Careers and Enterprise Blog
Andrew Lombart
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What began the year as “The CORE” ended as “The Careers and Enterprise Hub’!
A familiar name to most within the university, The CORE had been the name of our service since 2014. Whilst catchy and colourful, The CORE as an identifier, was open to interpretation as to it’s meaning for both students, staff and others.
Fast forward to the summer of 2019 and the team underwent a rebranding process, becoming The Careers and Enterprise Team – a change that brought a more obvious and modern feel to the service for both students, staff and others. This was seen in the launch of the renovated Careers and Enterprise Hub in Augustine House during October.
Since October, The Hub has been host to over 34 brand new workshops aimed at supporting students with developing their career skills. Over 126 students attended these workshops during 2019 with many more scheduled to run in 2020. The overall student feedback for this new service has been really positive.
Opportunities Abroad 
Unconsious Bias talks 
Sustainable enterprise 
Learning Teamwork through videogames – one of the many student workshops in 2019
Whilst the drop-in service was always popular, the new more welcoming Hub style saw a 60% increase in student uptake of the career support service between October and December 2019 compared to the same months in 2018.
The rebrand continued to our web presence online. Our Careers and Enterprise Online Hub offered students the opportunity, amongst other fantastic resources, to take their Career Pulse; a self-assessment tool that allows students to gauge their career readiness in areas of the department’s brand new career framework called Future 360. All work in this area was recognised by the team winning the “Career Centre Innovation Award for Developing Employability” at the 2019 Abintegro Conference.
In 2019, the Careers and Enterprise Team ran many bespoke student career events with upwards of 30 sector-specific employers attended each event offering students fantastic opportunities. Faculty and School-specific career events enjoyed success when supported by enthusiastic academics who encouraged student attendance.
None of these events would have been possible without the work being done by the team to engage and work with local employers as well as Alumni. We had the opportunity to thank these valuable partners with awards at The Evening on the Terrace event in June 2019.
On the topic of awards, our very own Hannah Marsh won the “Internal Consultant of the Year award 2019 – one that demonstrated her commitment to supporting the Unitemps branch embed the service it provides to the university and students, with particular reference to how her positive and friendly attitude representing the team and department in a great way.
Finally, the team successfully won an Office for Students Project bid to support local graduates with low mobility into graduate progress into graduate employment in the local SME sector and increase the number of graduate jobs in Kent and Medway overall. To read more about project “Gradforce” and how to get involved by following this link.
On behalf of the Careers and Enterprise Team, we look forward to working with you in 2020.
