I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to lead on an Employability project at City University London Library. This has been around how Library Services can assist students in developing skills to enable them to be employable in the future and also about how the Library can add value to the work of other departments.
The Library Employability Group began work in August 2014. Our objectives include: to investigate some best practice in other universities, build a current Careers collection, produce an online Library Employability guide and liaise and collaborate with other Departments such as Careers.
One of our outputs is an online Library guide produced using the LibGuides software. This highlights some resources for employability such as social media and finding company information and using study skills resources. It is partially ‘crowdsourced’ from our students and contains some resources suggested by them.
We have also offered some workshops on Employability skills such as current awareness and researching company information and building a social media profile to assist with employability. Our workshop booking system is here. We believe having strong information literacy and research skills assists students to obtain and retain a job.
Some of the Careers titles we have ordered for our current Careers collection are here.
We are also building up a ‘reading list’ here.
Myself and one of my colleagues also had the great opportunity to present our work at LILAC 15 this year and this is our presentation.
A real benefit for us has been forging closer relationships with our Careers, Student Development and Outreach Department and we can signpost and recommend each others services. We also recognise the value of other activities such as volunteering and mentoring.
I have really enjoyed the opportunity to work on this project and also speak to students about their experiences to inform our services and resource provision. We have engaged with undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and academics as part of our project. We have for example used the career and work experiences of our research students to inform our library guide and workshops offered.
Diane Bell (Research Librarian)