Eleanor Dall is Employer Engagement Officer at University of East London, one of ELBA’s wonderful partner universities. We hear from Eleanor about how the university supports its current students and alumni throughout their journey to graduate employment, the challenges that students face, and how ELBA fits into this. Plus, Eleanor tells us how volunteers can get involved to support the University and its students.

What are the challenges that your students and colleagues face?
We support our current students and alumni throughout their journey to graduate employment. From CV support, mock interviews, to inspiring industry talks and valuable internships, we give students the tools to equip themselves for their future careers.

Many of our students are the first in their family to go to university, whilst others are returning to university after taking time out for family or working commitments. We recognise the challenges that come with these responsibilities and that some students may not have time to participate in extracurricular activities to enhance their careers. As a result, we launched our Mental Wealth modules for students, which embed career development activities as part of the curriculum. This includes Work-Based learning opportunities and mock consultancy projects, allowing our students to gain valuable work-based learning experience.

How does your institution help students and colleagues overcome these challenges?
The fantastic career workshops and events that ELBA provide helps our students to gain valuable employability skills. From the Credit Suisse mock interviews, CV reviews with Barclays and Red Lion Chambers’ mentoring programme, these opportunities really help to inspire our students and give them valuable industry experience.

We have also welcomed corporate volunteers from ELBA to deliver guest lectures to our students within our academic modules. We recently welcome speakers from Man Group and Fitch Ratings, who gave great insights into their organisations and the financial industry.

At the University of East London, we run our Diversity of Thought programme. This 1-2 year-long programme gives students an in-depth insight into some of The Times’ UK Top Employers by providing mentorship, work experience and skills development workshops to help prepare our students for graduate employment.

Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work that you would like to share?
For the past six years, we have run our Funded Internship Scheme, which provides undergraduate students with 12 week-long, part-time paid internships with employers across London. This allows students to gain paid experience whilst they study. The internships are fully funded by the University, and we pay students the London Living Wage, meaning no cost at all for the employer. Over the past six years we have placed hundreds of students in internships across a range of industries from the arts, accounting, engineering, sports and much more.

What kind of support are you in need of right now and how might volunteering fit into that?
We are always keen to work with corporate volunteers from new organisations to deliver guest lectures to our students, participate in our Funded Internship Scheme or Diversity of Thought programme. In addition, the University has a professional mentoring scheme, postgraduate work placements programme and enterprise opportunities.