Hi Parmjit! First things first; what is the Warwick Award?

The Warwick Award is a brand-new University of Warwick initiative that offers students the opportunity to gain recognition for the employability skills they develop within and alongside their studies. It is a great way of encouraging students to think about their skills development and how they can improve their employability as they get ready for life beyond graduation.

The Award is based around 12 core employability skill sets that research by our Institute of Employment Research has identified as being crucial for the next step in our students’ journeys. These skill sets are: Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Self-Awareness, Communication, Teamwork, Information Literacy, Sustainability, Ethical Values, Digital Literacy, Intercultural awareness, Organisational Awareness, and Professionalism.

The Award is free for all Undergraduate, Master’s, Exchange, and Degree Apprenticeship students. They can choose the pace at which they complete the Award and which skills they focus on, allowing them to design their own programme and development plan. For undergraduates, the Award will also appear on their Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR).

What’s the story behind the Warwick Award – how did it come about?

The Award is our response to the growing demand for students to be able to develop key employability skills and evidence them to employers when they’re looking for work post-graduation. It’s a huge issue facing universities across the UK, according to a CMI (Chartered Management Institute) report last year, only 22% of employers think students have good employability skills, and yet anyone who has any contact with our students knows that Warwick students are bright, capable, and highly skilled. They need to be able to articulate and then demonstrate this during their interactions with potential employers

There’s a long history of helping students with skills development here at Warwick – some colleagues may remember the Warwick Skills Portfolio Award for example, while the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS) and Sprint programme are well-established and continue to be vital and highly-regarded offers from the skills team. The Warwick Award is a refreshed and university-wide approach to skills development that I think will really benefit our students.

In many ways, the Award is older than the team running it! The 12 Core Skills at the heart of the Award were agreed by Senate back in 2020, based on a report from the Institute of Employment Research from 2019. Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and things slowed down, but we were eventually brought together in October 2021. I manage a team of three Skills Developers, with a fourth re-joining us from maternity leave this Autumn.

Alongside URSS and Sprint, and with a new manager heading up the entire Skills team, we’ve now got a really robust skills development offer for our students, and I’m excited to see where we can take it in the future!

So, how does the Warwick Award work?

For each Warwick Award-accredited activity completed, a student will earn Core Skills Points. These points help students track their progress towards the Award and their development of the different core employability skills it covers.

Each activity will be worth a different amount of Core Skills Points, based on several criteria, including how much time is spent developing a skill, how demanding that development is, and how much opportunity students have to practise that skill.

Some examples of activities that will earn Core Skills Points towards the Warwick Award are academic modules that have embedded core or employability skills, skills training courses – whether online or face-to-face, work placements, internships, study abroad visits, volunteering through Warwick Volunteers, or leadership roles - such as SSLC representative or SU society committees.

One Core Skills Point equals approximately five hours of learning effort, and students will need sixty Core Skills Points to complete the Warwick Award Gold stream.

60 Core Skills Points is equivalent to 300 hours of activity throughout a student’s time at Warwick. Therefore, we expect most Gold Awards to be earned over the course of a three or four-year undergraduate degree. However, Masters, Exchange, Degree Apprenticeship, or part-time students shouldn’t worry; other award streams are available with a lower points threshold to ensure they can still earn a Warwick Award during their time as a Warwick student.

You’re currently running a Pilot of the Award, how is that going?

It’s been going incredibly well so far – thanks for asking! Almost 700 students have signed up to be part of the Pilot, and we have representation from all our departments and all the different year groups and study levels

As a team, we’ve been really buoyed by the level of interest in the Pilot – we had more than 200 students pre-register for it before we even officially launched! Our students are clearly interested, so one of the key challenges for us over the next year – and beyond – is to market the Award to our student body and regularly communicate opportunities to engage with new development activities as they become available.

The Pilot has also shown our students have a real passion and thirst for developing and evidencing their skills development. Our Pilot participants have been telling us what relevant activities they’ve completed this year so we can review their reflections on the skills they developed and give them the appropriate amount of Core Skills Points, and the range of skills development already happening across campus is hugely impressive. If the Pilot is a taste of things to come, then we’re soon going to be able to evidence how engaged the student body at Warwick is with their own capability development in readiness for life after university.

What’s planned for the next few months?

Our immediate focus is to complete the Pilot, and ensure we capture all the lessons learned and build on them. As part of the Pilot, we’ve created a special Pioneer stream of the Award for students who have registered but who are graduating this year – if they hit this level, they will have it added to their HEAR transcript. We’re working hard to ensure as many eligible students as possible become Pioneers – any returning students will be able to carry over their points into next year.

After August, it’s about getting ready for the new academic year and the launch of the full Award. We’re implementing a new platform to run the Award, and plan to be out and about in Welcome Week to spread the news to as many students as possible, before continuing to grow and promote the Award throughout the academic year.

Before that though, in early September we want to talk to staff about the Award and make sure they know about it. We’ll be running a series of drop-in roadshow events ahead of the start of term where anyone can come and learn more about the Award – keep an eye on our webpages later in the summer for more details!

For more information about the Warwick Award, visit our website or email skills@warwick.ac.uk and the Skills Team will get in touch!