Costa Roussis, Employer Engagement Officer, University of East London
What are the challenges that your students and colleagues face?
Many of the challenges our students face can be around sourcing relevant career opportunities and ensuring they are adequately prepared when applying for graduate level roles. As a careers service, a lot of the challenges faced are centred around student engagement over the course of the academic year.
How does your institution help students and colleagues overcome these challenges?
University of East London positions itself as a career-first university and is dedicated to nurturing and supporting students on their career journey.
Through a variety of initiatives, our goal is to ensure students have the necessary preparation when going into the world of work.
We’re thankful that ELBA has been able to support us with a variety of employability initiatives to ensure leading employers are matched with the University’s key activities. Some of the engagement initiatives include: embedded employer sessions, careers fairs, mock interviews, mock assessment centres, employer pop-up stands, panel sessions and more.
The ELBA team has been particularly helpful with supporting us on a range of requests and are often able to source speakers and volunteers at very short notice. This makes it a lot easier for the University of East London to engage with a range of employers over the course of an academic year.
By engaging with a variety of initiatives, students can build up their professional network, learn more about their career opportunities, hear from industry professionals and better prepare themselves for the world of work.
Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work that you would like to share?
One of the highlights from the previous academic year was the poster presentation that took place at the end of the Mental Wealth Consultancy module.
As part of this applied learning experience, students were matched with real businesses to act as student consultants, tackling live challenges. Supported by academic supervision and informed by industry experts, students worked collaboratively in teams to deliver data-driven, actionable solutions to challenges the organisations were experiencing.
The students’ overall projects and presentations were marked on content and research, organisation and structure, visual appeal and design, and overall presentation skills. I had the pleasure of being one of the judges on the panel. This experience was particularly satisfying as it was a chance to see students work as part of a team, interact with live organisations and come together to present back to a wider group.
What kind of support are you in need of right now and how might volunteering fit into that?
The type of support that I think University of East London students can benefit from in the future would be mock assessment centres with organisations that have live roles available.
