promote a spirit of enquiry and a desire to learn more about themselves and steer their futures.

“Mind-blowing!”

Durgha Ramji joins the mentoring project as Employability Mentoring Assistant. She will be supporting the delivery of the project, engaging with both mentees and mentors and igniting our social media presence. Please look out for key updates on twitter @DMUMentoring.

Welcome to Durgha Ramji!

Since joining us at the end of last summer, Durgha has made a

massive impact on the project. She has been brilliant with

students, developing new marketing and informing the projects

vision and strategy. She's a brilliant networker and a fantastic

asset to our work on the project. We are thrilled to have her

on board and look forward to great things. Welcome Durgha!

Employability Mentoring Project Newsletter #13 Welcome to our January edition - Latest project news from Employability Mentoring

Strength in partnership

The autumn term saw our project combining

forces with Leicester Castle Business School

to provide Employability Mentoring to a

range of students. We organised dedicated

workshops to help students explore their

own employability and skills in order to help

them identify areas for development. We set

up mentoring sessions with a number of

industry professionals to provide perspective

and share experiences in response to these

questions. Topics focused on self belief,

passion, happiness, work communication,

flexibility, resilience and determination. Big

thanks to our mentors Alasdair, Dave, Keith,

Phil and Steve for their time and perspective!

“This session has allowed me to start thinking about employability and what sort of professional I want to be which I haven’t done yet. I’ve realised I need to be more confident about my skills and abilities”, Adila

“I found the mentoring experience very useful because my questions were answered extremely well and the different perspectives each week helped to further develop what I’ve learned.”, Hasan

Group mentoring on our core project focuses on the subject of employability

We have recently successfully completed three weeks of group mentoring prior to matching. Our students successfully

completed a full process of introduction, induction, training and sampling mentoring in a group settings in preparation

for one to one mentoring. These students were asked for feedback following group mentoring. Comments included:

“I feel the programme is extremely well run. Andy and Durgha are very passionate about providing an insightful experience and makes the process even more enjoyable”, Brennan

Our mentors said students were very determined and keen to find out more and genuinely interested in mentoring. Special thanks goes to Douglas Flemington, Data Architect from Lloyds banking Group who attend all our sessions as a mentor. We asked Douglas to share thoughts on what students should take away from the mentoring experience...

“My key pieces of advice and guidance on building employability and becoming employable are know yourself in terms

of competencies, temperament, motivations, values, emotional scars, skills, knowledge, feelings and reactions and

their triggers, and acknowledge all those bits of you. There are loads of models which can be used to help this.

‘Pick something about you that you wish to change/ameliorate and make

that change a habit. Only those who risk going too far can

possibly know how far they can go’ TS Eliot”

Cheers Douglas!

Douglas

Flemington

On 1st November Andy joined Mark Evans from DMU Coaching at a Manchester Conference to showcase DMUs latest work and reputation for coaching and mentoring. The conference was organised by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, held at Manchester Metropolitan University.

At the start of the academic year we recruited DMU student Leigh Smith on placement with us. Leigh is our new Videographer and Digital Media Assistant who is here to help us showcase our work in Careers and Employability. During this academic year we plan to fully engage Leigh in our work and the wider department to help promote our offers and successes to students and industry. We asked her to share what she will be doing. “During this placement, by using my video filming and editing skills, I want to create short films which make a positive impact on people’s projects/events/websites. For example, by improving student & employer engagement. I believe that video is more engaging and can add dynamic to a webpage. Video can be a great promotional asset and I hope to create many high quality diverse videos for Careers which do the above.

Using our students talents to achieve success

By the end of my placement, I hope that there will be a wide appreciation of video and an awareness of how video can benefit other’s projects/events/websites.”

Leigh Smith,

Videographer

Mark Evans leads on DMU coaching

This term we have been actively involved in leading DMUs attainment mentoring scheme. Dare To Be mentoring is using university staff to provide mentoring and support to students seeking to improve on their grades and outcomes relating to studies. Using good practice learned through Employability Mentoring we have just finished preparing our first cohort of students ready for one to one matching. 41 students have been offered a mentor. Massive thanks go to our staff for supporting group mentoring . Particular thanks go to Paul Morrison from HPE for sharing his part experience for self development!

Dare to Be mentoring and attainment

Paul Morrison from HPE with Durgha and Andy

Mark and Andy developed a joint presentation focusing on how DMU nurtures potential into talent using our combined offers to students. It was an honour to promote our work at an event alongside a range of sector leaders and professionals, most notable being world famous mentoring and coaching expert David Clutterbuck. We received great feedback from our workshop and forged closer links with the council as a result. Huge thanks go to the brilliant Mark Evans for his work on the council for providing the platform to celebrate our work to others. We look forward to working with Mark in the coming year.

Welcome Leigh!

DMUemployabilitymentoring

twitter.com/DMUmentoring

A word from the Employability Mentoring Manager Our Careers and Employability webpages can help you!

If you’re a current student, graduate or alumni of DMU there is

great support on hand from Careers and Employability. All of

our offers can be found on our excellent webpages on DMU’s

main site. If you are a mentor on the scheme but not an alumni

of DMU you can still find out more about our work and get

involved in other areas of our work. Our webpages are a great

resource for signposting your mentee to get help internally if

they need it. The webpages are designed to help a student,

graduate or alumni no matter what stage they are at in their

career planning. Find out more about how by visiting:

www.dmu.ac.uk/careers

Our new film is out now

At the end of last summer we launched our new mentor recruitment film. This short film starring our mentors and mentees (with a brief cameo from our very own Sam Parr in Careers) highlights the power and benefits of mentoring and aims to draw new mentors to the project in order to increase the range and depth of talent in our mentors. Huge thanks go to Josh Penlington from JPentlington Media (DMU graduate) for his work in producing what is a fantastic piece of film making. If you have not seen the film it can be found on our mentor pages www.dmu.ac.uk/mentoring. Thanks also go to the stars of the film for giving up their time to produce this outstanding piece of work. Outstanding!!!

A big part of this year’s success is down to providing a project experience that is less directive and allows students to fully define what they want from mentoring. The aim has remained the same from day one... To improve the employability of our students using industry mentors. Happy New year!!!

Aims and objectives

This new academic year has seen the project evolve its aims and objectives further in the pursuit of best practice around mentoring. We have developed project objectives that offer students time and space to consider what employability is and then to identify a clearer understanding of their current position regarding their own employability. Allied to this we encourage students to identify a future desired state as to the sort of professional they aim to be, and then using the perspective of a range of industry mentors, we seek to illuminate potential pathways to achieve and ultimately for students to take action. As a result of our preparatory work we have seen students take greater ownership of their employability resulting in all of our students citing how our help has made a difference.