Rob O'Toole: [00:00:00] The human mind is creative. It works in a creative way all the time, constantly.

George Haughie: Hello and welcome back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important.

How they develop theirs and how you can too. In this episode, Skills Developer Zoe Pflaeger-Young is joined by Rob O'Toole, Director of Student Experience and Progression at the Faculty of Arts, to discuss the importance of creativity and problem solving. Remember that you can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk [00:01:00] forward slash skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Okay, here's Zoe and Rob.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: Hi and welcome to today's podcast. Today we're speaking to Rob O'Toole, who's from the Faculty of Arts and is Director of Student Experience and Progression with a focus on digital arts and humanities. Perhaps you can start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your role here at Warwick.

Rob O'Toole: Yeah, okay. So, it's complicated and very creative. So the role is very strategic. We're kind of looking at how we're shaping the faculty. Not just the faculty itself, but arts and humanities and creativity in the university. in the region and globally. So we're having that kind of impact. Warwick's one of those kinds of universities that reaches out across continents even.

So it's kind of strategic trying to shape the way in [00:02:00] which not just creativity in the conventional sense that people might recognize artistic stuff, but connecting that together with creativity across business, social, activism, and people's personal lives. Oh, and design. So design's been a very exciting thing to get involved in.

Recently in fact over the last since about 2010, I did a PhD looking at how designing happens in the real world and the exciting developments that were happening in how designing is done. So participatory design. Empathy, taking a greater role in designing collaborative designing and the role of technology in designing.

So looking at that, looking at how we do designing in the university, in education and elsewhere in the university, and seeing how we could transform the university through this. Out of that, I managed to get quite a lot of funding to kickstart what, what is kind of at the beginnings of a design [00:03:00] school in cross faculty studies and we now have, I've been teaching some design thinking, which is something, a term you'll come across later on in this podcast.

I've been teaching design thinking modules for quite a few years now, and that has grown into an entire degree program. We've hired some amazing staff. You might come across for example, Adela Glynn Davis, who leads that, and getting some amazing facilities and transforming what we have. in the Faculty of Arts building, but not just for the students on that building.

But actually for the whole university and beyond. Engaging schools, for example.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: So, creativity is really central to the work that you do. So some of our students might be asking, what is creativity and what does it mean to be creative?

Rob O'Toole: Yeah, I know. Okay. Sometimes I think, am I really creative in what I do?

Because I'm not an artist. I'm not a, I'm terrible at music and stuff like that. I'm quite good at writing, but not, I kind of, academic writing is my thing, but with a creative edge [00:04:00] to it, which is actually something my very first essay I wrote. I was a philosophy undergraduate at Warwick quite a long time ago.

Won't say when, that'll age me. Very long time ago. And my very first essay, the response, I got quite a good response from the academic. David Miller is a great guy. And he didn't write very much in feedback, but he said that the essay was very stately, but was kind of missing a, a kind of personal touch, and maybe a creative touch.

So actually, I kind of, I mean, I've never done this before, just immediately acted on that feedback, and this, good advice for students, acted on that feedback, and just try to understand what that missing element is, what that creativity is. Being a philosophy, a philosopher philosophers have been exploring creativity for a very long time, some amazing work, I'll mention in a minute done on that, defining what creativity is.

So yeah, that, that, that was the spark that set me off. But you want me to define creativity, [00:05:00] which is quite hard. It's something really hard to pin down, but we can define it. It's impossible to pre program. Now that's an important thought. Bear in mind what's happening with AI. Okay, so I'm going to argue Good evidence for this, based on cognitive science, philosophy lots of other fields coming together.

It's not something you can easily pre program. AI can't do this. Okay, so if you get good at creativity, you're never going to have your job replaced by AI. We can get good at it as humans through practice. We all have that. The human mind is creative. It works in a creative way all the time, constantly.

Our perceptual systems, our cognitive systems, are creating a vision of the world that is largely fabricated. So we're doing this creativity all the time, we just need to kind of boost that and apply it. So, it can have We all know there's an astonishingly [00:06:00] transformative and empowering effect in the world in any field or activity, not just art.

I'm going to focus on art to start off with, because we can learn a lot from that. Okay, so that's why we argue that the Arts Faculty is essential to everyone in the University and beyond. And why we want to provide opportunities for everyone to practice and develop their creativity. So that's what we want you guys to come over to the Fab.

Beautiful building and get involved in creative practice, maybe some modules lots of opportunities for you to take and then to reflect on that and feed it into your Warwick Award development. Okay, so, I haven't really defined it, I'm sorry, I'll get on to that. So, it probably sounds still a bit mysterious.

And I haven't really defined creativity, so let's get more specific. So I'm going to talk first about artistic creativity, which in some ways is an extreme example. So if you're not artistic, don't worry, I'm not [00:07:00] artistic. That can seem a bit daunting. Understanding this helps us all to recognise creativity, and to be creative in our own ways, in our own work, including business and study, and everything else.

So in my research actually in my PhD, I found that very successful people in all fields, And I, looked at lawyers people in medicine a surgeon, business, and they all had creative hobbies, or even second careers. We got some lawyers at Warwick, some law professors, who are also actors.

And they apply that creativity across their main fields. If you want to be successful, that's an essential ingredient. So you need to actually understand what it is you're looking for. So let's get to the definition. Okay, I've sold it really well. Okay, we need the definition. Creativity is best as defined through its impacts.

When we encounter the [00:08:00] changes it makes in the world, and we think, yeah, that's right, that works, that has a significant good impact. So thanks. Creativity, it makes sense what we encounter. It works in some way. Like, the way it works can be very diverse, but, at that point it might kind of like seem, wow, yeah, that seems obvious.

But then if we step back in time, before the creation, we could not have easily predicted the outcome. Okay, so, that's what makes it special. And that's what means, AI computer programs, not so good at this. Okay. AI is kind of looks like it can do creativity, but we'll get back to that. So we could not have written an algorithm, a computer program, a set of rules that would produce the outcome.

So I used to do AI. I studied AI after studying philosophy and worked in AI and we experimented with this and we could very early on see the limits of what AI could [00:09:00] do nowadays you have those. It's pretty awful AI generated images and that's not creative. Okay, it's totally predictable what the results are going to be.

The writing that AI does is largely predictable. There's nothing really interesting there. Okay, so, we want to see something that's unexpected. Often, but not always, we can't even deconstruct the work that's gone into that and its history to exactly explain how it happened. So it creates a kind of mysteriousness, which is a bit difficult for you if you want to become creative.

And that's why creativity has often been ascribed to genius or even divine intervention. Because it's amazing, but at the same time, it's not transparent in its operation. So like I said, AI can do this a bit. But I'll get on to more detail about why it's just not ever going to be able to replace humans at this.

So it's nowhere near the levels of creativity that all humans are capable of. And that's another reason to get creative. [00:10:00] You can't be replaced by a robot. Okay, so how do we know about creativity? Bit of background about the kind of research I do. So I like to delve into the reflections of people. Lots of people, but especially artists, on how great acts of creativity happened.

Kate Bush, for example. I love Kate Bush. I listen to Kate Bush all the time. She helped me do my PhD. She describes how the writing of one of her most successful songs, Cloudbusting, was flipped from quite a negative tone to a positive song, the one we know and love, by a bee flying in through the window.

and buzzing it around her piano. It sounds really trivial, but it had a huge impact. So it flipped that entire creative process. Now she's written a lot about creativity, and one piece of advice she gives is, let the weirdness in. Which we'll come back to later. So that's one of the pieces of advice that that sounds a bit strange.

How do you do that? We'll talk about that later. Suzanne. is [00:11:00] another interesting example. A lot written about Cézanne. So we can learn a lot from his notebooks and his art. Famously he painted the same subjects Many times. Mont Saint Victoire, a mountain for example, and apples. He seemed obsessed by these things.

And people, maybe at the time, would go, Paul, Paul, just stop painting apples! Do something different! Okay, but it wasn't because he didn't value each of the paintings, because it didn't achieve perfection. It wasn't perfectionism. So, one of the things you've got to drop is perfectionism as well. Every painting mattered.

In a superficial way. That's not creative, just doing the same thing again and again and again. So he was simply reproducing the same thing. But then look at the detail, and each painting is different in interesting ways. They bear the mark of a specific human hand and eye, which changes between paintings, the time, the place, the [00:12:00] changing lights, the moments in which creation happened.

That's the magic. Okay, every painting in Close Up has its unique magic. So following on from Cézanne, Francis Bacon took, you might have seen Francis Bacon, some of his paintings are pretty horrific, took this radical differencing, as philosophers sometimes call it, this wild and predictable creativity to the extreme, applying the same methods repeatedly with slow evolution over time to produce astonishing results.

Okay, so that's artistic creativity. You might still be finding that ideal idea quite daunting and quite alien, as some people might do art, might do creative stuff, and they've got a sense of what that's like. But we need to kind of bring that now down to earth, and down to kind of where we're at in all of our different things we do.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: Maybe. Can I just ask from your examples that you gave there? Is the creative process something which happens spontaneously or by chance? Or is there a method to creativity? [00:13:00] Oh, yes and no.

Rob O'Toole: I mean, there's methods. There's method to chance. So, yeah We like, playfulness is a big part of this and not planning too much.

Kind of having this there's a lot of research. There's a philosopher of creativity and design called Donald Shearn who looked at creative practice and found that great practitioners have this kind of balance between seeing the big picture and getting, having a sense of where they want to go with something, but also then letting the detail dictate.

What happens. So playing around with stuff and saying, Okay, so I wasn't expecting that, but let's go with it. And being open to that. So again, it's, not being perfectionist, having a sense of where you want to go with something, but also letting it flow. Okay. So, yeah. That can seem a bit risky.

One of the things we do in our teaching, we work with an amazing physical theatre [00:14:00] company called Highly Sprung, who get all the students together in a room. We do physical theatre exercises to get us doing that. So get us, being brave, diving in, not leaving it, just, having a go, seeing where it goes.

But at the same time, we've got that kind of big picture, that kind of idea of where we're trying to move this to, what we're trying to achieve. Balancing that takes a lot of practice. And really it is all about practice, reflection, getting feedback. I, I think one of the things you're probably going to ask is about whether you do this on your own or with other people.

Bit of both. Okay. With other people is really important, especially if you're trying to get that diversity into what you're doing. Okay. Lots of different perspectives. The more people you've got, then the more chance you've got there of finding something new. But then again, people add complexity. So, again, it's a matter of balance and judgement and working out what the right approach is to use at the right time.

Okay and also [00:15:00] different outputs, different goals of creativity will have different approaches. So I said that I think I said that that there's a commonality into how we do creativity from art, business, all of the other fields. But also, each of those has its own kind of special requirements that you need to learn as well.

That's really important. Okay, so, in art, I'll make the contrast between art and other stuff now, so you're not daunted by art. Cezanne, Bacon, people like that, what they're after is amplifying sensation. Making that kind of big impact that makes you go, wow. A lot of modern arts, conceptual art, is about provoking, challenging, not necessarily answering anything.

It's not about solutions. It's just kind of like hitting you hard in the face. That's fine for those things. But my main area of research now isn't artistic creativity, but it is influenced by it. So I study design, where the aims of [00:16:00] creative practice are broader. And this actually, design is something that goes across all fields.

And it's something that's actually worth everybody doing. So designing might include creating sensation, mood, and an emotional impact. But also functional change in how we do things. The products and services we use, even on an everyday basis. And that could be responding to a kind of clear, well defined problem.

So, problem solving, this is powerful problem solving methods. But actually, quite a lot of the time in design, I'd say maybe 90 percent of the work is spent finding the problem. Actually coming up with something that is kind of driving us to do something new. Okay, so it's problem solving, but also more importantly, perhaps, problem creating, problem finding, or problems, maybe not quite the right word there.

It's opportunities as well as problems. It's just looking for those possibilities. So I'm going to talk a bit about how we do that to give you some specific advice. [00:17:00] Okay so, yeah so, One thing actually to focus on to make it less daunting is to kind of think about everyday creativity. Okay sometimes we're doing this to give us amazingly novel results that's less often, but more often the impact is more incremental improvement.

Or the synthesis of innovations. So the iPhone's a good example. People predicted the iPhone way back in the 80s. Okay, there was a research group called Xerox PARC in America, and they even built prototypes of things that kind of looked like the iPhone. But then there was a whole load of other elements that needed to come together in combination that made this thing change the world.

And Apple, I think some clever people at Apple threw a lot of prototyping. You don't see that. So they were playful typing this for many, many years. And then it emerged, with a load of combinations of things, and suddenly, wow, this [00:18:00] is world changing. Okay. So, What I find most interesting for students thinking about their own creativity, this is a key point, is that creative practices in art, design, writing, research, business and other fields have a lot in common.

There's familiar patterns, which you're probably hearing some of those come out now, but one of the key techniques often overlooked is having an intense and detailed familiarity with the materials and systems we are creating with. So the possibilities of what there is, but also the constraints and the problems that are there.

So the situations in which our creations will be deployed into as well, and the people who are in those situations. So there's a lot of groundwork you have to do to kind of understand. I mean you might, you would have been told, If you're writing, understand your audience, which can sound quite trivial, but actually, it's worth really researching that a lot.

Going back to my very first philosophy essay I kind of, that bit of feedback gave me a better sense of what the people [00:19:00] marking philosophy essays were after. So I was getting empathy with the audience and I was realizing that one of the things when you're writing essays, always think the people who are marking this they read a lot of essays and they're going to be very bored.

So just make it a bit interesting. So, yeah, that getting familiar, playing with the materials. Donald Schoen, that philosopher I mentioned earlier, highlighted the importance of having an interactive dialogue with the materials, playing with the possibilities to let unpredictable potential emerge. Okay you might have heard that called design thinking.

I mentioned we have a new degree program. There's lots of opportunities for you to get involved in that happening around the university. So my advice is get an intimate knowledge of things. Find ways to play with them, what we call playful typing. Okay, try stuff out, prototype, play with things. Most importantly, do that with other people.

Get other people's perspectives early on. Don't just hide away and do it, but [00:20:00] get out there, get feedback, get it out into the field to try stuff out. Okay,

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: so you, you've, you've already really touched on this and given some good advice, but yeah, just thinking about from a student's perspective, they may be concerned about this idea of being original or coming up with something new or unexpected, as you mentioned.

So what do you think some of the challenges might be, and how might students be able to overcome these? Okay, so

Rob O'Toole: the first cha, the first challenge is the expectation that you're gonna come out with something. You are an original and big. It kind of doesn't matter, just know where your thing is going to go to.

Or even actually, quite often creatives are having to actually create an audience, create the place where it's going to happen as well. So think about that bigger picture. If you're putting on a play, then you've obviously got to, you might have a bigger picture. a venue that it's going to go into a program it's going to go into but you still have to do all the work of kind of building the expectation people's what they're what they're coming into it so you're [00:21:00] creating to some extent where it's going to land okay so yeah get to know that and get a sense of what is going to be good in that situation and what you what you're happy with as well So, originality is actually very, very, very rare.

Don't worry about that. And then, you've got the blank page problem. We have bunches, loads of techniques for filling the blank page, getting over that. Again, doing that with groups of people really helps. One of the big challenges I've had in my teaching is we teach the students that this is collaborative from the outset, okay?

And the ideas you create are shared amongst the people that you're working with. And yet we've got academia telling people that collaborating, we get students telling us, but I can't do this, it's cheating, I can't collaborate, I can't develop my idea for my [00:22:00] assessment with other people.

That's how it works in the real world, okay, and you can't get away from that. So, to some extent, academia has to change a little bit as well here, but students have to get over that, and you've got to find ways, with other people, to get generating ideas first. Lots of ideas. Get in that kind of rich picture of the situation you're designing for, creating for, creating in, Who, whether it's going to be deployed, what the impact might be can help you with that.

There's lots of creative techniques. So that's the kind of thing you can come to us in the Arts Faculty or the Design Studies Program and learn some of those creative techniques and get you beyond that that, that barrier. So the thing is, you've got to take your time. I guess the other thing is that people rushing kind of first idea that jumps into the head.

Yeah, that's the solution. Let's go for it. Often, I do stuff with technology and often the first idea is I'm going to make an app. Okay. [00:23:00] No, slow down, explore things more. Okay. But at the same time, don't hesitate to play with an idea or lots of ideas. But don't fixate. There's actually a whole field of research on design fixation, which is where, people jump onto the first idea.

Often a powerful manager will kind of go, yeah, this is the solution, this is going to get me my promotion. And the company has spent a million pounds, I've seen this many times, a million pounds down the drain because that manager would not let go of a solution that was often not even, not even had a good problem.

Identified so yeah that kind of you've got to dive in but at the same time Give it time let the weirdness in as well, but another thing is kind of like a Tendency to think that that's too weird. That's too weird. No, that doesn't make sense. But let some weirdness in You don't have to keep it there in the end product But [00:24:00] yeah, it's important.

You can learn all this through practice and with people who are good at doing it So find people who are good at doing it as well and and spend time with them.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: So would you say that? Developing skills and teamwork and collaboration is important for the creative process.

Rob O'Toole: Yeah. Yeah, and you So I'm just, I don't want to scare people, but you have no future unless you do that.

Really. That's the way the world's going. So even within academia now arts and humanities, PhDs, the way funding is going to work, is starting to work right now, is changing to be collaborative. Which that's, that's quite challenging. A collaboration takes a lot of work. A huge amount of my work is taken creating collaborations.

So over the last few weeks, I've had a focus on immersive technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality, and trying to accelerate the adoption of these and the work people are doing with them in the university. It probably took three weeks of emailing [00:25:00] people. It probably took three weeks of emailing people.

communicating, talking to people, getting them into the right place at the right time, getting the collaboration set up, and then after that supporting the amazing collaborations that come out of it. I mean we've got like, the Mapping Women's Suffrage project connected to a museum, Compton Verney, something might come out of that, and a world class VR production company.

And, I've kind of engineered that connection. I'm going to step back from it now. That's another thing, actually another piece of advice is don't feel like you've lost something when you step back and let it go. If it's the right time and you, if the thing is maturing and you can just hand it over.

That's something if you work in innovative companies, you're going to find that is an element of collaboration that really shocks people. Thank you. that they have to let go of their baby. Okay, which is quite a [00:26:00] scary thing. But a lot of companies now are set up to make sure that that happens, that people are letting go and passing it on.

I have to do that quite a lot. I'd go mad. I'd never actually achieve anything if I didn't let go and let other people run with it. Now there is there's a connection there. Yeah. Should have said this much earlier on because there may be sporty people listening to this. Sport is incredibly creative, especially team sport.

Okay, and that passing the ball setting up a potential goal, passing the ball, letting your feel your I don't know much about football, for your forward, your center forward, letting them go with it and score the goal and feeling happy for the team. Yeah, that's a very, that's a, that's a, Again, that's connected.

That's the same kind of thing, and it's very creative. So if you do sport, you are creative.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: So you've talked about how creativity applies in lots of different scenarios and situations. One of the core skills that we recognize with the Warwick Award is problem solving, and I'm sure lots of our students will be in different ways engaging with problem [00:27:00] solving.

So how important do you think creativity is to problem solving?

Rob O'Toole: I mean, there are problems that you can do without creativity. Yeah, that's going to be replaced by AI. They can do it. It's developing really fast. But most of the world's really hard problems yeah, you need creative practice. Now, in design research there is this idea of the wicked problem.

This kind of gets misused quite a lot by politicians and people like that these days. But there's some really good work done early on. A guy called Richard Buchanan, who's a design researcher, philosopher had a really good definition. It's not a very tight definition. So it's, things like problems where you try to solve them in a linear way and it actually makes the problem change very quickly and you lose a grip of it.

So you have this kind of constant, politicians are familiar with this kind of, You've got a great solution, you try to solve it, you throw loads of money at it, and oh, it's changed. Okay, so the wicked problems are non linear, they're [00:28:00] hard to pin down, etc. And one of, so what Richard Buchanan was claiming was that designers have become very good at not solving wicked problems, but dissolving them.

Finding different ways around them where the wickedness of it just kind of faded away. And, sometimes this is about getting people to collaborate in new ways. So, in design these days, rather than having a design team of experts, experts who are going to solve the problem that will bring in a diverse collaboration of people like doctors, nurses.

There's loads of cases in medicine doctors, nurses, patients, etc. Bring them together and get them to try and play full type solutions. Now, sometimes that doesn't lead directly to a solution, but just creating that collaboration and getting people talking to each other creates a platform for change.

Now this is a big thing in [00:29:00] diplomacy, peace processes and things like that, that you may not be able to solve the wicked problems head on, but create your platform for change. Yeah. And that's, that's amazing. That happened in Northern Ireland. They did an amazing work there. Long, long, long time of getting that platform for change, for peace, established.

So, yeah, it's another good example of how creativity applies to the peace process, to international relations, community relations.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: And finally, you've mentioned AI a few times already. I'm sure there are some students who are thinking ahead and worrying about whether AI is going to be a challenge to their, kind of future career prospects.

So what would you say? Do you think? We have a, there is a sort of a threat to creative roles from AI or?

Rob O'Toole: There is in that people who don't really understand creativity but have power hopefully not the new government, Labour government that's just come in, I think they're [00:30:00] different people who don't really understand this can think that they can actually replace a lot of what happens in the creative industries with.

They don't realize it's going to just produce junk, and people will get bored of it very quickly. Already people are bored of seeing AI generated images. And they see straight through them. There's no authenticity there. And they're kind of like, you're not going to buy a product that's got AI junk around it.

But, yeah, that's a danger. That, that's a danger. That may happen and we, we have to kind of then focus on what creativity is, really is and, and really amplify our creativity. So that's possible. And a good way of thinking about this is, let, let, okay, let's not paint the tech industry as evil.

But some of the people there are. And some of what's going on is they are, rather than trying to get the machines to be as intelligent as the humans, they really are trying to dumb down the humans to be as stupid as the machines. And we've got to resist that. And creativity, creative [00:31:00] practice, is the key.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: Okay, great. Thank you very much. And thank you for taking the time to speak to me today.

Rob O'Toole: It's always fun. I love these things. I should tell people that I'm kind of lounging on a couple of chairs here, lying back with my shoes off, so. Max creativity.

Zoe Pflaeger-Young: Fantastic. Thank you.

George Haughie: You've been listening to The Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find The Skillscast on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you get your podcasts.

And you can also find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk. forward slash skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Huge thanks to Rob O'Toole for sharing his experience and insights into [00:32:00] creativity and problem solving. And thanks also to Zoe Flagey Young for asking the questions.

This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, George Haughie. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk forward slash Warwick Award.

Georgie Pilling: [00:00:00] I think a skill that you can't really learn is passion and drive for what it is that you're going into.

George Haughie: Hi, and thanks for joining us at the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is a show about developing your skills while at the university and how you can use them to set you up for success.

For a fantastic start to life. Once you graduate, I'm your host, George Hockey. And this time I'm joined by Georgie Pilling and KoKo Taylor Takahashi to discuss Warwick sports activators, what they are, how you can become one. What are the perks and benefits and what exactly is a zombie run to find out more about Warwick sports activators and how you can get involved, check out the episode description for links to their website.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, wherever else you get your [00:01:00] podcasts.

Georgie Pilling: Hi, my name is Georgie. I am a sports engagement officer. in the Active Wellbeing team for Warwick Sport.

Hi,

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: I'm KoKo. I study engineering at Warwick Uni. I'm in my third year, and I was an activator, and I still am for

George Haughie: Warwick Sport. Let's start this off very simple. Georgie, what is a sports activator?

Georgie Pilling: So, a sports activator is basically a volunteer, so it can be a staff or a student, and they support us with our active well being program.

So they will lead on our sessions such as rock up and play sessions, leagues, or support us with events. So they are volunteer staff and students who support us run our program.

George Haughie: And KoKo, what do you do as an activator?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: So my activator role is a league coordinator. So I do this through [00:02:00] the Badminton Society and Warwick Sports.

So I run weekly leagues, badminton leagues specifically, for societies that are interested in playing badminton in like a friendly, competitive way.

George Haughie: What sort of skills do you think that you have? I've had to develop to get into the position that you are now working in the Sports Hub. And what skills are you using in your day to day job?

Georgie Pilling: Oh, okay. So the skills that I have learned. within my job, first of all, is a lot of like effective communication skills, because with our activators, we have over 80 activators. So it's really important that we've got effective communication skills, certainly organizational skills with the number of activators that we look after active listening skills.

In our role, it's really important that we listen to our activators to understand about our program, how we can improve and develop it further. I think a skill that you can't really learn is passion [00:03:00] and drive for what it is that you're going into. So for me I actually previously used to be a teacher and I was PE lead and I've always been passionate about PE and that's kind of driven me into this role because I don't think you can learn the skill of being passionate or having that drive for what it is that's of interest to you.

George Haughie: What is it that brought you into the Warwick Sports Group and what's, what is this the overarching mission? of Warwick sports.

Georgie Pilling: So what brought me into Warwick sport was, as I said, I loved my PE lead role. I loved the ability to inspire the children that I worked with to be active and really help them find the sport that really drove them and was of interest to them.

So for me, I wanted to find a job slightly outside of teaching because I don't teach anymore. But that a job that still worked with students and had the ability and the impact to [00:04:00] support them with understanding the benefits that physical activity can bring to them and the positive impact that it has on well being.

George Haughie: Is this something that WellExport is really active? You mentioned children. We're now working with adults, young adults. Has that been a big difference?

Georgie Pilling: I think the principles of what you're doing or what I'm doing as an SEO are very similar in order to engage students whether they be six years old or 18 years old the principles still stand so they're very applicable.

Obviously it is different because the students are obviously at university a lot more independent and it's kind of going out and finding them because at school obviously the children physical activity was part of the curriculum they did that. Couldn't opt out of it. Whereas with the students here, we have to make sure that we're engaging them and offering them that variety of what we're, our program is doing in regards to [00:05:00] our Warwick strategy.

So we're slightly shifting our strategy. Our focus was being previously being the most active community campus. We're now solely focused on students. So that is our aim to really increase the student experience, develop that sense of belonging, and make them more physically active.

George Haughie: So KoKo, have you always been engaged in sport as we're talking from school to the university, how's that transition been for you?

The difference been, And were you passionate about sport before?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: Yeah, I've always been very active in school. So, in primary school, I did a lot of athletics. I think any sport that they were offering, I would be up and running to take part. So I did like athletics or like rounders, just any sport.

Amazing. Anyone that had gone through. And even in like before university and secondary school, I took up like badminton and hockey. So I was very active in those. And [00:06:00] like, not only was I active within the school, but also like in the community as well. I was in like the local county, like hockey club.

And so it ranged from not only like Primary school kids, but also like adults as well. So we play with like, just local people in the area and just travel to the games and stuff. So I was always very active and I do enjoy playing sport. So I think that carried on throughout to uni as well. And so I I joined the Badminton Society and I was just a member so I wasn't really paying for any, like, the teams and I quite liked the social aspects as well as just a little bit of competition as well.

I wasn't planning on becoming exec for Badminton Society. But in one of my because I was playing in the active league for the engineering society and I was just playing and I was quite good friends with actively coordinator that was running the session and he If you want [00:07:00] Recommended me to apply to the activity coordinator role.

And yeah, that's kind of how I got into it. So it's just through like talking with people and just like communicating as well as I feel like through playing sport in like primary school and secondary school. It kind of built up my communication skills as well as like my team building skills as well.

And I think I was quite like a quiet child when like growing up and I think sport really like put me out of my comfort zone and I was able to just reach out to people and just talk more among people and you realize like there's so many opportunities around you and you just have to talk to people and find out about them.

George Haughie: Lovely, I absolutely agree with that. I think the major challenge for university students is finding these opportunities. This is very much where this podcast comes in. Try to help students like yourself who have these interests to find that there are great things that are happening. Quite hard to find out.

So we are going to continue to look at this [00:08:00] sports activator program, and I'd like to ask Georgie a little bit about the background. So why was this brought up and how does this support the mission of engagement with the students and a little bit more about exactly what happens as a sports activator?

You say rock up and play. I'm not sure. What does that mean?

Georgie Pilling: Yeah, so, rock up and play. It's basically a fun, free provision for students and staff. So obviously we've done a light hearted title, just rock up and play. That's literally what you can do. So you don't need any prior experience. You don't need to have been a professional in this sport.

We just want you to rock up and play. and have fun and we want it to be inclusive for everyone. And I think that's really important for us as a team to say, look, just come and have fun, socialize, make new friends. And that's really important for us. The program. Developed quite a few [00:09:00] years ago now prior to me joining But obviously as i've mentioned our aim as an active well being team is to get people physically active So developing the rock up and play program was really important to make sure that we would be offering something different, I suppose, to what the clubs offer.

Obviously, the clubs offer something slightly more competitive. They're getting involved in BUCS. So for us, we wanted to attract those people that might not be interested in being in a BUCS team, who just want to have fun with sport. So it was really important for Warwick Sport to develop that rock up and play program to make sure that they were being inclusive for everybody.

George Haughie: When we say rock up and play, I'm going to go try to clarify, when you say BUCKS, for people who may not be quite aware. Oh

Georgie Pilling: yes.

George Haughie: We have so many acronyms, what are BUCKS?

Georgie Pilling: So British University and College Sports, so yeah. Bucks basically means that each [00:10:00] Wednesday, universities play against each other in a variety of different sports.

So it might be Warwick travels to Loughborough and goes and plays a netball game, or Reading might come to us and play squash and so forth. So every Wednesday is a big Bucks Wednesday, if you will.

George Haughie: And what sort of sports do people play in the Rock Up and Play? What's available for people?

Georgie Pilling: Well, I might be here a while if I name them all because we have over 50 hours of free sport, which again, as we spoke about earlier, it's making sure that people know how much we have, and that's just in a week, 50 hours per week but we have a variety.

So. Badminton as KoKo's mentioned, squash, tennis, we have walking futsal, sensory table tennis, mixed netball, volleyball, the list is endless and still today we're open to providing more within our offering if there's other sports that people think we really want to try this [00:11:00] and we're really trying to push on being more inclusive so we're hoping to set up a walking net.

Just to make sure that we're appealing to all our students.

George Haughie: And to provide this, you're recruiting from a very wide and diverse student body. When you are looking for student activators, what's the recruitment process like? And what sort of skills are you looking for from Potential?

Georgie Pilling: So at the moment we don't really have a very formal process.

KoKo hasn't had to interview for her role, which I'm sure she's very grateful for. It's a very relaxed approach at the moment. We have a form online for an activator registration form, which students or staff can complete to show their interest. We then get in touch with the relevant people and from there, basically support them with finding an activator role if we have one.

Of course, all our activators that complete an [00:12:00] activator registration form go through training, which is really important. And I think it is really important for us in the future to formalize the process. It is something we're looking at for next academic year, because I think it's really important for us to have people that really want to lead from the front, that Be those role models, have those leadership skills, those time management skills, because they're at the end of the day leading our sessions with, it might just be them by themselves.

They might have a friend who's also an activator supporting them, but they need to have those strong leadership skills be very adaptive in those moments leading, whether it's a rock up and play or a league session as well.

George Haughie: And I'm going to ask then KoKo for yourself, what was your take on the this process?

So, you mentioned you, you heard this from talking to peers, but how was the process of registration and how was the training?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: Yeah, so, so after hearing about [00:13:00] the role I think I didn't really realize what the activator role was like as a part of the actual exec member role. As I just thought it was just running the league and it was just part of the badminton society.

And then I realized that it was also part work sport. And so, I didn't realize that I had to go through the process of like training and stuff. And I really think that was good for my role though. And I think It was something that I needed. It was I didn't realize how much, although it does sound quite simple, you're just running the light.

There is a lot of like procedures involved and there's also a lot of like, not paperwork, but I didn't realize that I'll be using like Excel for my role. And so after I, I was elected as the badminton activity coordinator. That was when I think I reached out to work sport and see that like I had to [00:14:00] have the training to become like the activity coordinator.

And I was a part of like a team's group chat with a lot of other people. Activators and so there were like several training sessions that we could go to and we just had to tell them like when we were available to go. And the training sessions were just in the evening. So it was quite easy to just go to the sports center and just meet the other activators and just learn about the role.

And we had like little group sessions where I just talked about how, like the ideal way that we'd run like a rock up or like a league and just, See what was involved and to be aware of like anything that could happen and just like how to deal with that and if like we're stuck with anything we can just reach out to help for help and so I think that was really useful to just gauge like a Overall perspective of like what to expect for my role and then after the [00:15:00] training I think I had, like, about two weeks to prepare for the first, like, league.

So, just during that time, I had to try and encourage a lot of teams to sign up to the league, and just gauge an idea of, like, the numbers involved. And then, from there, I just had to plan who would play and which, Like week as like sometimes there were more team players and they were caught so I had to just try and like, Make sure that everyone had like a fair amount Plays that they could for the league.

And then from there just coordinated it in person

George Haughie: So you've already answered a little bit of this question By talking about Excel and having to use your computer skills. But is there anything that has surprised you about taking part in this role? And how has this role challenged you?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: So, as I kind of mentioned before, like I wasn't I'm quite like, I wouldn't say shy, but like I wouldn't really put myself out there.

So, at the [00:16:00] beginning of the league, I think a lot of the players Teams weren't really sure, like what the league was, so I had to, like, stop everyone and try and, like, just give a speech, like, just briefly outline, like, what the league is and, like how the rules work, as I think a lot of people do go to come to the league and they're not really sure how it runs and, like, the scoring system is it kind of, it can differ in badminton a bit, so I had to just give, like, a public speech of just how it works.

So I guess that kind of pushed me out of my comfort zone. But, like, I'm glad I did it, and I wanted to just create, like, a safe space where, like, everyone felt comfortable coming to me if they had any issues. But what surprised me, I think, was as I kind of already took part in the league, so I kind of knew how it works.

So that was, there wasn't really anything surprising with that. And I guess the Excel was quite surprising. I didn't really realize that I had to do some, like, computer work as well. But I [00:17:00] think it was what surprised me that's. That was like what was offered outside of my role. So just within like the activator community.

So there was a zombie run that happened. I didn't realize that there were so many other events going on that activators could sign up to. And there's also like an inflatables coming up. So, I didn't realize the amount of opportunities that activators have not just limited to Leagues and rock ups, but also just events that students could come up to come to.

George Haughie: Yes, my my team, we are all looking forward to the inflatables. Quickly, I don't think we can't go past zombie run without stopping a little bit.

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: So zombie run is like a little treasure hunt kind of, events. So, the activators, they can dress up as zombies. And so people can Sign up in teams or individuals and they have to go around campus and there's little [00:18:00] checkpoints where they have to collect like a code where they can move forward to the next one.

And guarding those codes are zombies, . So, I signed up to become a zombie and I didn't realize that there would be like professional makeup there as well. So we got the whole shebang, and even like a what is it, the suit as well? Oh yeah, the white overalls. Yeah, the white overalls that we could wear.

And it was just. It was quite fun to I didn't do the zombie run on my own, so it was nice to just do it with other people and also see like my own friends do the trail as well and just surprise them and just chase after them. It was just a really nice day.

George Haughie: And that, that did happen around Halloween,

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: oh yeah, it was around Halloween.

We have to tweak it if we're not,

George Haughie: It's not the right day. Now that sounds amazing. There's more discussion about the perks of being an activator right after this message. It's never too [00:19:00] early or too late to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it.

The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements. caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more. The Warwick Award recognizes and showcases the skills you're building through these activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates. It can be personalised to allow you to shape your own employability skills development, and it is ready for you whenever you are ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy, so why not join more than 12, 000 students by [00:20:00] signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning the Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk forward slash warwick award.

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: As well as my passion for badminton one of the main reasons why I wanted to join were the many perks that come with becoming an activator. So, being an activator, you can log hours. So, For me, I would have like two hours a week and they can add up and set certain hours you get a certain rewards so I think five hours is Five hours you get a free activated t shirt so you can wear that when you're doing your league or rock ups I think 10 hours is the 500 Moves plus points.

And then 15 hours you get 50 percent off an annual membership from WorkSport. So that could be gym and swim and all inclusive membership. And as a student, I ate that up. That sounds amazing. And then at 25 hours, [00:21:00] you get a free activator jumper, which very comfy. I can vouch for that.

George Haughie: I do just want to jump back.

So you say a 50 percent off your annual membership at the sports hub. That's probably worth quite a lot more than a t shirt or a jumper coming in, I'd like to focus on that. As someone who does pay for a monthly membership, this has been actually thinking, How, Georgie, how can you've got spaces in the sports membership.

Georgie Pilling: Exactly, but yeah, you'd think, Once they, we want to reward our activators, so once they've done 15 hours, which for our activators like KoKo, who does it every week from the start of term, that builds up really quickly you will then get a 50 percent discount off your membership.

George Haughie: I'll clarify, that's 15 or

Georgie Pilling: 50?

50, 5 0. 50, 5 0,

George Haughie: that's what I thought. Wow.

Georgie Pilling: As well as once you hit 50 hours, you then get CPD. funding of up to [00:22:00] 150, so any extra training that you want to do as an activator, we then pay up to 150 for.

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: Also another thing is there's an Activator Awards evening. So that's coming up in June and I think it's taking place at the State and so there'll be free food.

I think it's like a small event and yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Georgie Pilling: And that's where we recognize our Activators. So we give out awards so it's for our Activators and our scholars, I should say as well. So it's recognizing our Activators and really thanking them from all of us. Everything that they've done for us for the year.

So it's a great opportunity to kind of celebrate in the summer and just have a nice time to socialize as well.

George Haughie: This sounds like a phenomenal opportunity. As you've, there are a lot of the skills you've mentioned that are things that we would be looking to develop in students to try to focus on career progression, preparation, and looking towards after, after graduation, or even through going to placements.

So. [00:23:00] Have you felt some of those skills that you've mentioned transfer across into your studies or into your applications?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: Yeah, so, I do a lot of group projects in my degree, so I do have to communicate a lot with the people in my group. So, that does help within my own degree, but I think doing the activator role has elevated those skills, as well as my leadership skills and my like project like management, so having to manage the teams and knowing who plays who each week, as well as talking amongst the teams.

If one team can't make it, I'll have to try and rearrange and ensure that maybe another team can play instead and always maintaining that communication skills are really important and also just Yeah, having that leadership so anyone can come up to me with any issues and I can try and solve it there or if I can't solve it there and then I can talk to Georgie and see if we can come up with something to [00:24:00] solve that and Also, I think just probably just the enthusiasm as well.

And I think people want there to just kind of relax and just have fun. And although it is a little bit competitive, everyone's so friendly and it's nice to just cause everyone comes from different degrees. It's not just one is like, as well as people coming in through different society teams, and it's nice to just see everyone come together to play like a sport they love.

And I want to keep up that enthusiasm and just have a Fun and safe place that they can have that.

George Haughie: Within either running these activated sessions or even the larger scale things like the zombie runs, are there any situations that have come up that have been particularly challenging that you've had to really like, use your skills to help find solutions for?

Georgie Pilling: I think, for me, some of the skills has definitely been problem solving. So for us, we obviously, as I've said, manage a lot of [00:25:00] activators, and sometimes it might be as simple as an activator run their session that day. So it is being adaptive, thinking you're on your feet and thinking, how can I find someone to take over that rock up and play session?

It's also silly things like problem solving, like where's the equipment gone for that session? Do we know who last had it? So it is really being adaptive and thinking, actually, how can I best solve this to ensure that our program continues.

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: I think for me is when some teams don't show up and they don't like tell me that they won't be there. So, I think the skills are just like thinking on my feet and trying to, like Jordi said, problem solving. So I'd either reach out to like another team or the team itself. They can just play amongst themselves if that's the case.

Also, just thinking ahead of time just be aware of like what might happen and just know how to handle those [00:26:00] situations just in case. And yeah, just communication. I think

George Haughie: that's really good. And I think those are, as you say, those are the specific situations that we'll be able to discuss in any personal statements, selection sessions.

They're fantastic examples, again, of having to really use things that, in any sort of job that we have to do, we have to solve various problems. And so we've talked a lot about this activator program and how we, it's great to engage lots of students. It's a great opportunities for students like yourself, KoKo to develop and practice and showcase these skills.

And I'd like to think about what are the next steps. So what's going next for yourself what do you see moving forward? And also a little bit about what's next for the program. So what's next for you?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: So I have a placement next year. So I'll be entering the working industry. So I think I'd want to try and kind of put myself more out there [00:27:00] and use like the leadership skills to maybe like manage a team.

I know I might not be going straight into management in my role, but just being able to be feel confident, more confident in myself and just Reach out to people and like, if I'm struggling and just not being afraid to just, yeah, talk to people. And even if I'm unsure, just not like sit with it, but just, yeah, ensure that people are like aware that I'm struggling so I can just work through it with them together.

George Haughie: And did you find that being a sports activator helped you applying for these placements?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: Yeah, no, I did talk a lot about my role in my application. So I talk about, yeah, my leadership, communication, organization and management. And I think, yeah, this, and this role does give me a lot to talk about skill wise.

And yeah, I think I don't regret taking on the role.

George Haughie: That's a good start. I don't regret.

Georgie Pilling: That's why I like [00:28:00] doing

George Haughie: it. Georgie, for the program overall, for Sports Activators, where would you like to see this going? What's the, next year or next five year plan for the Warwick Sports Hub and Sports Activators?

Georgie Pilling: Yeah, so I think more within our active well being team. So for activators, we definitely want to formalize the process more. We want to provide more CPD opportunities for activators. We really want to upskill them, whether that's more training throughout the year being offered. And I think it's also just working more closely with our activators, there's the slogan you said we did here at Warwick, and I think we really need to embed that within our program to really take on that student voice.

I think a bigger picture for us as Warwick Sport is Working towards our five year strategy. So thinking about how we can build on the student experience. So working more closely [00:29:00] with the wellbeing team, the student experience team, SU Warwick food group, the residential community team on actually how we can enhance the student experience and how our program feeds into them, hopefully reaching their full potential.

George Haughie: Let's finish up then KoKo and Georgie for a message for any students who are thinking that they, that sports activation or even just joining the sessions might be for them. What advice would you have KoKo?

KoKo Taylor-Takahashi: I think just go for it. There's, it's nothing to be scared of. And there's so many other supportive people around you and It's, you won't just be put in the deep end, like you'll have training, like you'll know what to do and there's so many other activators that you can work with and alongside and yeah, if I'm struggling with anything, I would just reach out to Georgie and she's like really good at getting back to me.

So, I think, yeah, I would go for it. And it really does build like this, your soft skills and yeah, I [00:30:00] think it's good to just. Come out of your comfort zone and try something new.

Georgie Pilling: Yeah, I absolutely agree with everything KoKo said. I'd be a bit worried if I disagreed. I think one thing that's really important for me to the message comes across is that you don't have to have prior experience.

So even if you think, oh, well I'm not really a very sporty person. I've maybe not never tried these sports before. That doesn't mean that you can't be one of our activators. We do have activators that just support us with events, and that's okay. All the skills that you learn being an activator are so transferable to when you become an employee.

So please apply to be an activator. You are crucial to our role. We honestly wouldn't be able to run our program without our activators, so we are very grateful.

George Haughie: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, [00:31:00] please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

You can find transcripts of previous All our episodes at warwick. ac. uk forward slash skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. If you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts, huge.

Thanks to Georgie and KoKo for joining us for this episode and to find out more about sports activators and how you can get involved, check out the episode description for links to their website, the skills cast is brought to you by the team behind the warwick. ac. uk. The University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme.

Find out more at warwick. ac. uk forward slash Warwick [00:32:00] Award.

George Haughie: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Skillscast Season 2 from the University of Warwick. I'm your host George Hockey and today I'd like to introduce our first ever Shorts episode. In this episode we have invited Careers Service Manager Dave Molyneux to discuss Hi,

Dave Molyneux: my name is David Molyneux and I'm the Career Services Manager here at the University of Warwick.

So, I'm going to be talking today about UK careers fairs. I'm going to start with what they are for and what they are not for. This does vary in different parts of the world. Here in the UK, careers fairs are principally for employers to advertise their graduate training schemes and graduate jobs. They may also be looking to increase their brand recognition amongst [00:01:00] prospective recruits and raise awareness of work experience programs or other types of events designed for students to with what they are for.

Each employer will have a stand, which will usually have two or three representatives from that company. These will typically be recent graduates, members of the company's recruitment team, or more senior representatives. Each stand will be accompanied by banners and other marketing material to try and make that employer stand out.

Employers often also give away sweets and other small gifts along with marketing material about their programs. It's important to remember though that most employers will not be taking CVs or using the event as a recruitment exercise. It's all about signposting people to their standard recruitment channels.

You do very occasionally hear about students having a positive interaction with an employer and then being fast tracked through one stage of a multi stage recruitment process, but this is pretty rare since most employers want to have a level playing field in their recruitment. So, if you are not going to be going to a careers fair to get a job, what's the point in going?

Note, it's entirely possible [00:02:00] to go to a careers fair and come away with nothing more than a bag of sweets, pens and leaflets. The value in going to a careers fair lies in the conversations that you have. Firstly, careers fairs are great for providing evidence to back up your motivation for applying for jobs.

You will almost always be asked at some point why you applied for this job. Talking about having had a positive interaction with representatives from the company and reflecting back some of the things they said about working there demonstrates a sincere effort to research your career decision making.

You can also learn things about the recruitment process, provided the representatives are allowed to disclose this. Things like the kinds of tests you might have to go through as part of the selection process. You might also be able to find out about behaviours and competencies that that company looks for, which again will give you an edge in the recruitment process.

You might also be able to find out about projects the company is working on, which might give you an edge around commercial awareness questions you were asked at an interview. Just a note on dress code. Though some students do [00:03:00] dress up for a careers fair, you don't really need to do this. Employers will expect attendees to be dressed as students.

That said, though I won't pretend to be a fashion expert, you probably shouldn't wear anything too outrageous. Preparing for a careers fair is a really good idea. You want to be able to go up to employers with some idea of what they do already, so you can ask insightful questions, rather than a more generic, what do you guys do?

You may want to ask things like, how did you find the application process? Or, what's the best thing about working at your company? And also, what's really challenging? Or, what projects have you worked on recently? At Warwick, we run our careers fairs using the Careers Fair Plus app, which lists all the employers in attendance.

I would suggest plotting a hit list of employers you want to target, and preparing questions to ask them based on the kinds of work they do, and the information you are able to find out about them. Careers fairs at Warwick can be very busy, with thousands of students in attendance. This can sometimes make it hard to get access to the very popular recruiters.[00:04:00]

If a company you really want to approach is very busy, It might be worth waiting until there are fewer students engaging with them. This is because when people are talking to large groups, they tend to fall into giving a standard pitch rather than engaging in meaningful conversation. Numbers at fairs tend to fluctuate in waves as lectures end or begin.

Large numbers of students arrive or leave together. Our fairs also start with a quieter hour for those students who have additional needs and really benefit from a less crowded environment. Finally, if you strike up a really good conversation with a recruiter, don't be afraid to ask if you can add them on LinkedIn.

This can keep the conversation going after the event and may mean you are able to get more tips and advice later in the recruitment process.

George Haughie: Thank you again, Dave, for sharing your insight and helping us figure out how to get the most from our attendance at a jobs fair. This has been a shorts episode on the [00:05:00] Skillscast, and if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider following us so you don't miss any further episodes.

You can find this Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts. The SkillsCast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk/ Warwick Award.

[00:00:00] Lauren Ketteridge: No one's going to force you to do the Warwick Award, but if you want a nice little thing that says, 'I've done lots of cool things throughout uni, ask me more questions,' it's useful and it's not going to take a weekend through a muddy field, like I said.

[00:00:19] Dave Musson: Hi and welcome to the season finale of the Skillscast from the University of Warwick.

This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they developed theirs and how you can too.

I'm your host, Dave Musson, and this time we're covering something that has been mentioned in just about every episode; the Warwick Award. The award is Warwick's skills development programme, and it fully launched in September 2022. To help you understand more about the award and why you might like to register for it yourself, I caught up with Lauren Ketteridge.

Lauren is now studying for a PhD, but she also achieved the gold level of the Warwick Award while she was an undergraduate here, and she has plenty of useful insights to share.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk slash skillscast and there's a link to that in the episode description. Oh, and if you are listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, that's enough to start with. Here's Lauren.

[00:01:33] Lauren Ketteridge: My name's Lauren Ketteridge. I'm both a Warwick grad and a current Warwick student. I'm doing the whole Warwick pathway. So for my undergrad, when I did the Warwick award, I was doing a BSc in digital healthcare science over at Warwick Manufacturing Group.

And I'm now up at School of Life Sciences doing a PhD.

[00:01:49] Dave Musson: And how's life in the early stages as a PhD student?

[00:01:53] Lauren Ketteridge: Stressful. So I've recently had an accident which meant I've basically spent four weeks off and so there's a lot of catching up to do. But I really am enjoying learning about brand new things.

It's a biology PhD but I haven't done biology since GCSE so I get to learn loads of really cool things and it's really nice being able to pull my old skills which were a lot of sort of softer transferable skills that I developed in my undergrad and now pull them into a, not a more rigorous subject, but a subject that has a lot of rigor.

[00:02:23] Dave Musson: Well, good. That sounds, that sounds good. So you've already, you've already mentioned the Warwick Award and that is the main focus of our chat and the award was something you got involved with right from when we piloted it back in 2022. I guess to start, like what, what made you sign up for it in the first place?

What was the appeal of the Award?

[00:02:39] Lauren Ketteridge: So I think. Probably the major reason I signed up for it was I was grumpy that I hadn't completed its predecessor. So before the Warwick Award, there was the Warwick Skills Portfolio Award, we're just removing letters, and I was so close to finishing it and then I just got tired and didn't.

And I was like, I did all that work and nothing's come out of it. Obviously, I developed skills, but I was like, I still want a shiny bit of paper, please. And so when the Warwick Award came around, I was like, okay, this time, clearly have the momentum and the trajectory. to do these sort of extracurriculars to invest time in personal development.

This time you're going to complete an award. You're going to have a bit of shiny paper to show for it. And yeah, I was like, okay, now I just have more reasons to get involved with more things. And that's felt like a good idea.

[00:03:23] Dave Musson: And that, that sort of impetus, that drive you just mentioned to get involved in these extracurricular things and to develop those skills, was that something when you first arrived here as a fresher that you knew you were gonna wWant to do or is it something that came about as part of being here?

[00:03:39] Lauren Ketteridge: Yeah, so I think I arrived at uni very much, like, wanting to do these extra things. I will note that I've had a very unusual path into and throughout university.

So I came to uni after having worked for a few years. When I applied, I only applied for this one course at Warwick and didn't apply for any other universities. So I very much knew what I wanted to do, but I also felt confident that I'd be able to fulfill the academics of the course. And I was like, okay, well, we're all here because we're really great students, what am I going to do to sort of set me apart? And again, like, I'm just really into sort of being like a little amoeba that floats around and goes, oh, that's cool. And so, yeah, the fact that Warwick has all these things available made it like. really nice. When I got here and I learned about, actually, there's way more than I found on the website.

I was, the happy little amoeba was even happier.

[00:04:31] Dave Musson: Great, great. So in terms of, in terms of that interest in developing your skills, that, that amoeba part of you, how did that compare with your coursemates? Were they as, as engaged with it as you were?

[00:04:43] Lauren Ketteridge: Again, I feel like I have to asterisk everything I say.

So my course was very, I'm kind of like, oh my God, are any of my lecturers listening? was very innovative and In some degrees, a giant experiment in terms of pedagogy and things like that. I absolutely loved it, but it meant coming into the course. We all came from very different backgrounds and we had apprentices on our course.

It's Warwick Manufacturing Group. There's always apprentices around. And so. I would say, as the Americans would say, I was a bit of a gunner when it came to doing the extra things. But I think, especially because we were on a very new interdisciplinary course, and I know Warwick has a lot of those already, but also springing up, we all had some degree of being like, okay, we're going to do these extracurriculars and we're going to get these, I don't like the word soft skills, makes them sound like a really bad flamange.

They're transferable skills. Not even that, they're translational skills. That's my little soapbox. So yeah, I think we all had similar. I'm just a bit of a gunner and I'm also quite competitive, which is not unfamiliar for Warwick. So I was definitely the one texting the group chat to be like, have you seen this?

[00:05:51] Dave Musson: Nice. Well, thank you for spreading the word. It's, it's, it's much appreciated. So I guess on onto the award itself then, like. I mean, you've already, you've already sort of said you were, you were confident of, of the academic side of things and you, you, you were keen to do the, the extracurricular stuff. In terms of how it panned out in practice of balancing those two things together, how was it?

[00:06:11] Lauren Ketteridge: That's a really interesting question. And there's me just sitting in my head going, Hmm, we've discussed this in therapy a lot. So Yeah, I'd say the first two years of my degree, so I did a three year undergraduate, I balanced it quite well. I was always very busy, like, six things happening at once.

Running on, I don't even drink coffee, but I had the vibe of someone running purely on coffee. And so I think that was very manageable. I think, again, the competition came in because I did want to be one of the two people, whoever you two people are in the uni, that managed to do the whole award in one year.

My eyes are on you because I was so hoping to beat you. So that was definitely pushing me. If I'd done it, like, as it was intended, I would have been chill. So chill. I will say though, if you're writing a dissertation, please don't try and complete an award in a year. Please rest. I have made so many errors in my life and that was one of them.

[00:07:04] Dave Musson: That sounds like good advice. I mean, in terms of things that perhaps helped in terms of managing the award, was the fact that it was managed online a useful thing for you, like through the grad intelligence platform? Did you find that easy to use? Was it useful in terms of logging your progress and staying on top of it, all of those kinds of things?

[00:07:22] Lauren Ketteridge: Yes. I think for me. The Gradintelligence Platform, because before the platform was released, I was tracking it on a little spreadsheet and

[00:07:29] Dave Musson: As we were.

[00:07:30] Lauren Ketteridge: And aggressively emailing to be like, you have seen this, haven't you? So when it came up on the platform, it was a lot easier, especially when it came to like, submitting reflections and stuff, like I cried for what your inbox probably was like, as it was just like, especially as it released and I sent like 50 emails in a day being like, I've done this, this and this and this, because everyone had to be in a separate email.

So I found it really useful. I will say quite hilariously, I think for some people on the award I spoke to, it was the first time they found out what the Gradintelligence platform was like, there's your transcript. You can also click that button. But yeah, it was really good, especially the feature to like search and the search comes and filters based on like what bits you're missing and stuff like that.

So I found that really useful. It was nice just to have it all in one place rather than several web pages and a lot of emails. Again, apologies for the emails.

[00:08:19] Dave Musson: Hey, I'm, I'm with you on that. And that was the nature of the pilot was that we were, we were bootstrapping it somewhat, but we got there in the end.

You mentioned earlier about wanting that shiny bit of paper, that sort of validation of completing it. And before you transitioned into your PhD life, you did hit the gold level of the award. So you got the, the shiny digital certificate and the shiny digital badge. How did that feel?

[00:08:42] Lauren Ketteridge: It was a nice accomplishment, especially given as I'd almost completed the one before, and then didn't.

I think The value for that came from, yes, it was a bit cynical of me to be like, I want the shiny thing, I'm a magpie, a magpie and an amoeba. But obviously, it was more to encapsulate what I had done in a sentence. So having a very new interdisciplinary degree, we struggled right up until graduation to vocalise what we actually did.

And it was in our third year and we got our lecturers and we were like, please, can you give us a session on how to explain our job to people, because we still don't know. And it was kind of like that value for the Warwick Award. Like, having done so many activities, I'm not going to send my stack of reflections to employers, but being able to sort of have the university and the award sort of act as a conduit to say, they have done these things, they would have done x, y, and z, put it all in a tagline made it a lot easier, and I'm very thankful for that, rather than just, Filling the CPD section of my CV with endless lines.

Now it's one line. Now I can write more about other things.

[00:09:48] Dave Musson: Good. And in terms of hitting that gold level, so for context for anyone listening, that means you've put in more than 300 hours of skills development, which is pretty impressive. Curious, could you take us through some of the activities that helped you get to that level of the award, and maybe, like, touch on some of the skills that those activities in particular helped you develop?

[00:10:08] Lauren Ketteridge: Yeah. Wow. We're really pulling from memory here. So I'd say the major one for me, and the category that I first tapped out of hours with, because with the award, you can only have like 20 hours for volunteering this sort of thing. So we can't just bank it all on one thing. It is broad development. So volunteering for mine was the first one that I tapped out on, and I found it so useful.

Because even within that category you can do so many things, because it pulls from your hours logged on the Warwick Volunteers platform. And so, the things I do on a daily, like, weekly basis count as volunteering, but for me they're just things I do, and I'm like, yeah, I go to this community group. It doesn't feel like volunteering.

It just feels like I'm a bit of the furniture. And so that was sort of one of those like undercover skills development things where I was like, Oh, it counts for so many points.

[00:10:54] Dave Musson: Yay. Well, that's always a key part of the award that perhaps some students don't necessarily get right away is that so much of what they're doing at university is developing those translatable, transferable skills.

And it's, it's only when you sort of take a step back and try and articulate it that you realize what, what you're going through. So, I mean, I guess from your volunteering, you're probably picking up, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like communication, teamwork, all of those kinds of things.

[00:11:20] Lauren Ketteridge: Definitely. And so I volunteer across a number of organizations in different sectors. And so that communication piece is definitely. It's very important because when people like your line manager in one organisation finds out you also do work for the other organisation, suddenly you're collaborating on things.

And so being able to talk to both groups on using their own, like, languages they have because everyone's got jargon in each sector, was a really useful skill that suddenly I was definitely using all the time. Even things like, sort of, Organisational awareness. So, I've done a lot of work in the university to do with sort of teaching and learning, academic quality, and so you learn a lot about how higher education is structured from that way.

Then to go out into a voluntary organisation and it's structured completely differently. And yes, I might not have the sort of commercial awareness that I think, for example, law students, when they talk about commercial awareness, they're reading the Financial Times and they know these specific magic circle firms.

My commercial awareness is much more about, like, the general structure of things. Coming from someone who's not particularly interested in business did not take a business module, but having that knowledge and suddenly having it click, and it come through practical things was really useful, yeah.

[00:12:33] Dave Musson: And in terms of anything else that you might have, might have tapped out on, or might have, a particular activity see, You really feel sort of helped with your award progress.

Are there any other that spring to mind?

[00:12:43] Lauren Ketteridge: Yeah, I think, so, the Sprint undergraduate program. So there is a postgraduate version as well, if you're a postgraduate taught student. I found that really useful.

[00:12:51] Dave Musson: Just a quick note here, the Sprint program no longer exists, but has instead been replaced by Thrive. And there's more information about Thrive in episode five of this podcast. Okay, back to Lauren.

[00:13:03] Lauren Ketteridge: I think for me volunteering was sort of the long stretch activity, but then doing lots of short activities within three days, the Sprint program is really quite compressed. I found that really useful, like, it's kind of like you're booking study leave off work, but we're booking study leave off study.

So I found that program incredibly useful, again, it's a program that involves talking to people from a range of backgrounds, really doing that self reflection. And yeah, so that was a really fun one as well, and I think that was one of the early ones I did as well.

[00:13:30] Dave Musson: There's more about the Warwick Award coming up. After this ad for, well, the Warwick Award. It's never too early, or too late, to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities, so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates, it can be personalised to allow you to shape your own employability skills development, and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy, so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning a degree. The Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk slash warwick award.

So while we're talking skills, I mean the, as you know, the award is centered on 12 core skills. I'm curious, in your opinion, which do you think are the most important of those dozen skills for, for students to develop?

[00:14:51] Lauren Ketteridge: So for me, it's the, I'm going to misquote the actual words used on the Warwick Award, but the skill relating to self assurance and reflection. For me, having an understanding of yourself and how you work.

Without them, you can't access the other skills. It's sort of that thing where you're reflecting on reflecting. It's sort of getting into like metacognition and more words with hyphens in. But for me that's the most important skill to be able to step back and reflect. And that's baked into every Warwick Award activity by the fact you have to do a little short reflection.

But I feel it's really the basis of all the other skills. And so yeah, I'm, I'm a big fan of sort of self assurance and Knowing who you are, that's my little hippie bit out of the way.

[00:15:40] Dave Musson: Well, that's a very nice segue into the next question, because I wanted to ask about the the requirement to write those reflections that's embedded in the award. And obviously it's there to help the award team administer it and make sure people are getting the right value out of the award. But hopefully it's useful for you guys as students to have that bank of examples and to, to use when you're going into applying for jobs or, or whatever else. What's that process of reflecting a useful exercise for you?

Like, did you get any value from it as you were going from the award?

[00:16:08] Lauren Ketteridge: Definitely.

So again, asterisk time. So my undergraduate involved an awful lot of reflecting. So basically a third of our marks each year was based on a reflective portfolio. And for me, So that portfolio was quite large. So in our first year of undergraduate, it didn't have a word cap, and I took things a bit too literally when they said do a reflection a week.

My final submission ended up being 30, 000 words. I'm so sorry whoever marked that. The future years they were capped at 5, 000, so that's fine. But bringing that back into small, please don't write 30, 000 words for the Warwick award team.

[00:16:40] Dave Musson: Yeah, please don't. Please.

[00:16:42] Lauren Ketteridge: So it's a lot smaller, sort of 250 to 500 words.

And I found that incredibly useful, because sometimes when you're just stuck in your head, you think, oh yeah, I'll remember that, and it's stuck in your head. And then you forget it, and it's like, no, I really need to write this down, especially if we're going to, like, then bring these things back up into interview.

Having it written down, it's like, so useful, especially with the second box on the Warwick Award which says, hey, you can put this in the star format if you really want to. I will say I didn't, and I think that's something I missed out on. But I think I just did that because I knew I wasn't going to go for a grad job.

And I was like, no, I don't really ask these things in PhD interviews that much. But yeah, incredibly useful. Even for someone who's done an awful lot of reflecting throughout their undergrad and beyond, to be able to sort of do it in a different format, a shorter format was really useful. And speaking to people who did their award and sort of hadn't done much reflecting before, having it start out quite small was really like a nice stepping stone.

And especially with sort of the links to things like the Gibbs reflective cycle, sort of give you a bit of a framework to how that can help. I think it works both ends of the spectrum to get you still reflecting more.

[00:17:53] Dave Musson: So as someone who has done a lot of reflecting in your degree and has written reflections ranging from 200 words to 30, 000 words, do you have any tips on how to write a good reflection, or at least a reflection that will be useful in the future?

[00:18:09] Lauren Ketteridge: So my advice is rely on frames, not necessarily rely, but don't be afraid to use them. I think if free writing works great for you, that's really useful. But often when I free write my reflections, it just quickly goes into like my favorite sandwich flavors.

Whereas using a sort of, a sort of proven framework can be really useful. So I've mentioned the Gibbs Reflective Framework and the University of Edinburgh has got a really great page on how to use Gibbs Reflective Framework. But there are other ones, so there's more simpler ones. So there's the What happened, so what, now what, which can be really useful and just breaking it down like that can be really, really good if you're starting on reflection.

And even beyond that I would say, sort of become like a, like the world's most like nitpicky detective. So write your reflection, especially when you're doing the what happened bit, and go through like a little detective and circle. Theoretically circle, you could physically circle every little thread that you might want to follow up on because it can get you to some really interesting places.

Like if the core theme of your reflection is, I did X, Y, and Z, and you find the core theme in it is how I approach reading, you could also have a really interesting thing you've missed, but your little detective brain has gone, Oh, but I was reading in the library. Maybe I should consider. How environments affect my reading as well.

And yes, you can go into a million little rabbit holes, but I think if you sort of recognize that this reflection isn't being marked, it's for you, you can write in note format, as long as the Warwick Award team can understand that you have used your brain. I think there's lots of things you can do, but yeah, my top tips is reflective frameworks.

There are so many. And yeah, feeling like a little detective to pick up on those things you might not necessarily get otherwise.

[00:19:58] Dave Musson: So we mentioned earlier that you're having bagged the gold level of the award is like a nice, a nice succinct thing you can put in a particular section of your CV. In terms of like how else you think you might make use of, of what you've achieved with the award in the future, has, has anything come to mind about how you might go go about talking about it or, or, or using it in any way?

[00:20:19] Lauren Ketteridge: Yeah, so in terms of the award itself, I think that's the goal I came into it with and I think it's fulfilled that, but the sort of flip side of that for me is because I've done so many activities throughout the award, I have so many connections now, and it's really useful as I'm staying at the university and sort of doing the path of becoming an academic, I All of these contacts now that if I have a project or I see a colleague who's struggling with X, Y, and Z, I'm like, boom, you can go to this person.

And I think it's really useful in just the experiences. Like I will say, the paper copy of the certificate, no clue where that's gone. Thank Earth. That there are digital copies for a reason. But yeah, so that's kind of fulfilled its purpose, but the connections we've made along the way, it sounds so cheesy, but it's true.

[00:21:01] Dave Musson: Great. And, I mean, we're onto our last question. I just, just to, to round off. If there's any students listening to this who perhaps have heard about the award, maybe considering it but haven't necessarily registered, or maybe who have registered but then have not done anything with it, what advice would you give to them?

[00:21:17] Lauren Ketteridge: My advice, and I know this is like, uni's very busy, we're all stressed. Maybe, you know, take a walk, but after that walk, book an hour out of your calendar just to go through the webpage a second time, because you've probably already done quite a lot of it. So I think one of the things you can even do is, if your uni has placement, and there is asterisks on this, so it's certain types of placement and certain timeframes, but that counts towards your Warwick Award.

So yeah, just take an hour out. That would be my top tip. And I know it can sometimes feel a bit cheesy, like I know quite a lot of people went through high school and college or sixth form, never like, Oh my God, if you don't have D of E gold, you're never going to get an offer. And then we all came to uni and realized that wasn't true.

You do not have to muddily walk through a field for a weekend to get into uni. And so I think. There can be sometimes a little thing like, oh, it's just like the D of E thing. Everyone says you have to do it. And yeah, no one's gonna force you to do the Warwick Award. But if you want a nice little thing that says, 'I've done lots of cool things throughout uni, ask me more questions,' it's useful and it's not gonna take a weekend through a muddy field, like I said. Just take an hour to set up and realize, oh, I'm already probably halfway there.

[00:22:33] Dave Musson: Brilliant. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for your time. Good luck with your, your PhD. And yeah, really appreciate you joining us on the podcast.

[00:22:39] Lauren Ketteridge: Perfect. Lovely to be here.

[00:22:42] Dave Musson: You've been listening to The Skills Cast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find The Skills Cast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

And you can find transcripts for all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast. And there's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, do be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks to Lauren Ketteridge for joining us on the podcast.

Congratulations to her for completing the Warwick award and best of luck with the PhD. This episode was hosted mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. This is a final episode of this season. Thanks so much for listening, and if you're only just joining us, hey, you've got another 11 conversations to go back and listen to.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] Giorgia McDonald: So professionalism to me is, I suppose, the embodiment of employability. And I think having, if I think back to my time in recruitment, professionalism was the one thing that you wanted to see more of. Now, you can learn a lot of transferable skills, but professionalism is the one that you, you have to really learn by doing.

[00:00:23] Dave Musson: Hi, and welcome back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important.

How they developed theirs, and how you can too. I'm your host Dave Musson, and this time we're taking another deep dive into one of Warwick's 12 core skills - professionalism . In this episode, head of the skills team here at Warwick, Ali Collins, was joined by Georgia McDonald, who is Warwick Business School's careers manager for undergraduates.

This interview is packed full of excellent advice about professionalism, including what it is, how and where you can build it, and how it might help you stand out from the crowd of 500, 000 graduates who enter the job market every single year. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes.

You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, here's Giorgia .

[00:01:38] Giorgia McDonald: So I suppose it's easy to start with where I began, and I suppose how I got into what I do right now. So I, I studied a French degree. Thinking that I'd go on and be a teacher and did a year abroad, decided that I didn't like teaching as a result of that, and then entered the wonderful world of graduate recruitment straight out of university.

Great learning experience, opportunity to develop resilience, tenacity, all those really good and wonderful skills. But as a result of that, I think when you're in a career, you think about the ethical implications of what you're doing or you try to and you start to which led me to applying to a careers coach role at the business school. I've been at Warwick for five years, very, very soon. 7th of January will be five years. And very recently started in the role as careers manager. That's a bit about me. I suppose what I do on a daily basis really ranges from supporting students with queries around what they want to do with their life application questions, helping them navigate multiple offers, which is a lovely problem to have, you know, and that could also include working with academics on how we embed what we do and employability skills into the curriculum. What

[00:02:47] Ali Collins: What would you say professionalism is?

[00:02:49] Giorgia McDonald: So professionalism to me is, I suppose, the embodiment of employability. And I think having, if I think back to My time in recruitment, professionalism was the one thing that you wanted to see more of. You know, you can learn a lot of transferable skills, but professionalism's the one that you, you have to really learn by doing.

So for me it's a combination of things. So it would be integrity, accountability, but also committing to that excellence in your work as well. So, you know, maintaining respect, but ethical behavior. In everything you're doing to ensure that you're doing a good job and you're well respected by your peers as well.

[00:03:26] Ali Collins: And you sort of cover this, I suppose, in that it's about being ethical and developing respect with your peers, but why is it really important for students to learn or develop professionalism?

[00:03:37] Giorgia McDonald: I don't think it's just important. I think it's crucial. I think when you think about the workplace, the lack of professionalism in your peers, for example, you wouldn't want to work with them again.

It's a little bit like when you're working with students in a group for a module. If they're not behaving in a way that you think is going to guarantee you an outcome, you know, whether that's for your degree or whether it's just in terms of a learning point, I think it's that respect for each other, which is why I think it's so crucial.

I think it also forms a foundation for a successful and sustainable career as well. You know, if you have great professional ethics and you. are very professional as a person, as a result of your professionalism skills, people will want to work with you again and it opens up professional opportunities and makes you more successful in your role.

[00:04:21] Ali Collins: So you mentioned about developing your own professionalism or rather it's something that you learn by doing. Can you talk a bit about what learning professionalism might involve?

[00:04:32] Giorgia McDonald: That's a really good question because I think it's really hard to, to quantify, qualify. I think it's a real range of communication skills, relationship building skills.

I think it's thinking about how you adapt to different environments. So how you would learn each of those is some of it passively through your modules. So. If we're thinking about communication skills, it's the ability to listen as well as speak, and talk, and hold a conversation. So, you know, you're, you're developing that in lectures and in seminars, but also developing that in any of your extracurriculars.

So societies, sports, for example, you're learning how to communicate in all the very different facets that that involves. But then again, relationship building, you know, it's thinking about your personal tutors or your module leaders, you know, the people that are going to help you get through your degree.

But then also the relationships you build outside of the classroom and how you navigate that as well.

[00:05:28] Ali Collins: So it's possible to build professionalism without being in a professional setting?

[00:05:33] Giorgia McDonald: Absolutely. If I think back to again, my, the very first role I did out of university, I think the, what helped me the most in that role was thinking about how I'd worked with people.

In my degree, so again, think about communication skills. It's very basic, but making sure that if you're in a group project, you're communicating your ideas, you're communicating boundaries, deadlines, and that's the same in the workplace. You have to communicate with not just people in your direct team, but cross functionally to make sure that you're all working towards the same purpose, which most of the time when you're working in an organization, you are doing anyway.

So, absolutely, I don't think you have to work in a professional setting to have professional or professionalism skills.

[00:06:17] Ali Collins: So you've got experience as well of working on the other side of this. So, at the moment, you prepare students for their careers, but in a previous life, you're a graduate recruiter. So, you're, you're selecting students.

What would you look for you know, if we're thinking about assessment centers or anything like that, what kind of behaviors could students display in those situations to show that they are professional?

[00:06:38] Giorgia McDonald: Oh, this is where I get on a bit of a soapbox, I guess. So, my time in graduate recruitment showed me that absolutely every person, whether you're a graduate or not, because it wasn't just graduates we were recruiting, but it taught me that absolutely everybody's employable in some way, shape or form.

And you can quite literally go and do. And I think when, when I think back to what we were looking for in terms of these skills, I always say that employers hire for attitude more than they hire for skill. Obviously you have to have the core basic transferable skills and that kind of wide range of skill set.

But if you don't have the right attitude, you don't have the right work ethic, you don't have the right approach to professionalism, you're going to be much harder to employ. Because employers want people that want to be at work and want to do a good job because then for them there's a return on investment because they're going to teach you, you know, they're going to pay you, but they're going to teach you.

So it's just, it's time as well as financial resource they're putting into you and they want to see that return on investment. And if you haven't got the right approach to professionalism or drive, they can't see that return on investment.

[00:07:51] Ali Collins: So professionalism is a way to signal that you are a worthwhile investment ?

[00:07:55] Giorgia McDonald: Absolutely.

If you don't know something, they can teach you what you don't know. But if you're not showing the right approach to learn that information, you're not behaving in a professional manner, they can't see how they're going to teach you. And therefore they can't see that return on investment. Because most employees, they want to see it as a longer term investment as well.

And if you're not showing them at the very beginning that you can take this on and you can, you know, we're going to make mistakes, but you know, if we think about professionalism, professionalism, sorry, in that sense, how do you approach a mistake? It's all the very small things, you know, they can teach you what you don't know, but they can't teach you attitude.

That's what I always say. Yeah.

[00:08:37] Ali Collins: That's really interesting. So going back to your experience doing various different things, teaching, recruitment, working here, how did you develop your own professionalism skill?

[00:08:47] Giorgia McDonald: Very passively. Again, like I say, I don't think it's something you can, you can learn out of a textbook.

I don't think it's something even me as a careers coach or manager. can stand up in front of a lecture room and teach students how to be professional. I think how I've developed it over time is practice. You know, if we go really basic professionalism, replying to emails and communicating in the workplace, you get better at that the longer you do it.

And if you have the right mentors in place, and if you're working in the right team, fundamentally as well, if you don't have a good support system in your workplace, you know, your manager's not overly Hands on, let's say, you're not going to learn. You know the right thing to say in an email, for example, there's acronyms, you know, COP, close of play.

That means that by the end of the day, or COB, close of business, by the end of the week, you're not gonna learn those kinds of things and you're not gonna learn the right time to use it as well. So a lot of it was passive through practice. But I think in terms of the intrinsic value. Wanting to do a good job and, and what that looks like.

That comes from getting quite philosophical. My parents, you know, seeing what the reward of hard work is. You know, being able to do the things you want, go on the holidays, you want, you know, the more professional you are, the more successful. And I think that's as a result of having seen that. The harder you work, the more time you put into wanting to do a good job, the more you'll reap the benefits of it.

[00:10:14] Ali Collins: Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying before about. You know, if you, if you are professional, it opens up more professional opportunities to you.

[00:10:23] Giorgia McDonald: Absolutely. You know, the more you put in, the more you're going to get out. So it only benefits you to behave in a professional manner.

[00:10:29] Ali Collins: So I know we talked about sort of passive learning, so, you know, basically seeing good examples of how it's done and then emulating that.

But is there anything that students could take part in, whether it's on campus or elsewhere? that they could perhaps do more actively to develop their professional skills?

[00:10:48] Giorgia McDonald: When I think of the opportunities that students can do on campus to do the passive learning of professionalism, my mind immediately goes to societies and sports.

You know, if we look at how many graduates enter the workforce every year, there's 500, 000 of them. That's a lot. It's a lot of graduates every year. And the ones that stand out to employers are the ones that go above and beyond. They don't just do their course. Because again, you can't learn the skills that they want from just your course.

So developing professionalism with a society, for example, could look like I don't know, Warwick Consulting Society, let's say you're a member, not of the executive board, but maybe you're organizing a summit for them. For example, you're having to liaise internally with your own team, but then you're also having to get employer partners, employer sponsors.

So you're learning possibly how to communicate internally and externally for mutual gain. I think that's a really good way. Again, sports, communication, deadline, making sure that you're putting in the effort to get the reward. You know, sports, if we take football, I think they train three, four times a week, I think.

So, you know, that's early mornings to students, might not be to, to those of us in the workforce. No, no, but I think it's those, like I say, those, those core morals, you know, if you're willing to get up and work hard to play football because you enjoy it, you know. That translates to, okay, so what am I prepared to do that goes above and beyond in the workplace?

So it's not just your modules, it's all those extracurriculars. And you've got 200 societies that you can get involved in on campus, there's plenty of opportunity.

[00:12:18] Ali Collins: That's interesting, because I suppose I was sort of expecting you to say part time work or internships or something, but obviously you can develop professional skills not doing something that's directly work related.

[00:12:30] Giorgia McDonald: Definitely. And, you know, I would say, well, obviously work experience, part time work. Shadowing. Any of that is fantastic. That's the goal. That's the nice to have, I suppose. I'm also aware that there's very limited opportunity sometimes for that. Not everybody has access to that, but you all have access, or students all have access to the societies.

They're part of a community. I mean, yes, naturally, if you do work experience with shadow, you're going to learn that a lot quicker because you're in the workforce. But, you know, if you're a first year and there's no formal opportunity for you, what can you do? You know, societies, sports.

[00:13:07] Ali Collins: So you talked a bit about opportunities on campus and stuff that students can do.

And we've talked about how you would define the skills related to professionalism or, you know, what professionalism means, but what do you think students don't realize they need to learn when it comes to professionalism?

[00:13:22] Giorgia McDonald: What a question. What they don't realize they need to learn is managing upwards and managing expectations.

So as a recruiter, I'll take an example of when I was recruiting. So as a recruiter. You would invite a student to an interview and you'd help them prepare for the interview and then you'd get a text the morning of, Oh, I can't make it. I don't know, my car's broken down or trains are running late, you know, that's fine.

That happens. But if you manage expectations and say, I can still make it to the interview, but I'm going to be late because of this. That's better than completely not attending. It's a bit like, you know, you're doing a group project with your, with your peers and I'm really sorry I couldn't submit that because my laptop died.

Whereas instead if you say, you know, I can submit it but it's going to be later, you're managing expectations, you're managing everybody's expectation of what you're going to be able to commit and you're not failing to deliver. You know, there's a lot more acceptance, I guess, in that respect. And I think that comes down to, again, that professionalism, that, that ethical behavior that you're not wasting somebody's time as well in that respect.

[00:14:29] Ali Collins: I think that's a really good one because I know that used to come up a lot in some of the interviews and assessment centers I was preparing students for where there would be these situations where, you know, the scenario would be you've got this task to do and then this thing comes in at the last minute and how are you going to manage it?

Really, it was looking for, as you say, managing expectations and going to your boss to say, well, this is, this is the situation and this is how I'm going to tackle it, but it's not going to happen. But I know sometimes students will find that difficult because, you know, you imagine in an interview what you're going to say is I'll do everything on time, even though it's impossible, I'm just going to guarantee it.

So, yeah, I guess managing those relationships and making sure if you're letting people down, you're letting them down with plenty of notice to find an alternative.

[00:15:11] Giorgia McDonald: Exactly right. The last minute. And I think that's the most important thing to remember. And you know, I'm 10 years into a career and I'm still learning that I have to say no or I have to say yes, but with a caveat.

And that's better than saying you're going to do something. It's over promising and under delivering. You're better to. Deliver. Yeah. Over deliver and under promise. You're better to do it that way. But it's something that you want, I think as a student, you, you don't realise that you can set those boundaries because you want to take on the opportunity because there's been limited opportunity for you to take that up until then, but you're well within your right to say, yes, I can do that, but it needs to be in this timeframe, for example.

[00:15:52] Ali Collins: And I suppose it's about looking after yourself to a degree as well. And I know that's been a focus more and more in recruitment. You know, recruiters will want to know that you know your limits and you know at what point you need to say, okay, I'm, you know, I've done as much as I can on this at the moment, but I do need to take a break.

So again, the temptation is to say, isn't it? I'll just work 24 hours. I'll just, I'll never take a break. Not doable. And then I'll burn out in six months and you won't get a return on your investment.

[00:16:20] Giorgia McDonald: Exactly . Exactly. But I also think this comes through to. This is, it's an emotional intelligence point as well.

And again, that's not something that anybody can teach you, you know, that you can read about it. You can understand what emotional intelligence is, but you can't teach somebody how to be emotionally intelligent. And that's something that recruiters, particularly in the UK, really value somebody that knows where their boundaries are, what they can be expected to do, what they can't be expected to do, but also somebody that speaks up in a meeting and says, well, this isn't feasible.

We're not able to do this because of X, Y, Z.

[00:16:53] Dave Musson: There's more talk about professionalism to come, right after this. It's never too early, or too late, to start thinking about what you might do after graduation, and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates, it can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development, and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy, so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning a degree. The Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:17:54] Ali Collins: So you talked about being 10 years into your career. Still learning. I mean, obviously that never stops, but what are your professionalism goals or what kind of skills do you plan to develop in the future?

[00:18:07] Giorgia McDonald: Yeah, 10 years doesn't sound like very long when you put it in that respect. You know, if I, again, if I summarize what I think professionalism is, it's integrity, accountability. Commitment to excellence. I think my goal for the next five years is really mastering the craft of what I'm doing right now.

You know, I don't want to be the kind of person that is jack of all trades, but I also can't sit here and say I'm going to be doing what I'm doing right now. forever. But before I decide on what that next thing is, I really want to be excellent at what I'm doing. You know, by no means do I think anybody ever masters integrity, accountability, but I like to think I'm already pretty good at holding my hands up when I don't know something or I'm not very good at something.

Or I've made a mistake, and I also think I demonstrate pretty good integrity as well. So the one thing that I think I'd focus on is that commitment to excellence, you know, and, and also realizing what excellence actually is. It's not perfection. It's just, you're putting a lot of effort into something to get a return.

If it doesn't result in perfection, that's okay. At least you know you've put in that excellence, but also realizing that everybody's definition of excellence is very different. So, managing my own expectations, I suppose, of what everybody else is able to achieve and what effort they're able to put in, because that would be very different to mine as well.

[00:19:25] Ali Collins: And it's interesting that, you know, you're saying that you expect to come to a point in the future where you want to decide what you want to do and it, you know, I guess it's easy to imagine that you make that decision when you finish university and then that's, that's it, off you go. But it's all the way through your career isn't it, isn't it, the Stomping thing, okay. I've got options, which of these am I going to take?

[00:19:43] Giorgia McDonald: I think if you get your dream job at the age of 21, 22, or however you old when you graduate, I mean, that's great, you've, you've secured the jackpot of life. But two years into that, let's say you're doing a graduate scheme, if you complete that graduate scheme, then what, what's, what's your goal?

You've got 40 years to potentially, unless you retire early, and you're very fortunate, or you choose to not work and do something completely different. You've got a really long time to enjoy work, and I think that's something that, for me, is really important too, to me, is enjoying what I do, and which is why I say I don't know whether I'll be doing that in five years time, because I love what I do.

The work we do with students is so impactful and so fulfilling, but what that fulfillment looks like to me in five years time will be very different. And I think that's what students need to remember, you know, they could do an internship, a placement year, shadowing, a graduate scheme in what they consider their dream job, but in five years time, after they've done that, what is that next step?

You know, great if you're happy to stay in that, fantastic. But a lot of people want that progression. A lot of people want to see and evolve in what they do, I guess. So, I think it's realising there's lifelong learning, and that's what we talk about when we talk about a squiggly career, you know. And again, when I think back to what I very first said, you know, you can do something and you have the skills to do lots of different roles.

You might start in something and then decide you want to go to the complete other spectrum. I'm a great example of that. I did recruitment. I flipped. I now do the other side. And instead of trying to convince people to do jobs they might not want to do, I'm helping students realise what they do want to do.

And I think, yeah, it's understanding what that evolution looks like to you and how you're going to change what you're doing to fit with that evolution.

[00:21:33] Ali Collins: And people change, don't they? I mean, my dream job when I left university. Was not, or my dream life when I left university was probably live in a treehouse and be a zookeeper and neither of those things really appeal now, but you know, the thing that you think, or that you do want to do at one age is not the same as it is at another.

So I guess that's it, isn't it? I think it's really important to be open to changing your job as your interests and goals and everything else change.

[00:22:00] Giorgia McDonald: There's also an awful lot of people that think they know what they want to do. They do an internship or a placement year and that's not at all what they want to do.

Again, I'm case in point for that. I did a year abroad teaching English in a very small country. I'm going to say because it wasn't big enough to be a city in France. And as a result of that, I did a complete U turn to, you know, did a degree to teach in the UK, taught students from the age of eight to 25 in France and decided that it's not for me.

So I think it's, yeah, it's understanding from yourself. It's okay to not know what you want to do, but if you do know what you want to do and that changes again, that's also okay. The, I think the idea of a dream job to me needs putting in the bin because not everybody is fortunate to have a dream job, but also the expectation that you set of that to find that dream job can be really crushing.

[00:22:56] Ali Collins: It prevents you from taking action, doesn't it? You spend. All this time looking for the perfect thing as opposed to something that's good and interesting and will open doors and allow you to decide what to do.

[00:23:07] Giorgia McDonald: Yeah. Prevents you from seeing opportunity where there is opportunity to be had. Definitely.

[00:23:12] Ali Collins: So going back to the sort of professionalism skills, bit of this, I suppose you've talked about some of the skills that you have developed, but Oh, that you've developed sort of over the years or through your career, but can you think of a recent skill that you developed and how you did it?

[00:23:29] Giorgia McDonald: So, anybody that knows me knows that something I have to work very hard to do is focus on detail. My attention to detail can be really, really poor, to the point of if I'm looking at information in a spreadsheet and I can't find it, it's because I've not given enough time to look for it.

Or if I've missed something out in an email, it's because I've not given my brain the space to think more widely than just what I need. I've transitioned into the careers manager role very, very recently. And a significant part of that work is being a little bit more data driven and obviously having to focus on detail to get the results we want on a more wider scale.

So attention to detail, it exhausts me, it drains me, but I'm finding now that actually. The result of that is what's giving me energy. So, I'm working on, at the minute, on trying to embed our service into as much of the curriculum as I can. Obviously, that's a lot of spreadsheets, thinking about figures, how much of a percentage of the modules that we have are we already in.

And, I'm really, I'm really enjoying seeing the result of putting in the hard work of the formulas, making sure I've got the right cells in the Excel document. Sounds really dull. But I came out of a Christmas lunch that we were having early on Monday because I was so enjoying the result of what I was doing.

So I think I'm learning not necessarily to focus on detail, but to identify what I enjoy as a result of having to work so hard on something.

[00:24:54] Ali Collins: Just the, the feeling of learning something or knowing that you know something that you didn't before. It's quite gratifying, isn't it?

[00:25:02] Giorgia McDonald: Yeah . And you know, the result that I'm finding might not necessarily be the most amazing result in the world.

We might not be doing very well in terms of let's say versus a target that we're working on. Knowing where we are, as a result of having to do all that really hard, attention focused work. Yeah, that's really fulfilling, really energising.

[00:25:22] Ali Collins: So it's finding, I suppose, what's in it for you if you've got to learn something that's outside your...

[00:25:27] Giorgia McDonald: Yeah , and I think that's a skill in itself.

I think that's, maybe it's not the attention to detail skill that I'm talking about here. Maybe it's actually more Understanding myself and emotional intelligence, maybe.

[00:25:39] Ali Collins: Okay, it keeps coming up, doesn't it, as a key thing. So in your experience of working with candidates, with students, whatever, can you give an example of when a lack of professionalism has really tripped somebody up?

[00:25:50] Giorgia McDonald: Oh, these are my favourite ones to remember. Because the great, the great students, you know, they're going to be successful with or without your help. But the ones that maybe lack that professionalism, they're the ones that you remember because they're the ones that you benchmark everybody else against.

So the one example I always think about is, we used to run assessment centres in London on a weekly basis, so that would be potentially 50 candidates every week that we'd be assessing. And they'd have to turn up before a certain time, they'd have to register, they'd have to log on, and then they'd also have to sit in a room all together and do an introduction to who they are.

Less than, 45 seconds we gave them. And this one candidate turned up not wearing interview appropriate attire. They were wearing jeans, trainers a jumper, which again, depending on the environment might be very different. But I was recruiting for professional sales roles. So, you know, the expectation was that you'd wear at least a shirt and smart trousers.

So that wasn't the faux pas. That wasn't the, I suppose, the, the red flag. The red flag was when this candidate stood up. And we asked them to share, you know, their name, their course, and a fun, unique, interesting fact about themselves. And this candidate said that their fun, unique, interesting fact was that they had read the Bible so many times because they'd spent so much time in detention.

At school. And, you know, these assessment centres, it wasn't just in front of me, it was in front of ten to twelve employers that were looking to recruit as a result of this. So, I'm not sure that was the best impression to give potential employers about, yeah, your professional behaviour. If you're spending so much time in detention, I mean, great that you were able to use that time and focus on something that was important to you.

But what got you into that position in the first place? Maybe not professional behaviour at school. So yeah, that's one that always sticks out.

[00:27:46] Ali Collins: Yeah, it's kind of reading the room to a degree, isn't it?

[00:27:49] Giorgia McDonald: I mean, it's quite often difficult to know how to answer some of these questions, but just remembering who are the people that are here and what are they looking at me?

As, you know, I'm here as a potential employee, so what, what do I probably

Not want to advertise? What's the impression that I want to give, you know, if this is the only thing people learn from me today, what do I want them to think about me?

[00:28:09] Ali Collins: Well, this was a few years ago now, and you've obviously remembered that particular fact.

[00:28:12] Giorgia McDonald: Yeah, it was eight years ago, I think. And I, I remember to this, I remember exactly what the person was wearing. They also fell asleep on the front row while everybody else was doing. They're like, you know, tell me about yourself pitch. I think that's worse than the detention thing. Yeah, probably is.

But that is, yeah, I remember that more than I remember the really great ones. And the things I remember about the great candidates wasn't necessarily their knowledge. It was how they came across. And sometimes it's their background, not necessarily what they did but whether they did a placement year or something like that.

But yeah, the, the terrible one, that one, I'll never forget that. Never.

[00:28:51] Ali Collins: I mean, it's a way to make an impression, but, and thinking about professionalism as in the way that you sort of present yourself. And then authenticity. I think sometimes students find it quite difficult to balance those two. And I know I've worked with students who felt that there was quite a, quite a strict definition to professionalism, which included behaving in a particular way that wasn't necessarily Them presenting themselves authentically.

How do you advise or recommend that students balance be professional, but be you?

[00:29:24] Giorgia McDonald: I don't think there should be a balance. I think if you are having to conform or you are having to behave in a, in a way that is entirely unnatural to you as a person. you're probably working in the wrong environment. You know, if you're not a particularly formal, overly, and I'm going to use the word professional, but not in the same sense, you know, I'm thinking when I think of professional in this sense, I think, you know, suited suited and booted tie, really intense professional kind of role.

You know, if that is unnatural to you and you don't see yourself wearing a suit every day to work, think about what kind of environment that is. And that's not industry. That's environment. You know, you could go and work in, let's say, finance, and you could work in very different organizations. There'll be finance organizations that don't want you to wear a suit, for example.

So I think, you know, this is where we think about our strengths and authenticity. You can be authentically you and play to your strengths as well. So you can work in any industry you want, but it's about the environment. And I think that's where we think about that authenticity. So authenticity is relating to the environment, maybe more than the job role itself.

Don't conform. Be yourself. Because if you have to be somebody you're not every day, that's draining physically, emotionally, mentally. It can make you really quite unwell. So, be you.

[00:30:45] Ali Collins: So what are your final words of advice then for students about professionalism, its importance, and what they can do to develop it?

[00:30:52] Giorgia McDonald: So, I think my final, my final words, or my final points, are kind of two prong it. So, first one is employers hire for attitude more than they hire for skill. So think about any opportunity that you're able to develop the kind of attitude you want to have in the workplace. And this isn't me saying that every employer is going to expect you to work over and above, you know, do more hours.

It's thinking about the return on investment that you're going to be able to give to an employer. It's not just, you're going to work for you. Yes, you're replaceable at work and you have to think about your own well being. Employers only want to hire people that want to be there as well. So thinking about what opportunity you've got to learn and understand the attitude you want to have in the workplace and then understanding where that fits best as well.

But then I'd also think about your return on investment for your course. Again, there's 500, 000 graduates every year in the UK. That's just the UK. So what are you going to get out of your university experience? The more you put in, the more you're going to get out that return on investment is, yes, you're, you're putting a lot of financial investment into your course, but also there's three, potentially four or five years here that you could really enhance a lot of those skills from outside of the classroom.

The more you put in, the more you're going to get out.

[00:32:23] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page. In the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Huge thanks to Giorgia McDonald for offering such a wealth of wisdom and insights into professionalism.

And thanks also to Ali Collins for asking the questions. This episode was hosted, mixed, and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back in two weeks for our season finale. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme.

Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward .

[00:00:00] Zosia: That's why I think as well, volunteering is a great thing to do, because a lot of things at university are very campus based, so you'll come onto campus, then you'll go home. So it's all in a bubble, whereas volunteering actually makes you go out and see the locals, see the problems that are happening, or just, it allows you to help out people that are outside this bubble, and therefore, maybe you'll get an understanding of what type of work you want to do in the future.

[00:00:26] Dave Musson: Hi and thanks for checking out the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is a show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they develop theirs, and how you can too.

I'm your host, Dave Musson, and this time our focus is something that is great not only for skills development, but many, many other things too. Volunteering. In this episode, skills developer Tom Greenaway caught up with two people who have in depth experience at Warwick Volunteers, the official Warwick Society for volunteering that has an impact across the local community all year round.

Later, you'll hear from Dominik, a recent graduate who has previously been a project leader and vice president of Warwick Volunteers. But first, you'll meet Zosia, the president of Warwick Volunteers for 2023/24 . To find out more about Warwick Volunteers and how you can get involved, check out the episode description for links to their website and Instagram pages.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen. And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description.

Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, it's time to talk volunteering. Here's Zosia.

[00:01:47] Zosia: So my name is Zosia East. I'm a third year law student and I'm interested in doing volunteering and now I'm president of Warwick Volunteers.

[00:01:57] Tom Greenaway: So, how did you get into it?

[00:01:59] Zosia: Well, I knew I was always interested in volunteering, because I did some at school, so I'd help out in the local soup kitchen, we did fundraisers, and yeah, we just volunteered around the school if, you know, if there was a food drive, or we needed to give clothes to some homeless people, or, you know, help around there.

And so I knew that when I went to Warwick, I wanted to join Warwick Volunteers immediately, In my first year I got into Write to Read and the rest is history.

[00:02:27] Tom Greenaway: What's Write to Read?

[00:02:28] Zosia: So Write to Read project is where you go to local schools and you help disadvantaged kids to read. So I went to Leamington and there I helped kids who either had like a disability or just had a lot of trouble reading, weren't getting enough support from home, had difficult situations.

And they just read with them, support them, give them encouragement, et cetera. I mean, you sound like you've been volunteering for a long time.

[00:02:52] Tom Greenaway: Was it hard to start? Like, did someone volunteer you or was it always something you wanted to do?

[00:02:58] Zosia: I think it was always something I wanted to do. Previously, I would volunteer with my mom and we would, at the school, we would just help with fundraisers, bake sales, whatever really needed to be done.

She always helped with like administrative things as well. So yeah, it was fairly easy just to get into it. It was just a matter of deciding what I wanted to put my time into.

So, like I'm thinking about, we're recording this at the start of term just before the volunteering fair.

[00:03:25] Tom Greenaway: If you're a student walking around one of these volunteering fairs, what do you do? Do you book questions? Do you ask what, how do you know what you want to do?

[00:03:34] Zosia: I would say just walk around the stalls, ask a question about what you see there on their board, poster. Whatever the sign is, you know, ask about what sort of commitment the student should expect. So are they expected to commit to, for example, weekly sessions of, you know, two hours?

Or is it just kind of like, okay, this is a one off session, we'll just send you an email, you can sign up, and very flexible. Or is it an online thing where you can? You know, just for example, call someone who is, I don't know, in a care home or something cause we've had projects like that as well.

So, you know, there's a variety of different things that you can ask at the fair time commitments, volunteering is obviously free at Warwick Volunteers and yeah, just come to the fair and if you have any more questions, ask the exec, look at the Instagram Warwick Volunteers and we'll be in touch with you.

[00:04:27] Tom Greenaway: Got our adverts in early. There's a website as well. There's the Warrior Volunteers website. So this will be coming out after the fair, but you can go to the Warrior Volunteers website. Am I right in thinking that if you have to travel you can get some money back as well?

[00:04:43] Zosia: Yeah, so you get to reclaim expenses.

So, for example, last year, I was a project leader of the Charles Wilcox Neighbours project. And there we'd take the bus to Kettleworth. And, you know, you know, it was only like two pounds. But after you've gone, you know, every single week there and then back, it does add up. And luckily, Work Volunteers is kind enough to reimburse you.

So if you collect receipts and then send them pictures and fill out the form. which is also on the website. Then you can reclaim the expenses.

[00:05:14] Tom Greenaway: Okay. So you've already talked a bit about the different types of volunteering you've done. Why, why do it? Like, why do you volunteer? What motivates you?

[00:05:24] Zosia: Well, I think it's just the simple answer of, I want to be a good person.

And selfishly, maybe it's like, I want to feel good about myself. At the same time, it's like that selfishness is combated by the fact that I'm actually helping other people and when I see their happy faces after, I don't know, I've taught them something about technology or helped them out with, I don't know, giving them food, for example, then they're so happy and that just, you know, brightens up everyone's day for them and for me.

[00:05:53] Tom Greenaway: So it's kind of like making yourself feel good by making other people feel good?

[00:05:57] Zosia: Exactly. It's that kind of mutual benefit.

[00:06:01] Tom Greenaway: What are the most important things you've learned from volunteering?

[00:06:03] Zosia: I've learned a lot of skills, it depends, because initially I was just a volunteer, and there I'd just learn how to communicate with different types of people, you know, what their facial expressions mean, body language if they're comfortable or not comfortable.

Things like that whereas now when entering more leadership positions I'm learning those kind of skills, so organizational skills you know, communication obviously always but yeah, it's a lot more about, okay, I've got this team or I've got these volunteers, okay, I need to take the responsibility and help them out while helping out the clients or people who need volunteers.

[00:06:43] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, so I guess the start is kind of you. Turnip and you just do stuff from that improves your communication skills, you know, things like being able to explain things or helping other people

[00:06:53] Zosia: Exactly.

[00:06:54] Tom Greenaway: But now that you, cause you led projects last year, I believe.

[00:06:57] Zosia: Yeah. And so that's more organizational, so getting people in the same place at the same time. Booking rooms, you know, emailing everyone, I guess promoting as well.

[00:07:08] Tom Greenaway: So recruiting people and then now as exec, you're, it's a whole other set of skills, isn't it?

[00:07:14] Zosia: Yes. This time it's less about interacting with clients and other volunteers. Although obviously I try to attend as many sessions as possible.

It's more about talking to like the university staff. The other exec members, the staff team and getting them to communicate clearly with each other, getting things sorted out on time and yeah, just trying to promote our strategy for this year, which is, you know, trying to increase the number of volunteers after COVID and getting people more excited about helping others.

[00:07:48] Tom Greenaway: Is there anything that's surprised you about what you've learned?

[00:07:51] Zosia: I think I'm surprised how it's different when you're a volunteer versus in a leadership position. So when you're in a leadership position, you have to be very organized. You always have to stay on top of your work. Whereas a volunteer, it's a lot easier because even though, you know, you do have to turn up, you do have to make that time during the day to go and volunteer.

It's a lot easier, but then when you're in a leadership position, it's also more rewarding because you did organize it and you actually helped other volunteers to volunteer as well.

[00:08:20] Tom Greenaway: So do you prefer a leadership position to standard volunteering or which two?

[00:08:25] Zosia: I don't think I prefer either or. I think there are different stages in life where First, you're a volunteer and you learn from the leaders and then you become a leader and then you can help others the way they helped you.

[00:08:37] Tom Greenaway: So what, what do you think you still need to learn?

[00:08:40] Zosia: Oh, plenty. I mean, there's always things to learn. You can always be a better leader, be more organized. Time management, obviously, at university is a big thing, trying to fit everything into your busy. timetable, so that and yeah, presentation and skills so many different things always, you know, just need to improve everything.

[00:08:58] Tom Greenaway: Is there anything you've thought specifically that you need to work on?

[00:09:02] Zosia: I think probably maybe like organizing bookings and things like that, because it's quite difficult to make sure it's well in advance and then try and be flexible if things come up. So I like to always things have everything organized, but obviously You know, things happen and you have to be flexible and then find ways around that.

So problem solving. So I think I need to probably improve on that more, but I'm trying.

I think that's part of it as well as learning more about the way places work, like the university. So you can, once you know how things work, then you can develop different strategies if something goes wrong. Whereas if something goes wrong and you've never encountered it before, then you know, then.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm always happy to ask others to help as well if I'm stuck on something, but I always try and figure it out myself beforehand as well. Yeah.

[00:09:56] Tom Greenaway: What else have you done at Warwick to develop your skills apart from Doing all this volunteering.

[00:10:02] Zosia: Well, it's something that I've, I mean, this isn't a very academic skill, but I've done salsa during the last year.

[00:10:08] Tom Greenaway: Salsa dancing?

[00:10:09] Zosia: Yeah, salsa dancing, and that's really improved just being comfortable and interacting with so many different people as well. So yeah, just communication again, you know, communication is, I think, you know, from the foundation of almost everything. And because you dance in a circle and you keep switching partners, and so you're just You know, you've got to talk to them, understand what they're going to do, and also, I don't know, commitment, perseverance in different dances and skills that, you know, you just can't get at the beginning and then after persevering through it, you

[00:10:43] Tom Greenaway: What advice would you give students or would you have for students who are thinking about volunteering?

[00:10:48] Zosia: I would just say join and pick something that you think is interesting. If you decide afterwards that it's not for you, you can always change. It's not like a You know, one path fits all, you can always change your mind, so I'd say just get involved and as quickly as possible, because afterwards you'll think, oh, I wish I would have done this, but university just flies by and you realise that it's your third year, you've got to apply for a job, and You know, you wish you could do all these things.

[00:11:17] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I mean that's You're saying all the right things, that's quite nice. But skills development, you need to start early. You can't just, in your third year, be like Oh, I need to learn teamwork. You know, something you have to practice in your first and second year.

[00:11:31] Zosia: It's never too late to start. Never too late to start.

[00:11:34] Tom Greenaway: But sometimes starting later makes it more difficult to do the things you want. What advice would you give to students about developing skills? Kind of from your experience.

[00:11:43] Zosia: I think developing skills is very important. You can sign up for different workshops talk through different things that you have problems with, try and become more confident, whether it's public speaking debating different points, writing you know articles for newsletters or things like that. So it's an always, it's always like a useful thing to go to. You can try and fit it in and, you know, as I said before, go see how you like it. You'll always learn something new. So I think it's a valuable event to go to.

[00:12:14] Tom Greenaway: I think kind of what you say about trying new things definitely is a way to develop skills.

Even if it's something that you feel you may have done something similar, doing it in a new place or with new people is a, is a new test.

[00:12:27] Zosia: And that's a good way of developing, especially if it's like, you know, 'cause a lot of students at university want to go with their friends as well. So putting yourself out there when other people aren't doing that is also hard.

But I think that it will pay off in the long run.

[00:12:42] Tom Greenaway: Did you volunteer with a friendship group, or did you find your friends through volunteering?

[00:12:47] Zosia: I actually found them through volunteering. So the first year volunteering here at uni was quite isolated, because I'd just go alone to the school and then I'd volunteer there for a few hours.

But in my second year when I was a project leader, We all met as project leaders in this giant group. We talked to each other about our different projects and actually I've got great friends from that. So yeah, you'll meet different people and they're all lovely and you know, they'll be happy to help you anytime.

So that's another bonus.

[00:13:15] Tom Greenaway: So I've got one last question, which is about the future. What are you going to do after you finish work? What are your goals or ambitions?

[00:13:23] Zosia: That is a good question. I still don't have it figured out a hundred percent. You know, now is the time for writing applications. So, I still don't know exactly.

Maybe I'll go on to, you know, teaching for a year, kind of do like a placement year, and then maybe decide what I want to do from there. I'm applying to do a master's. I'm applying to different law firms for a training contract or a scheme, and then a training contract. But honestly, it's all up in the air for now.

So I'm just trying to apply and enjoy my last year as much as possible.

[00:13:55] Tom Greenaway: So where do you see yourself in five years?

[00:13:58] Zosia: I see myself definitely volunteering again. So if I am a lawyer in five years, then I would want to take on a lot of like pro bono projects and things. Otherwise I'm always happy to help out the community.

And with whatever I'm doing, either, you know, if I'm a lawyer, teacher or whatever else, life throws in my bath.

[00:14:20] Tom Greenaway: Just to be clear, pro bono is like the cases that you do for free?

[00:14:23] Zosia: Yes, exactly. So in a law firm, there'll be the cases which clients pay for, and then there are a few cases that the law firm will take on for free.

Different variety of different reasons. Yeah.

[00:14:35] Tom Greenaway: People can't afford it or if it's. A case maybe involving a charity and they don't have a lot of money.

[00:14:41] Zosia: Exactly. So that type of thing. So yeah, to just help them out.

[00:14:44] Tom Greenaway: So it sounds like you kind of, you see yourself being a lawyer or working in the law.

[00:14:49] Zosia: At the moment. Yes.

[00:14:50] Tom Greenaway: So you're waiting for. Whichever opportunity comes available?

[00:14:54] Zosia: Exactly. I think that there's a lot of pressure to know exactly what you're going to do after university, but I think that life doesn't always work that way and you just have to obviously, you know, try and learn things early, apply to different things, but ultimately, if you don't have control over it, then you just have to try and see where it goes.

That's why I think as well, volunteering is a great thing to do because a lot of things. at university are very campus based, so you'll come onto campus, then you'll go home. So it's all in a bubble, whereas volunteering actually makes you go out and see the locals, see the problems that are happening, or just, it allows you to help out people that are outside this bubble, and therefore, maybe you'll get an understanding of.

What type of work you want to do in the future.

[00:15:35] Dave Musson: Thanks to Zosia for joining us. Stick around to hear from Dominik right after this. It's never too early or too late to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that.

Pulling from your academic modules as well as anything else you get involved with. such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more. The Warwick Award recognizes and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates. It can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning the Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:16:37] Dominik: Hey guys, I'm Dominik. I was previously both a project leader for Coventry Food Bank and the an executive vice president on the work volunteers committee.

And so basically I graduated this year. So I'm back in July, 2023. And I studied management with digital innovation. So I'm part of WBS. Yeah, essentially, I've just been doing work now. I've been going on the adult life, you know, working nine to five, going on a graduate scheme. So that's what I'm up to right now.

[00:17:05] Tom Greenaway: Did you say, was it PwC you're at?

[00:17:07] Dominik: Yeah, so that's where I, where I am right now.

[00:17:10] Tom Greenaway: Okay. Are you accounting, auditing,?

[00:17:12] Dominik: Yeah, so essentially the reason why I chose my program, it's, it's one of the newer ones. I think it was founded or created in 2019. It is, I think, a competitive advantage, let's say, for PwC, because the other big fours don't have it, so EY, Deloitte, and KPMG, they don't have a graduate business program.

So the program I'm in, it's called the GPP which stands for Graduate Business Program, and it allows you to rotate across different lines of services. So I can go from corporate finance, deals, to tax, to audit, to consulting, to risk, so it really gives you a lot of flexibility and it depends on business needs, so we're required to be, you know, flexible.

And able to accept any challenge we're given and basically what the business demands, or not really demands, but what they need from us, and therefore we have to apply various transferable skills, which I will later touch on, that I've sort of gained from Thanks. My leadership positions at work, volunteers, as well as other societies and clubs that I've been a part of.

[00:18:06] Tom Greenaway: So yeah, let's, let's ask about that. So how did you get into volunteering?

[00:18:09] Dominik: Yeah. So volunteering, my first tenure with it began back in high school. So I was a part of a, an international school back in Budapest. So from my accent, you can probably hear that it's an American international school. And there we had various clubs as well.

And one of them was, I think, anything that ranges from. The National Honor Society to the Hungarian service team, which I was the president of, there was also Amnesty International. So these are very international charity or charitable organizations and clubs. We're affiliated with and I essentially began sort of as a member of certain, some of these were service teams.

And then I sort of had the opportunity to go to, for instance, a bravery camp is what you would translate it to in English from Hungarian where very seriously ill children had the opportunity to sort of explore. So sort of those adventurous activities, you know, going on ropes and, and sort of climbing walls and, you know, all those just out, outdoory.

Adventurous activities, and that really showed me. Sort of deep down, sort of how such unfortunate or children that have such, you know, terrible illnesses can still have a positive outlook on life if, and, and being able to witness that was also sort of a, a reminder to me to sort of remind me how fortunate I am and how good of a position I'm in essentially with sort of having a healthy body, being able to function, doing, doing like normal things people might take for granted.

And then essentially those experiences made me feel grateful for what I had. Yeah. But also admire sort of the strength and the resolve, you know, these children had. And that really sort of catapulted me into leadership positions back in high school as well. So I think back in 11th grade I joined MST, which is called the Magyar Service Team or the Hungarian Service Team.

And we were responsible for sort of organizing trips to the local salvage, I mean I think it was those camps where we offer food for the homeless and sort of provide shelter. So we were helping out by serving food. I think it was the Salvation Army is what they call it. And essentially we were, we organized food drives, we had unrazors, we had clothes drives.

We also helped, obviously by going to the facility and help serve the food and interact with the homeless individuals. So I applied for the executive team there and fortunately I got the president position. I was through a round of voting. A bit different to Warwick, but it was based on the, the members and what they saw from the speech and everything.

So then I got to the position of president for that. And interestingly, the current president for Warwick Volunteers was a part of that as well, like Zosia. She was a really good member, was very innovative. So once she joined Warwick and was interested in volunteering, obviously she reached out to me.

And then I spoke good stuff about her just because of stuff I've seen she do at like high school. So she was always a very committed and very sort of helpful member that was willing to partake in activities and help out whenever she could. So that was really how my volunteering began from like simply volunteering in a community type of role.

But as well as a leadership position or an executive role.

[00:21:12] Tom Greenaway: So when you came to Warwick, did you know from the beginning that you wanted to volunteer?

[00:21:16] Dominik: Yeah, so when I came to Warwick, it was a bit weird because I started off, you know, during the height of the pandemic. So I'm back in 2020. We were basically, I came to my accommodation and they told me to just quarantine for, I don't know, a week or two weeks.

That was unbearable. But that's why I was playing games. That's the only thing I could do. But then I really didn't know, I didn't really think that anything was open, just because I can't even get out of my house, right? Then what's the point of me trying to Sort of go for something that's even more extreme, such as like meeting with 20 other people and then organizing a trip to a local, you know, volunteering community just to help them out because obviously COVID is a big thing and you don't want to spread that, you know, so I did think about it, but obviously the only thing that I found to be feasible was sort of staying in esports and doing what I could do to my full abilities because obviously there were no restrictions.

For online or they were virtual related events. And so volunteer really at Warwick, I think it was the second year when I, when COVID sort of died down a bit, that's when I really went into it and got myself a position for the, as a project leader and for Coventry Foodbank.

[00:22:25] Tom Greenaway: So what were you doing with Coventry Foodbank?

[00:22:27] Dominik: Yeah. So essentially I think I applied back in the summer or towards the end of 2021 for the project leader position. And as project leader I essentially organized various trips, I think over well, over 10 to 15 trips to the food bank in Coventry where we helped out the the employees there.

With sorting out food and then sort of carrying things and then sort of packing things in, in, in a bag, which will directly go to sort of people that are in need of this food. So either, People that are financially, or struggling financially and sort of need this support food wise or just individuals that just cannot afford food at all or, or are, you know, under very unfortunate circumstances.

So it was for me a very Another, you know, opportunity for me to feel grateful because of, obviously, I see all the food that's packed in those bags, and then I think about the waste the food waste, and especially the, the amount of food that I waste sometimes. It's like all these cans. Sometimes I open one and then use, like, I'd say two tablespoons and then it's just there and then it just rots or like you have to throw it out because you don't need that much.

But then when you see that, okay, wow, they only get a can of this. They can only get a can of this because of the limited supply, right? Just makes me appreciate what I have, but also makes me stay aware of food waste and sort of bigger issues as contributing to the wider environment as well. But it was, it was a very, very meaningful experience because I got to meet a lot of people, especially after the pandemic, right?

So then it was like a surge of, of activity levels again, met people from, you know, across various departments from psychology, economics, you know, to, to computer science. So I got to meet a lot of new people and having a lot of new fresh faces apart from my e sports society, right. And my business peers.

So it was really nice conversing with them and getting to know who they were, how they dealt with the pandemic. And then why they're interested in volunteering.

[00:24:26] Tom Greenaway: What did you learn from it in terms of skills and just generally what did you learn from the volunteering experience you had?

[00:24:32] Dominik: Yeah, so apart from what I've mentioned before on sort of appreciating what you have and being grateful for the things you have, but also it's it also, it's also like an experience in terms of self improvement and sort of observing what others have done.

How they have sort of overcome certain obstacles that might be very difficult in your perspective, let's say. So it sort of made me learn about the potential a human being really has. So it's like, goes above and beyond what you might think. Just because some people might never think that they'll be in a situation where they wouldn't have food on the table, let's say, for dinner or lunch.

So it really made me reflect about, you know, okay, what I have, how I got it. And what happens if I don't have it? So it kind of makes me stay positive in some ways as well to see people be able to sort of go above and beyond what I thought was a limit and sort of still stay happy and still live a fruitful life that made me, that's sort of sharpened my self awareness. So in that aspect, I think personal development was one pretty big thing that I gained from it. But from my leadership positions, cause I was obviously always a part of an executive team on strategy or implementation. So this year, actually a part of work volunteers.

I felt really basically I was sort of co leading the, the work volunteers community with Bandit. And we were sort of in charge of different aspects and different events. So for instance, I was leading the welcome week and certain other weeks as well, but primarily for me, the bigger event was welcome week.

And obviously that's where the, the surge of, of Warwick students come in. That's when people can sort of see what societies there are. And that's our, really our golden time to capture as much attention and traction to Warwick volunteers as we could. So that was a very, very big task. But from the data that I received from Paul and the sort of overwhelming positive comments I got from the other staff members from the org volunteers team as well it was a very successful event in this year, especially I think maybe this is another skill again, but especially the, the public's talk I gave or like a speech I gave with the psychology department.

Yeah. Public speaking was obviously another one. Yeah. Although I was relatively confident in speaking to a large audience before, but that really allowed me to sort of put that into action, right, and to see. How impactful my speeches can be and whether or not I've had any impact on the audience. Right. So I think that event, we had a QR code at the end, we had around, I would say around two, 300, maybe people, or maybe 150, 200 people in the lecture hall and the Oculus.

And then by the end, I think Paul told me like, just from that single event alone, we got like a couple hundred volunteers registering for work. Volunteers. I was like, I'm not sure exact figure, but as well in the hundreds, you know, three, four, maybe five. Just from that single event, I think, or just to maybe like, let me think if it was around 200 people, 300 people, then around 200 registrations, let's say, just from that speech alone.

So then that really made me think about the impact I had especially because people came up to me afterwards as well, telling me, you know, Oh, that was a really insightful speech, or that was very useful and meaningful to them, especially. And then they were like, okay they will definitely try out volunteering because of the experiences I've shared.

And basically, cause I was telling them about how. The pandemic affected our cohort of, of Intellix, and how we weren't really able to do it, even if we wanted to, because of COVID, so I really pushed them to really consider, you know, doesn't just have to be volunteering, but also, you know alongside other societies and, and the clubs they have.

Just to sum it up, I think mostly leadership skills management skills, and obviously some transferable professional skills in terms of strategy and sort of retention and stuff like that. So very business jargony findings as well, just so I can implement my learnings from school.

[00:28:25] Tom Greenaway: I think as well, the great thing about like, for example, that speech is you can see the impact of it. I think you've got the numbers afterwards of students who signed up, which I think there are many opportunities where on campus where you can really say, I did this thing. And then I have the evidence afterwards of how successful it was. we're in, I think, leadership positions. So what are things you still want to learn or things that you still feel like you need to learn?

[00:28:50] Dominik: So I think from my tenure at Warwick Volunteers, I've developed obviously a lot of skills that I've mentioned before already, but things and areas that I think I could improve on. Is I think managing my time slightly better just because I joined consulting let's say towards the end of my position or executive position at Volunteerist and that really Messed up my time allocation and resource allocation, sort of.

So I'd had exams coming in, had applications for jobs, applications for postgrads, which all went well at the end. But during that time, I just felt like a bit overwhelmed from the work academically and outside of academics. And so. I did not forget, but sort of like miss a few meetings with the staff members and also us as an executive team.

I think the entire team was quite busy and we didn't really remind each other that, okay, we, we should have a, you know, weekly meeting or at least once per week and a half or two weeks. So then I'd say time management skills, sort of dealing with stress when it arises, a lot of it is something that you should look out for if you're looking on to take various roles across campus.

And so I think even at Warwick right now I have two exams coming up next week. So it's, you know, guys, university is at the end of, of studies and qualifications. If you want to do qualifications and get a, get a professionally certified type of thing, then you got to study further. So I've already done like after uni, I think in the first week and a half, we did a thousand pages just on pure accounting, pure business technology, finance related stuff.

We've got two exams coming up so that's within like a month of studying.

[00:30:26] Tom Greenaway: The next question is what advice would you give to students who are thinking about volunteering?

[00:30:32] Dominik: Yeah, so I think if you're thinking about volunteering then Definitely. I would say, suggest, if you know anyone that's done volunteering, or is a part of work volunteers, either at a project leader position, you know, even a session leader, it's fine.

Just anyone who is sort of involved. You can talk with them about what opportunities there are because they most likely will be aware of what's available out there. But obviously I think if you want to just dig deeper and find the exact project you want to work on, then go to the Warwick volunteers website.

So I think if you search volunteering on the Warwick website, you should be able to navigate your way through over there. But then obviously it's. If you want to do and commit to long term volunteering, either in a leadership position because obviously that's, that's going to be a few hours a week of your time, or just simply by going and partaking in projects and sort of these sessions to the food bank or to, to, to out to the outdoor areas and it's the forest to pick up branches and clean up woods, you gotta, you gotta sort of have your timetable and make sure that if you sign up, you will commit to the The, the project, because obviously the project leaders and the executives will assume and expect you to be there that day.

So manage your time well obviously academics come first. So you gotta, you gotta make sure you finish your work in time and you have stuff scheduled in your calendar so that you can ensure that you complete everything on time. But also yeah, just take responsibility for your actions. And if you do sign up, then go ahead and do it.

And if you can't go because of an, you know, unforeseen circumstance. Then at least let the project leader know, or let anyone relevant know that can relay the message for you. Yeah, but I would encourage you to try out different volunteering opportunities. You might not be interested in one, one thing, let's say, but then once you maybe do it and find the people.

Find new people and meet new people that are passionate about it. You might, you know, have a change in perspective, and then you might actually find yourself enjoying doing that activity or that specific volunteering. So it's a really good way to meet new people to, I think, sort of foster some relationships as well with people that you might have never met.

If you didn't do volunteering, let's say, and just be, stay open to opportunities and make the most use of your university time. Whilst I just came out of uni, it's only been like, I hate to say it, only like two, three, four months. But so I haven't had that, okay. I want to go back to uni already, but I already, I have some thing.

I do think about it sometimes. It's like, well, I miss my buddies. I miss my, my, my sort of friends that, because it's another hindsight. Cause I did apply to post grads in London as well. And they're back over there. So then I'm working in Birmingham. So then it's like, okay, I miss the times I had and I spent with my brothers, essentially.

And my really good friends back in uni were fooling around in lectures or right after lectures we went to study or to, you know, eat something or have fun. So, you know, this is a time for you to meet the people that you might stay in touch with or, you know, a very long time after your uni ends. So you know, go out there and make the best and most use of your time just so you don't regret or you have any regrets afterwards.

[00:33:41] Tom Greenaway: Great. I've got one more question, which is about you, what are your goals and ambitions for the future? I mean, you've, you found a job, sounds like a pretty good job. Where do you see yourself in five years time?

[00:33:52] Dominik: So I think what I'm considering as a career path, because I get, obviously I haven't really gone to experience all the lines of services yet, but what I was looking into mostly before starting this job was already sort of in the field of consulting. And specifically strategy consulting. So I think from my perspective right now, and the position I'm in right now, I think preferably I'd like to be in a position where I'm either working for one of the top consulting firms, so McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or Bain.

Because I did have some Progress with the master, but obviously didn't get the final offer or with an Upwork experience bank. I think if I can start my own business related to a certain area and I'm still trying to identify and finalize right now. That would be also another very good position to be in.

Not something I would be proud of. If I see myself there in five years, so as of right now. Career path wise, if working for someone, then strategy consultant just because of the variety of work you get to take on and the challenges you solve with sort of the C suite executives, right? It's, it, you can see a direct impact essentially because the strategic proposals you give or that you formulate.

Essentially, we'll become a part of their strategy if they do decide to implement it. So, it's a very impactful or sort of like impact explosive work where you can see your results come into full action. But it's also just a variety of work that's present and it's not like a very boring job where you do the same thing over and over again.

Not taking a hit on accounting or auditing, but I'm just someone that prefers work that's more varied. And that requires creative problem solving, obviously. Hopefully if I can be there in five years, I'd be happy.

[00:35:35] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Huge thanks to Zosia and to Dominik for joining us on the show to talk volunteering.

To find out more about Warwick Volunteers and how you can get involved, check out the episode description for links to their website and Instagram pages. And thanks also to Tom Greenaway for asking the questions. This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork.

While our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back with a new episode in two weeks. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] Steven Burke: Another tip, or a piece of advice that can make reflection easier and more effective for you is to treat the experience as a cycle. There's a reason Gibbs' reflective cycle is called Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, and it's because you should go back to the start and do it again.

[00:00:20] Dave Musson: Hi, welcome back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick.

This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university, and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they developed theirs, and how you can too.

I'm your host, Dave Musson, and this time we're focusing on a key part of learning skills, personal development, and, as it happens, the Warwick Award. We're looking at reflection. In this episode, I'm handing over to two colleagues from the skills team. Tom Greenaway is asking the questions of Steven Burke, who has extensive interest in and experience of using reflection and reflective practice. He gives you some background to the art of reflecting, tips on how to do it and explains how it can help improve so many parts of your life, including what you have for breakfast. This episode also mentions the reflective practice toolkit that can be found on our website. There's a link to it in the episode description.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you listen. And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast . There's also a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, here's Steven.

[00:01:41] Steven Burke: My name's Steven. I am a skills developer here in the Warwick skills team.

But before that, I've done a bunch of things. And some of them have been relevant to what we're going to talk about today. I'm from the northeast of England. I have a background academically in history but I've also worked in the employability sector outside of higher education as well. I'm interested in reflection as it comes to bear on my own practice, critically and creatively, and also as it comes to bear on my own practice as a teacher or an educator.

As well, I began to sort of encounter reflection and reflective practice when I was working with people who were unemployed for long periods of time and often had health conditions as barriers to getting back into employment. And then I picked it up as a kind of A practice of my own when I started to do my doctoral research and it's continued from there, both as a teacher and as a learner myself.

Currently, I am working here as a skills developer and I'm responsible for several of the core skills here at Warwick, including critical thinking. That's my real thing. That's the one that I'm most excited and engaged with, but also including self awareness within which we include self reflection and critical reflection, things that I also think are vitally important to a process of thinking critically.

[00:02:58] Tom Greenaway: So, what is reflection and why do we keep talking about it?

[00:03:02] Steven Burke: Well, we keep talking about it because it's really important for learning and for practicing skills. Reflection is kind of like looking back in order to look forward. So, in our core skills framework, self reflection is the ability to perceive and evaluate your cognitive, emotional and behavioral processes and then set actions for development.

So, that means learning from experience and applying the lessons. Critical reflection is the ability to examine personal or group experiences and also use critical theories and methods to evaluate past actions and then to reapply those lessons.

[00:03:38] Tom Greenaway: Where does this practice of reflecting come from?

[00:03:40] Steven Burke: Well, it's quite a deeply ingrained concept culturally.

I'm going to start with a quick definition. So the Oxford Dictionary gives us a couple of definitions for reflection that are kind of relevant here. They say that it's the action of thinking carefully or deeply about a particular subject by considering your past life and experiences. A definition that draws a bit more on philosophy and psychology for a more modern and analytic way of looking at it is that reflection is also the mind observing and examining its own experiences and emotions.

Intelligent self awareness. Introspection. So it is learning from experience by deliberately analysing that experience and your own responses to it. A reflective thinking and reflective practice in terms of their modern history, if you like, they began to be formally laid out by John Dewey in the early 20th century.

Now, Dewey was a philosopher and a psychologist. He was interested in education and in socialisation. And he saw reflection as a way of involving people in their own learning. By moving away from routine and tradition and conformity, and towards cooperation and problem solving, by combining thinking and doing, knowledge and skills, or planning and practice.

These principles were developed further in the 1970s by people like David Kolb and Donald Shearn. So Kolb began to model them into a process that learners could follow with his experiential learning model, which had four stages. Concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.

Repeat them, and you've got a cycle. You've got something you can repeat to continue the process of learning, consolidation, application. This is something that Graeme Gibbs did with his learning cycle in the 1980s. And that simplified the names of the stages, it expanded them, supported them with suggested questions.

Now Gibbs approach has been the basis of a whole load of alternatives that have been created since. Donald Sherman, who I also mentioned, made loads of contributions to the fields of design, professional education, organisational learning. But his key idea for us here is that of reflection in action. He said that reflection in action hinges on the element of surprise.

And what that means is that when we do something and the results are ordinary, we don't necessarily stop to think about it. But when we do something and the outcome is unexpected, it's a surprise whether that's desirable as an outcome or not. And we might respond to that by reflecting in action. That is, we'd think on our feet.

We'd learn by doing, during the process of doing it, with improvisation and adaptation becoming very important. So think of, and this is a bang up to date cultural musical reference here, right? Think of jazz musicians, right? Those are the avant garde of our, of our musical culture. Think of them improvising together, even if you're not that familiar with jazz, you know, make it up as they go along sometimes, right?

What happens when jazz musicians improvise together is that they do indeed largely make it up as they're going along, but they draw on their experience and they reapply that, and a rhythm still emerges, patterns are still created, their approach evolves as they react to each other and they they've been playing jazz for years.

[00:06:58] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. And so then they can improvise.

[00:07:00] Steven Burke: Absolutely. Because when something unexpected happens, it makes them respond. It makes them reflect in action, in the process of doing the thing that they're doing, in order to change their approach in response to each other. Being aware of this. process makes it useful so that you can learn from it and reapply those lessons.

So for Shurn, reflection in action, improvising, responding as you do things, that's as important as reflecting on action, which is what Kolb and Gibbs were advocating. with their structured approaches, where you do it after you've finished doing the thing, and then you reapply those lessons. A more deliberate form of reflection.

Absolutely. So both are important components. The thing is that you might not realise you are reflecting in action, unless you stop and take the time to reflect on the action. Once you finish doing it as well. So they're kind of dependent on each other to get the most value out of them.

[00:07:54] Tom Greenaway: So one is like correcting your course when you're driving.

[00:07:58] Steven Burke: Yeah, as in oh I'm slightly off the road and you just do. If you always drove your car that were, if you always drove your car on set rails, you would never learn to correct your course. If suddenly you came off those rails, then you would have to learn to steer the car in a much more adaptive and responsive and improvisational way.

[00:08:15] Tom Greenaway: Whereas the reflecting on practice is more like, I've crashed my car, and I'm re evaluating my life choices up till that point. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because I've done something really monumentally bad.

[00:08:27] Steven Burke: What you want to do in that situation, though, is you want to take into account the emotional response that you feel, which might be quite negative towards yourself and your ability to drive the car, especially off the rails.

As it were, cars don't run on rails, I know this, right, but you get the You get what I mean, but what you really need to do is you need to find some degree of objectivity in this by taking a step back and thinking about the wider context of it and thinking about how you can maybe learn something from the negative experience of crashing the car so that you can improve your ability to do similar things or the same thing in the future more safely in effect.

[00:09:01] Tom Greenaway: So why did you get interested in this? Why did you get interested in reflection?

[00:09:05] Steven Burke: As far as reflection's concerned, in two ways I suppose. So I've, I've, I've been writing reflectively on and off. In a kind of a diary or a journal for probably the last eight or nine years or so. It started more or less I think as a way of recording thoughts and ideas as I began my doctoral research.

So the research that led to my PhD thesis. And at times I do it really consistently and regularly. At other times less so. It's a bit more piecemeal. As and when I feel like it. Sometimes it's critically reflective, which is something I'll come back to you later. Looking at broader issues, events, concepts, drawing on resources to analyse them in the context of my experiences or the perspectives that I hold.

At other times it's more creative, it's kind of a free process where ideas and responses to experience are freely written down and then I come back to them later and I develop them into something. I'd say it's helped me critically. to develop stronger analyses and arguments for my PhD thesis, for example.

And since it's helped me creatively as well in writing including writing poetry for publication. And it's also helped me personally as well for my own mental health and wellbeing by frequently looking back and thinking about what I can learn. From what I have done, or from knowledge that I've gained.

Now the other way I became interested was from the point of view of a teacher or educator. So this started a bit earlier really, as a facilitator working with people on long term unemployment programs. So people who'd been out of work for a lot of years, a lot of which had complex and interacting different barriers that prevent them to go back into employment.

A lot of it to do with health problems, and mental health problems. So I delivered workshops in that role on basic employability skills but also on personal development for people with health conditions as barriers to work. Some of it involved getting them to reflect on their past experiences and to go back a lot of years in some cases, to draw out the things that they might consider to be valuable to them, help them to identify their strengths.

Help them to regain confidence in their ability, both to contribute effectively based on their experience, no matter how long ago it was and to see value in it, and then also to learn new skills as well. So that confidence to learn new skills, having it demonstrated to them through reflection that they have been able to learn things before.

So later on, teaching history to undergraduate students, we integrated reflective practice into several modules. For very similar reasons, so this was a, an audience if you like, a group of learners with a different life experience up to that point. But also with a lack of confidence in the value of their own experience and encouraging them and giving them a structure around which they can reflect effectively helps them to identify what it is they've become good at and where they can reapply that experience in the future.

I think it really helps students to see the broader value of their experiences on the course as well, and particularly within. the discipline of the subject of though they were studying. So the ways in which they can draw on their experience of learning history and apply it practically. Yeah, so it helped them in terms of the applications of the skills they'd practiced and the things that they might do once they graduated.

[00:12:08] Tom Greenaway: One thing that kind of strikes me is that we sometimes talk about reflection and then we talk about this other thing, critical reflection. We've already touched a bit on reflection in action versus reflection on action. What do you think is the difference between general reflection and critical reflection?

[00:12:26] Steven Burke: I'll be giving you a very, very basic example to determine the difference between the two from your own current experiences. If you like, these are the things that occupy an unanswered space in your mind, maybe you might reflect. By just writing it down, introspectively. You know, you might write it in a diary, you might write it in a journal.

And it's all about you and your experiences and your behaviours and your responses. On the other hand, the other type of writing you might be doing right now, and this is the occupation that you might anxiously have in your mind with this, you might be writing an essay or a report. Or something that is going to be assessed on your course, right?

Well, then you're going to need to draw on a body of knowledge and a wider context in order to support the conclusions that you draw. That's critical. What you're doing before is introspective and it's personal. So, reflection is personal and it might tend to be quite introspective. It runs the risk of being too self critical without contextualizing the whole range of influences that affect our attitudes and behaviours.

[00:13:26] Tom Greenaway: What do you mean by being too self critical?

[00:13:29] Steven Burke: So, if you don't think about the wider context, if you don't think about the influences outside of your actions and your behaviors, then you might not come to realize that you have been influenced by outside influences, right?

You might think that you bear the responsibility. for the outcome of your experiences entirely. And you might be too critical on yourself, you might judge yourself too harshly, for not doing it well, or for not learning from past experience.

[00:13:55] Tom Greenaway: So you might think that you're the problem, and that there aren't other problems that are impacting your behaviour or performance.

[00:14:03] Steven Burke: Exactly, yeah. If you think about yourself and your experience in isolation, then you're not going to think about where it sits within a wider experience of society. So you run the risk of being too self critical without contextualizing that whole range of influences. Critical reflection takes the wider context into account.

It can be used in that introspective, personal way of analysing and applying, but it's also about engaging in a wider conversation. So, a wider conversation around reflecting on processes, experiences, also on things like academic disciplines, on the themes and the practices of the subject in question. So you might, for example, reflect on what you had for breakfast this morning.

And it might be a valuable experience for you to think about what you chose to eat and why. And whether there were any positive or negative consequences of this. And then whether there's anything you might change in your habits or your behaviours or the practices in the future to improve your choice of breakfast for a given set of reasons, right?

You know what I'm going to ask. What did I have for breakfast this morning? This morning feels like a long time ago. I had some shreddies. I had semi skimmed milk on them.

[00:15:09] Tom Greenaway: What are you going to improve for the future?

[00:15:11] Steven Burke: Well, where I might improve for the future on that is to give myself an extra ten minutes so that I can add some fruit to that.

And have a more balanced meal maybe. But also make a sandwich so that I don't have to buy my lunch on campus. I digress if you're prompting. Let's however, say you had nothing for breakfast. Now we've established diet tricks. What did you have for breakfast this morning?

[00:15:32] Tom Greenaway: I had a fried, no, I had eggs and rice.

[00:15:35] Steven Burke: Did you really? really?

[00:15:36] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. Oh, it's a Japanese style breakfast.

[00:15:39] Steven Burke: So protein and carbohydrate. It's going to fill you up for a while. You've got calories to burn there and they'll release quite slowly. That's great. It's a good choice. Analytically speaking, we can pick out reasons why that's a good choice of breakfast.

It's not the point I'm trying to make. Let's say, you had nothing for breakfast. And we probably all had to do that at some stage, right? And we probably always feel a little bit bad about it as a result. But say you had nothing for breakfast because you were up late last night and you were working on an essay.

And you had to get up and you had to rush out to work this morning. Or the other way around, I don't know what your working pattern might be. But then, you know, you were so busy and you'd had little time to sleep and you were tired and you didn't make time to eat before you left the house this morning.

You can reflect on that and you can realise quite easily that you could have planned better. You can realise that that crash in energy that you experienced at 10am or potentially earlier was a result of this lack of breakfast, right? You might blame yourself for a whole bunch of reasons, if you analyse that in that way.

Reflect more critically on this, though, and you might consider the social pressures people face to conform to certain working schedules. Or to stay in the game of living and paying your bills as the cost of living rises. All of this might have led to having a detrimental impact on the healthiness of your own schedule, right?

You've considered the wider context, you've thought critically about what other influences came to bear on your lack of breakfast this morning. The wider context informs. And drawn on the work of, for example, experts in suitable fields. So, if you go and read the work of a sociologist who's analyzed the impact of intensifying working patterns on people's health and well being, eating habits even more directly, then that'll help you to better understand your own experiences.

And that's when you're taking your self reflection into the realms of critical reflection. So say, for

example, if I was having, if I didn't sleep enough. The answer might be, might not be just to reflect on like being bad at leaving my phone away or drinking too much in the evening and it should be maybe I read a book about getting better sleep.

Yeah, look into it, do some research, find out what people who know about this stuff have to say on it. But also, be critical about the research that you do and be critical about the sources that you draw on at all times as well. That's part of the process of doing things critically and so part of the process of critical reflection.

Do they have the credentials to back up what they're saying? Have they done the research to support their conclusions?

[00:18:02] Dave Musson: There's more reflecting on reflection to come right after this. It's never too early or too late to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it.

The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules as well as anything else you get involved with. such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more. The Warwick Award recognizes and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates. It can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning the Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:19:03] Tom Greenaway: How do we know what good reflection is? How do you know when someone's reflected well? And when they haven't?

[00:19:12] Steven Burke: So, we might start with the basics. And we might start by making sure that we've looked back. And that we've looked back with a degree of objectivity. That doesn't mean to say that you remove all subjectivity from your experience. We all have our own unique perspectives. Influences, and that can be different at any given date or time, or when we're looking at specific experiences.

But to find some objectivity in what you're doing, you need to go some way towards thinking about it critically, and looking at some of the wider context. If you start off by looking back at what you've done, but also looking at what surrounds it, the influences that come to bear, the things that affected your actions, your behavior, your thoughts, and your feelings, in taking part in whatever this experience was.

Then you're setting some basics for reflecting effect. If you can then draw some lessons from the experience that you can reapply. That's the other side of the reflective process at its most basic. So the most basic reflective process is to look back, try to do so objectively, maybe with a degree of kindness, to consider your, your actions and your behaviours, but also your thoughts and your feelings.

And then to think about what influenced those outside of you as well. Then to draw some lesson from that, that you can reapply in the future, in the same, or in a similar situation. This is the basics of a good reflection, at the very, very simplest level. Look back, do it with some degree of objectivity, and then draw something from that that you can learn from and reapply.

Now, if you wanted to do the best reflection, then you need to learn to effectively apply and structure what you're doing. The best way to start is to practice it by using a clear structure. Using something like Gibbs' Cycle, that's a good way to start. Or use one of the other ways and means of structuring and guiding your reflective process.

And then re apply it. So do it cyclically. Do it again.

[00:21:14] Tom Greenaway: Okay. Do you have any tips or advice for making reflection easier?

[00:21:18] Steven Burke: Well, these are kind of tips for making it easier and making it more effective. So they kind of follow on nicely from the previous question. Well, first of all, practice with the structure.

So I've mentioned this a couple of times. You could start with Gibbs so that reflective cycle that he developed in the 80s that has been re developed and re applied so many times since. Maybe start with that because it makes sense quite intuitively. The stages are simple, they're easy to understand, they logically follow on from each other.

But there's also quite a lot of guidance available too, including a whole load of questions for each stage that we have on our website that you can have a look at. And the guidance will help you to get better at answering each stage and then moving on to the next one.

[00:21:57] Tom Greenaway: That's the self reflection toolkit available on the Warwick Skills website?

[00:22:01] Steven Burke: Yeah, I wrote it. I draw on a number of resources there and put it together. There's some links to some more background material as well. Remember, context is very important for effective reflection. But yeah, so everyone's had a go at interpreting Gibbs approach to their own ends. There's lots of variations on it.

But, the, the, the, the, the version of it that we present there is quite easy to follow through and will help you structure things. You might also consider something like, what, so what, now what. That's good too, it's simple, it's quick to apply, it's snappy, immediate. But it covers the key basis of, what happened, that's the first what.

What does that mean? That's the so what. So what does it mean, what happened? Can you draw some conclusions from it, interpret it? And then, what can you do about it? To learn from it. That's now what, what comes next. Another tip or a piece of advice for making it easier and more effective is to treat the experience as a cycle.

So, the, Gibbs approach is called a cycle for a reason. It's because you should be repeating it and reapplying it in order to continuously improve. And learn from the experiences that you, that you undertake. Another tip or a piece of advice that can make reflection easier. And more effective for you is to treat the experience as a cycle.

There's a reason Gibbs' Reflective Cycle is called Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, and it's because you should go back to the start and do it again.

[00:23:24] Tom Greenaway: I think kind of what it sounds like you're talking about is incremental improvement. When you say go back to the start of the cycle, what you're really saying is you've improved a little bit.

So you're back at the start of the cycle, but your point of learning has advanced a bit. So you've gone from like a level 1 to a level 2 to a level 3, but you just do the cycle again to go up at each level.

[00:23:45] Steven Burke: That's a good way to look at it. You've learned something from each experience because you stopped and reflected and then you started again in the next experience or the next iteration of the experience, and your level of experience, your application of what you've learned, will improve as you go. So try this out in a low stakes situation, so here's one you're probably embroiled in at the moment. Try it out maybe across three weekly seminars, preferably ones where no assessment takes place.

So, not seminars where you have to turn up and say something meaningful, 10 percent of your mark for the module. Just those seminars where you'll only get assessed at the end of the term. So reflect using your structure of choice, Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, what, so what, now what, or some variations of those.

There's loads of them out there, but they're the ones that might resonate most with you. And then consciously apply your inclusions the next week and reflect again. So you go to the seminar, you prepare for your seminar, you go to your seminar. You come away from the seminar and you use a structure, you use a cycle to reflect on it and draw some conclusions and then you go to the next seminar the following week and you apply those lessons.

At the end of that seminar, you reflect again and so on. Do it at least a third time, right? At the end of that third week or however long you've been doing it, Reflect again on the whole process and then take what you've learned from that about the skills that you've practiced and the things you've developed and the things you've improved at, but also about the things that you've found difficult or you've struggled with or that you maybe need to spend more time developing.

Take those lessons and reapply those in another situation. Maybe apply those. to the assessment. As the habit builds, so will your ability to reapply the skills that you recognize each time. And you will get a little bit better, it will get a little bit easier to do this every time that you do it. Until eventually, the process of reflecting will feel quite natural to you, but in actual fact you'll have trained yourself.

[00:25:41] Tom Greenaway: Do you think new tech such as AI or chat GPT can help you with reflection?

[00:25:46] Steven Burke: In short, no. Now, it can help you in lots of ways. AI tools like ChatGPT, these are not general artificial intelligences. We're a long way off something like that, where you can hold a genuine and meaningful conversation, or what seems like one, with an AI.

What they are instead are specific artificial intelligence tools. They do specific things. Using a specific data set in order to produce outcomes. Now they seem quite flexible and quite responsive because of the huge volume of data that's been used as an input for them. But as we've all come to learn with the extensive and obsessive media coverage of chat GPT in particular, you can find the limitations if you know how to push for them now.

Chat GPT might help you at a fairly low level to get better at some things, like communication. But only if you use it as a tool to help you and you reflect on the experience of what it's, of the output it's produced, and then you work on improving that yourself, and then reapply those lessons again. In terms of your actual reflection, on your own abilities, on your own experiences, on your own personal development.

I don't think you using that to come up with an answer is gonna help you to consolidate what you've learned and to reapply it. I think reflection is, at its first stage, a self reflecting process and an introspective process. And then at its second and more sophisticated stage, it is a critical process.

And those things are things that you need to learn to do. in your own mind, and in interaction, and in conversation with others.

[00:27:22] Tom Greenaway: Because reflection is essentially a conversation with yourself, structured in a certain way, so going to chat GPT or any other kind of AI platform, the conversation isn't with yourself, it's with the AI platform.

And they're not going to give your voice back to you, they're just going to give you their voice.

[00:27:39] Steven Burke: Yeah, but it's not their voice as well. It's not the voice of an individual intelligence, because we're not dealing with a general intelligence here. We're dealing with a tool that draws on a data set, no matter how complex and wide ranging it is.

Have a conversation with yourself. It's going to be more effective, even if you get too introspective at first, and then you need to repeat the cycle and draw in some critical tools to help you to do it more effectively. Do you think talking to other people helps? Yeah, I think definitely talking to other people helps.

One really effective way of applying and learning to improve reflective practice is to do it in groups. It's also effective in a teamwork context, if you share your experiences, and you share your interpretation of those experiences, and you learn from each other's perspectives on the experience of working in that theme.

[00:28:29] Tom Greenaway: What newer thoughts or developments can you see regarding reflective practice?

[00:28:33] Steven Burke: I can see it becoming more common, but I can see it also being done badly more frequently. So, you know, if you want to make it effective for you, you need to put the practice in at first so that it becomes Kind of intuitive to you because you build up the habit of being able to do it by practicing the structure and the approach Until you're not until it becomes kind of second nature.

What we see quite frequently at the moment is a lot of references to self reflection. Autoreflective practice without the guidance to lead you through effectively or without people applying that guidance when it's available in order to do it well. So spend a bit of time practicing it and reapplying it and sitting down and thinking about it and reflecting on it as a process and then drawing a lesson from it that you can reapply in another situation.

And see it as something that is cyclical, and that is continuous.

[00:29:26] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, that sounds, sounds good. Thank you very much. Thank you. I feel like I've learned a lot about reflective practice. Do you? Like, I've read Gibbs, but I couldn't remember his cycle. Kolb is interesting because there's no actual proof for his Like, because we can't look at people's brains while they're learning.

So the reflective cycle on, for his, his learning cycle is kind of difficult to prove. But the Gibbs one is interesting and obviously Dewey is the probably only great American philosopher.

[00:29:54] Steven Burke: Well, that is a kind of really noted statement. I'm not, I'm not a philosopher myself. Prefer, I prefer the application of context a little bit.

It's an historian, right? What I would say is that What Kolb came up with stimulated a lot of responses and a lot of conversation. And what Gibbs did was demystify some of the concepts that he laid out, so that they were much more applicable and actually practical and logical and understandable for ordinary people.

I think that contemporary with Kolb, I think what Schoen developed in terms of the idea of reflection in action, it's, you know, it's a simple idea, but it's a more relatable.

[00:30:33] Tom Greenaway: You see that model there, the reflection action versus reflection on action. In Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, you see it also in single loop and double loop learning, which is by a guy called Argus from, he was a business professor and also in the idea of heuristic thinking and non heuristic thinking.

So it's quite a common thing that you'll see in learning everywhere about short kind of cycles of reflection where it's almost instantaneous. Versus longer, more critical cycles of reflection.

[00:31:05] Steven Burke: I think the importance of evaluating something like this to decide whether it's useful for you is how easy is it for you to understand and put into practice as an exercise.

Remember, it is an exercise. It's something that you need to practically try and do in order to get some benefit from. And if it's too conceptually highfalutin, if it's trying too hard to use the language of an impenetrable discipline to make it sound like it's particularly clever and make, that makes it difficult for you to apply in your own lives, then it's not a useful concept.

Whereas if you simplify it. And turn it into a process that can then be applied as a cycle, then you can give it a try and you can learn something from the experience that you can reapply, which emphasizes the value of doing it again.

[00:31:57] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac.uk/skillscast . There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Massive thanks to Steven Burke for such a thorough and useful reflection on reflection . And thanks also to Tom Greenaway for asking the questions. This episode also mentioned the Reflective Practice Toolkit that can be found on our website. There's a link to that in the episode description. This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music.

We'll be back with a new episode in two weeks. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick. ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] David: Just fail and fail and fail, get involved. Don't worry about the results too much because the results will slowly become a byproduct and that will slowly become success.

[00:00:15] Sumit: Keep in mind that becoming an entrepreneur is the most fulfilling thing that you'll do. What I felt that I have been so tired at days, but I've never been stressed.

I've been tired, I've been drained, but I don't feel stressed. It's because I'm doing something I do enjoy.

[00:00:28] Dave Musson: Hi! Thanks for coming back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is a show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university, and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate.

In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, How they develop theirs, and how you can too. I'm your host Dave Musson, and this time we're hearing what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and what skills you might build up along the way.

In this episode, skills developer Tom Greenaway caught up with two former Warwick students who have both found success setting up their own businesses. David and Sumit both offer great insights into why you might want to consider becoming an entrepreneur and tips on how to achieve success doing so.

And don't forget here at the University of Warwick, we have Warwick Enterprise who can help you explore your ideas, develop your skills and launch your venture. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/enterprise. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes.

You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen, and you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, Sumit's interview is coming up later, but first we'll start with David.

[00:01:44] David: Hello there. Yeah, so I am an entrepreneur. I've always wanted to seek a path that was fulfilling, and I would always get burnt out pursuing the wrong things, and so I realized that my motivation lies within helping other people.

[00:02:05] Tom Greenaway: So, just to give a bit of background, you were a University of Warwick student, I think I saw between 2016 and 2020? Yeah. Right? And, what did you study?

[00:02:16] David: Biomedical Sciences. Oh, okay. Yeah. Originally, I actually, I wanted to get into psychology. At Warwick, but the, the department was completely full, so I had to enter through biomedical sciences, but I still enjoyed it.

[00:02:32] Tom Greenaway: So you didn't want to become a doctor or anything?

[00:02:35] David: I did consider it, but I realised it wasn't truly who I was, and I was only able to learn that through being really proactive at university and realising these other skills that I had.

[00:02:48] Tom Greenaway: So do you want to tell us a bit about what you did after university?

[00:02:51] David: Sure, so I love starting these mini projects and sometimes they turn out into small businesses.

Sometimes they don't and they. Get lost in the air, but yeah, I I've had work experience as well with startup companies I love the startup world and really being able to see that impact that you create I'm not the biggest fan of working for bigger companies because it's just less valuable for me less fulfilling

[00:03:18] Tom Greenaway: So you've worked for a few startups and what were they like?

What did you do?

[00:03:22] David: It is A lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure that you have to sometimes overwork, you have to go beyond the usual hours because it's what is expected. There's more chaos. However, it's a lot more exciting. There's a lot more initiative involved. There's more responsibility. And sometimes that responsibility is shared, your job title isn't necessarily defined because you have to do multiple things in a small business.

[00:03:53] Tom Greenaway: What were the small businesses about? Like, were they selling something?

[00:03:58] David: So one was a visual app. For children who have problems with their eyesight and it was basically an eye training app and I was the, the sales lead for that. So I had to try and get charities involved and organizations and hospitals so that they could see the value of this app and how it could help, uh, children of need.

That was one startup, the other startup was a little bit complex, but it was all about biotech and AI and how we can harness algae and produce it to mass quantities whilst using AI and algae is a very sustainable product. It's a bit random. Yes, very random.

[00:04:41] Tom Greenaway: So what, what, what, what are your current activities, your current kind of entrepreneurship?

[00:04:46] David: So actually through that. Job experience with the algae company. I actually had to learn the hard way that I was struggling with a lot of things and Throughout my whole life. I've very much so struggled with studying and maintaining my focus and attention And at times I had chronic fatigue and, and all of these issues, and I basically realized that I have ADHD, and I was recently diagnosed a year ago, and it's, it's just been a journey from there discovering myself, and really learning and understanding my brain, and really getting involved with neuroscience.

And I was able to learn the real and hidden potential of my brain. And because of that, I now want to inspire others because I know. the results I achieved myself and I want to instill that in others.

[00:05:43] Tom Greenaway: So, is your company related to ADHD then?

[00:05:47] David: Yeah, so right, right now I am running a company called Enzobrain.

It is not specific to ADHD individuals, however, we focus on memory, improving memory. Increasing your productivity, creating this driver, relentless purpose of motivation and really transforming that mindset to increase your confidence. And we also train individuals with their focus and all of these things are usually slightly impaired or lower with ADHD individuals and because the these things are are our focus it caters to everyone because of technology and our attention spans decreasing and really becoming dopamine dependent but also it really caters to ADHD individuals and It's really beautiful to see how you can transform someone's life, especially when they felt different their whole life.

[00:06:45] Tom Greenaway: What does the name, where does the name come from, Enzobrain?

[00:06:48] David: Enzobrain, that is a, a very good question. I usually only reveal this at events where I talk about the company and, and give out free masterclasses. There's, there's a lot of hidden meaning behind Enzo. It's a, it's a Japanese word and if you search Enzo, it's basically, it's a piece of art where you use a singular brushstroke to create a circle and this circle It's incomplete and it's imperfect, but it's supposed to represent enlightenment and being fulfilled with yourself for who you currently are.

And there's a lot of spirituality involved and it resembles the universe and, and all of these other cool things. But the reason why I resonate with it is because we're not perfect. And I think there's a lot of Beauty and differences and imperfections and it's learning to be happy with ourselves.

[00:07:47] Tom Greenaway: Was it hard to start this company?

[00:07:50] David: Not really. Of course, there's been struggles and challenges. However, I've been able to rewire my mindset. My mindset previously wasn't It didn't really reach its full potential. It was very much dictated by the environment and I didn't look internally as much as I could have and growing and learning more and more with that new mindset, I'm able to always push through no matter what setback or challenge I have.

So yes, of course, there's difficulties on the way, but because I have that anchor of motivation and I know what fulfills me. I never look back, I'm always able to, to keep going forward, no matter how many failures, no matter how many setbacks.

[00:08:41] Tom Greenaway: That actually leads us on to the next question quite well, which is, What have been the most important things you've learned from setting up your own business?

[00:08:49] David: Okay, so, throughout my whole life, I've done multiple projects, multiple challenges. You know, getting involved with lots of things, and I have failed, and failed, and failed magnificently. But I kept going, and so I, I built resilience, and, and this drive of like, Yes, I've had very, very low, low moments in my life.

But when you see those low moments for opportunities, and you see them, there's a reason behind this, and you extract the lesson behind that failure, you're able to create even higher peaks. And you're able to, to grow even more from it. So I think we need to learn how to embrace failure and how to be okay with that.

And that's how we achieve a successful business or a successful life.

[00:09:41] Tom Greenaway: I think it's really interesting that I think so far. When you've talked about what you've learned and what you've struggled a lot of, it's kind of been the emotional part of it, because often there's kind of two parts to learning about skills.

So there's like the resilience, the emotional, the confidence, and then there's also, I guess, you know, learning how to run a company and learning how to sell stuff and how to, you know, set up your own. Yeah. Business. And because you focus more on the emotional part, that suggests that the other part you found fine.

Or you didn't struggle too much with it.

[00:10:15] David: No, that was actually, that was quite insightful, insightful to pick up on that. I am quite an emotional person. My psychology profile says so. And I just think it's all about the foundation. And if you don't have the foundation, then. The skills will not come along easily.

So if your script, if your emotional script or your brain script or your neural wiring is, I'm not capable of this. I have bad memory because I have ADHD. Then you will never go beyond that. And so You know, ADHDers really struggle with admin and running a business is extremely difficult. However, if you don't start with the script of, I'm more, I'm capable of that, I'm not going to allow this impairment to stop me, then everything else becomes a lot easier.

[00:11:08] Tom Greenaway: So what do you think you still need to learn or what do you want to learn or develop yourself further to be able to do?

[00:11:15] David: Wow, well, I have a whole list of books that I want to read pending. I do find the time to read. I think reading is very important, so I just want to keep immersing myself with, with these books, with neuroscience, with reaching our cognitive potential.

So I want to keep learning and training myself to then inspire others and, and be that best role model. I guess also experiencing different things. So trial and error, you know, testing, you know, maybe living in a different country or doing very, Uncomfortable and different things so that we learn and adapt.

Like a podcast. Like a podcast today, yeah.

[00:11:59] Tom Greenaway: So we've kind of talked a bit about your business and a bit about what you've learned so far. What did you do at Warwick to help you develop your skills? What do you think you learned that really set you up for what you're doing now?

[00:12:10] David: So during my biomedical degree I would, you know, spend hours in the lab and there was a lot of research involved.

I just realized that was a little Bit harder for me because I am quite extroverted, I like to talk, I like to create conversations and, and More you know, I enjoy emotional bonding and the human psychology. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to go out there, see what events are happening. You know, go to one talk there, go to another talk there, go to a masterclass, whatever it is, start learning from others, feel inspired by them, and then find that motivation to, to challenge yourself and try new things and use discomfort or potentially fear as a compass for growth.

Use that as a, as a guidance to go forward. And so I would, I would just challenge myself and try new business ideas and startups and, you know, people would look at you like. You sure that's gonna work? And then it's very satisfying when you prove them that you can.

[00:13:12] Tom Greenaway: Were you doing that kind of off your own back?

Were you with Warwick Enterprise, working with them a lot?

[00:13:17] David: Yeah. So I, there was multiple societies that I got involved with. Warwick Entrepreneurs, Warwick Kickstart. There's so many societies out there and there's so many events that Warwick organizes. I was also with the Innovation Hub, Warwick Enterprise.

I got involved. Yeah, it's a whole list. There's so many things out there, it's just I think my recommendation is following these Instagram pages, really keep up to date to, to what's going on on campus and just go for it. Just pick a random event and slowly build your proactivity.

[00:13:52] Tom Greenaway: You mentioned sustainability as well.

What were the, what were the sustainability activities that you got involved in?

[00:14:00] David: So I. I my thesis in, in biomedicine was all about seaweed and biotech, and I, I had this, I still do. So you were already thinking about the algae before you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a fascination with algae and how it's, So much more efficient than planting trees and the amount of oxygen that algae can absorb is insane.

But anyway, I won't get into that right now. I, I loved sustainability. Recently it's been harder for me because I'm focusing on the psychology. I Did a TEDx talk about sustainability and how seaweed is revolutionary and how it could save our planet. That's one example of how I got involved. How do you even get to the stage of a TEDx talk?

And I think that's building your connections at university, just engaging with different sustainability talks. There was the Warwick. Creative award maybe it was called and they did a public speaking competition to raise awareness on sustainability and that's how I like started building my way up to a TEDx talk, you know, just to start off smaller and then and then okay.

[00:15:14] Tom Greenaway: You've already said a little bit about this, but what would be your advice for students who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs?

[00:15:21] David: Oh wow. How do I answer this in a simple way? Okay, a simple answer for that. Would be to embrace fear, as I mentioned, use discomfort as your compass, use fear as your guider towards success and growth, just fail and fail and fail, get involved, don't worry about the results too much because the results will slowly become a byproduct and that will slowly become success.

So when you're trying to be an entrepreneur, it's, it's all about going for it and, and, realising that. You might not always be 100 percent certain about something, and that's completely natural. That is how the brain works. You, you don't necessarily have to be a hundred percent sure of anything. But when you attempt and try, that's where you learn, and that's when you can extract these lessons from these failures and, and really slowly become the best and better version of yourself.

And so I would say just Build your confidence through action, but do the action first, and then you will slowly learn what entrepreneurial pathway is right for you.

[00:16:34] Tom Greenaway: That's really interesting. It's kind of a, it's almost a paradox to build your confidence through failing. Yeah, but that's kind of what you're saying, that you fail and then you build your confidence through it.

[00:16:45] David: Yeah, it's very interesting, but that can only work if you have the right framework for it. If you, you know, if you start to focus on the negative outcomes and, and you internalize that, then you start to see the negativity out of challenges rather than seeing the opportunities. So it is a strange paradox and that's why I train individuals to To focus on the opportunities that arise from the challenge.

[00:17:11] Tom Greenaway: Okay one last question. What are your goals or ambitions for the future? Where do you see yourself in five years time?

[00:17:17] David: Well I want to change the world. That's, that's something that I know for certain will happen. And I want to change the world by changing and transforming one individual at a time. And so with, with these transformed individuals, I hope to inspire more and more people throughout the whole world and really unlock our true cognitive capabilities and, and learn to be happy and, and learn to love the journey.

So. My, my goal, I know I always focus on the emotional side of things cause that's, that's how I am. I, I wouldn't say always, just, just in this interview. Yeah, yeah, that's, that is true. I like, I like to be very passionate and inspire, so that's, that's one of my ways. But yeah, I just wanna change the world with one individual at a time.

And that's what I want to do with my work and one day I hope to a global company that has saved and changed hundreds and hundreds of lives.

[00:18:20] Dave Musson: Thanks to David for joining us. We've got Sumit coming up.

It's never too early, or too late, to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

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[00:19:20] Sumit: My name is Sumit. I am a PhD graduate from the University of Warwick, WMG. I did my graduations in Artificial intelligence and data science.

And from there on I moved on to set up Kavita, which is a supply chain AI company that I'm currently leading. Okay.

[00:19:40] Tom Greenaway: What does Kavita, what's the supply chain AI company?

[00:19:44] Sumit: Yes, so what we do is we essentially help companies detect risks in the supply chains. We also help them manage their procurement workflows and thus help them mitigate the risk and also help them automate various tasks that are currently done manually.

[00:19:59] Tom Greenaway: Have you worked with any big companies?

[00:20:00] Sumit: Yes. So I think one of the biggest companies that we work with is Deloitte. I know how we help them is that we basically help their clients monitor their supply chains. So their clients are basically big manufacturers all across the world. Caterpillar, Mercedes.

And these have suppliers globally, and it's very difficult to manually track what's happening with each supplier, what's happening at the locations. But then we, in real time, help them detect anything that can go wrong with those suppliers.

[00:20:28] Tom Greenaway: Sounds very interesting. I don't know much about it. All I know about the AI stuff is the chat GPT that you see.

Is it using similar AI?

[00:20:37] Sumit: Yes, yes. I think the core in chat GPT is natural language processing. That is how well you process text data and how well are you able to mine insights from that. we Are very similar in one way that our media source of data is anything on the web. So any news article any tweet, anything on social media.

So we mine all of this information in real time. And then we try to detect that is there something that's mentioned that will adversely impact, impact the supplier. or the supplier location. So the core technology that goes in chart GPT is very similar to what we leverage in our risk detection.

So say, for example, if you've got a company that wants its goods delivered, But there was a flood on the route, companies mining all the data and finds that information.

So as you mentioned, so I might be a buyer who's buying goods from a supplier, let's say in one of the live examples I can say is something in South Korea. And there was a recent typhoon there that essentially led to closure of the manufacturing plant and hence the company not getting its order.

So what we were able to do was to detect that there is a typhoon coming and there's a flood at the start and then kind of warn our company beforehand that there's a big chance that your orders or your goods may not be delivered on time.

[00:21:54] Tom Greenaway: And I guess that saves the companies money.

[00:21:56] Sumit: Exactly. So I think once you do that, the company has a lot of options in how they want to exercise with this information.

They may plan to change the production schedule. They also may change the way that they communicate with their customers, because in the end. All the orders that are coming in are basically going to be used to manufacture something from the customer. So if you tell the customer beforehand that there's a risk, then there are more ways to mitigate the strategy.

It also helps them manage their inventories better, reduce the costs of inventories, reduce any costs due to production downtime, and hence basically optimize their operations cost.

[00:22:31] Tom Greenaway: How did you get into it? Did you think about this while you were studying your PhD or was it?

[00:22:36] Sumit: it's a long, yeah, so it's a very interesting story.

So I was doing my PhD and the PhD was on using artificial intelligence to build digital twins of supply chain. So there was some similarity there, but what happened during the peak of COVID was that all of us were shut in our houses. There was not enough to do. And at that point of time, I came across an AI volunteer community.

And the job of the volunteer community was to basically leverage the latest in AI and tech to see how we can. in some way help people who are impacted by COVID. So there's a lot of food shortages. There's a lot of other kinds of shortages. And the whole idea was that people in tech and data science who have skills and capabilities, how can they use their skills to kind of help people out there?

So I joined that volunteer community and there were like 10 we're all brainstorming on ideas on how can we use data science to maybe forecast better, to maybe detect better what the COVID risk is. And As we were going through that journey, we realized that the need for such a product, such a tool to detect risks is increasing day by day, primarily because the world was a much more stable place than years ago.

And over the, over the course of time, there's been a lot more chaos. There've been a lot more disruptions that happen all across the globe. There's a need for a platform or a tool that can help you manage it. And It was in that forensic community that I also met my co founder, Anam, who was also working in the food supply chain area.

And together we felt that there is a big need for such a tool in the market. And we started our journey from there onwards and then we moved on to building a company. Our initial team was based from the volunteer community. The five of us, apart from both the co founders who agreed to come up on the mission.

And then from there we grew to, as of now, we are 31 people all across the globe. Okay.

[00:24:33] Tom Greenaway: So you started out actually volunteering and then from using your current skills or using the skills you had then and then. Set up the company and now it's a company of 31 people did, did, did it kind of happen naturally?

Was it hard to start?

[00:24:48] Sumit: It was definitely hard to start. The good thing was that because of COVID, there were a lot of people who had a lot of time on their hands, so they could kind of invest in their time in doing things beyond their day to day jobs. That was one plus point for us, but I think from there onwards.

Transforming that volunteer community to to a formal company, to a formal startup, raising our first round of investment, we're getting our first customers. So yes, that journey is challenging. I think getting from zero to one is the most challenging part where you start up. And that part was challenging.

We did face a lot of hurdles when it comes to how are you going to show the investors that your product is worth investing in? How are you going to show your customers that your product is worth buying? But it's been a long journey from then.

[00:25:33] Tom Greenaway: Did you have any business experience beforehand.

[00:25:36] Sumit: Very less.

I think before that I had worked at the Data Science Associate for a big consultancy firm, but that was one year of experience. That was, again, very technical. And my PhD also was, again, very technical because it was on how to use AI and data science for digital twins. From there onwards, I think once we decided that we had to set this up We then embarked on a journey to learn all of these skills on how you do sales, how you do marketing, how do you do customer success, how to think about product users.

It was at that time that I got involved with Warwick Enterprise, who, because of the fact that there was a good idea and there was some engagement that we had gotten from industry, they were pretty interested in helping and supporting. Alex from Warwick Enterprise was pretty helpful there also. But I think it's a journey that we have gone through with Warwick Enterprise as well as us, ourselves leveraging various, tools and techniques that you've been able to pick up these skills to get here.

[00:26:28] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I didn't expect Warwick Enterprise would get such an explicit plug. Good for them. So you went to them. They kind of helped you develop the skill.

[00:26:36] Sumit: Yeah, so we went to them to help with skills So they have a program I think the startup scheme. That's what we applied for and That helps develop your skills also helps with any other formalities that you might need to get done in order to set things up.

[00:26:51] Tom Greenaway: And then the other part is just by doing it you're developing skills as

[00:26:55] Sumit: well.

Yeah, of course learn day to day I mean and none of us were expert on how to do customer success none of us was an expert on how to do Selling or how to do marketing. But I think as of now, there are a lot of resources out there. That if you want to learn the basic of it, you could do, you pick up the basic framework and you do it and you learn on the fly.

I think that's common for any startup and any founder.

[00:27:17] Tom Greenaway: So in your company, are you currently, because I assume at the beginning you were doing lots of coding and the AI and stuff. Are you still doing that or you've got a more of a managerial role?

[00:27:28] Sumit: Yeah , I think at the beginning it was a lot of technology product infrastructure coding.

I think as founders, you have to always be outward facing and look at how do you get more customers and how to get more investment. So yeah, I've been more focused. I've personally been much more focused on selling, marketing, investment, fundraising, and kind of those side of things. It is explicitly the founder's job to do this.

You can always get people who will maybe run the product better, who will maybe run the tech better. But then going out and getting business is one of the most challenging parts. And I think a founder's time is justified only when it's invested there.

[00:28:07] Tom Greenaway: What are the most important things you've learned from setting up your own business?

[00:28:10] Sumit: Yeah, I think as a, as a founder, when you transition from a researcher to a founder to a businessman. One of the key learnings is that you should not fall in love with your idea. We had this grand vision of that we're going to make a distance support tool where. The AI is going to tell you what to do next and how to mitigate that risk and when we take it out there, we realize that no one wants that kind of product.

No one is going to believe or trust an AI to make a decision for you and kind of supersede your skill. And since then we felt that, okay, that idea that we had is maybe a good idea, but it's not something that is going to give you, get you revenue. It's not something that could get into business. So at that point, we did a lot of pivots to get to a product that was more suited to the market, more suited to what business would have.

And that's a general bias that all founders have that my idea is going to change the world. You have to be very open to the fact that your idea may be good, but it might not be a good business.

[00:29:07] Tom Greenaway: And I guess linked with that as well is the the commercial awareness?

[00:29:10] Sumit: Exactly, exactly. What's the market willing to pay is you may have a very good product, something very transformative, but if it doesn't fit a user's requirement, it's not going to work.

When we started building the product, we are building the product Just because we like the idea and we like what the product could do. But as we went forward in the journey, we realized that We don't know whom to sell it to within the company. If I'm going to sell it to let's say a manufacturing company like let's say Jaguar.

I don't know within Jaguar which person is going to use the product. So it's tailoring the product to actually fit the workflow of a user. And that becomes even more challenging if you're. Working in the business to business space, the B2B space, because you have to find that ideal job profile within a company that doesn't use the product.

So yeah, always be user focused. That's one of the other key learnings that you've got.

[00:29:59] Tom Greenaway: So you've been running your company for two years now?

[00:30:02] Sumit: So we started in year one, so two years going to company, three years soon.

[00:30:07] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. What do you think you still need to learn about kind of running in a company?

[00:30:12] Sumit: Yeah.

Everything. I mean every day. It, we keep thinking as founders that it's going to get easier. It doesn't, this is challenges change. We initially had challenges about the product. Now we have challenges about how do you make customers successful tomorrow? We're going to have challenges about how do you scale.

But I think key things that I've learned is one you need to learn how to deal with people better as you grow in a role as a founder you deal less with technology and presentations and Excel sheets you deal. more with people. You deal with investors, you deal with customers, you deal with your employees, you deal with new hires.

That is something I'll, that is, you have to learn continuously. That's something that I learn every day. Then you have to get new people on you and to let people go just because they don't align with your business strategy or your business roadmap. So handling people better, meeting their expectations, being upfront about what would work, what will not work, is something that you learn on a day to day basis.

Apart from that, of course, you need to always keep your eye out on what What kind of benefits, I mean, how your time will benefit the business the best, maybe at the initial stage, it was building the product, maybe right now it is, you know, making customers successful tomorrow, it may be, how do you build a very scalable go to market model and at a point when you know that your time would be invested better in something else, invest time to learn that skill, or at least get as much knowledge as possible, yeah, as a founder, your, your role is not specified role.

Like CBO, it's basically investing your time where the business needs it most.

[00:31:47] Tom Greenaway: So we're kind of moving on to the point where maybe you can think of some advice. So what advice would you give to students who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs?

[00:31:56] Sumit: It's a difficult question. And because personally, I was never one who thought that would go on an entrepreneur journey.

So I did not have a mindset at the beginning. I did. Because I just felt that the opportunity came at the perfect time. There was COVID. I was finishing my PhD in the same topic then. So I can say that, yes, a lot of coincidences have led. The advice would be that if you have a mindset that you're going to become an entrepreneur, you're 50 percent already there.

A lot of people do not have that mindset. And if you have that mindset, you're definitely there. And if you do not have that mindset, keep in mind that becoming an entrepreneur is the most fulfilling thing that you'll do. What I felt that I have been so tired. But I've never been stressed. I've been tired.

I've been drained, but I don't feel stressed. It's because I'm doing something to enjoy. So keep that in mind whenever you're going on an entrepreneur journey, because there'll be a lot of times when you feel that, okay, this, you cannot do this. It's too much for me. It's too demanding. But if in your head, the end objective is clear that you're going to have days where you're never going to be stressed, then you'll be much more open to pursuing the idea.

[00:33:05] Tom Greenaway: In a more general sense, what advice would you give to students about developing skills?

[00:33:09] Sumit: I don't want to sound very negative, but you're only going to use 10 to 20 percent of your degree skills. 80 percent of the skills that you're actually going to use to get ahead in the world or just to excel at anything, maybe your business, maybe your job is skills that aren't taught in the university.

Skills that aren't taught in your general courses. I wouldn't say university, but in your general course. So put a lot of focus on that. Put a lot of focus on skills that matter. The way you tell a story, the way you present the way you write. So those things are skills that are going to get you much more ahead because your technical skills are only useful until one point and to, to actually kind of get the most out of it.

Invest your time and resources in things that wrap, that wrap around that technical skills. Maybe it's how well you present the work that you've done. Maybe it's how well you, uh, document the work you have done. Maybe it's how well you convert that work into a website, things that. are outward facing rather than inward facing because your technical skills and the work that you do is inward.

Something that you do internally, there's no one that is seeing that. Then there's a whole set of skills that are going to help you present that work externally. And that is one skill that people overlook, especially in the technical space. Personally, me being an engineer, it being a researcher, some skill that I would always overlook that, no, if my work is good enough, it, it should do the job, but that's not the case.

Your work maybe is only like 50 percent of the job. It's how well you present it outwards. That's going to be key. You're going to use that. Work and you're going to try to sell it everywhere. You're going to sell it to investors, you're going to sell it to a customer, you're going to sell it to the person that you want to join your company.

So all you're doing is basically selling what you think and what you envision. So invest in that. That's great.

[00:34:55] Tom Greenaway: That's often what we tell students is what you learn in your degree isn't enough. And even when degree modules simulate the skills you need for, you know, life after It's not the same as doing things that develop those skills that are other activities that aren't your degree whilst you're at university.

So we encourage, obviously we encourage things like part time work internships, volunteering, but all the things that are not the technical skills that you'll be learning in your degree.

[00:35:26] Sumit: I mean, one more point is that your initial breaks are always going to come from your networks. Your first investment, it's very rare that your first investment or your first customer comes from, you know, something very, something like a gold email or a cold call.

So, just be open to networking with people, network as much as you can, and just make sure that the first, just be prepared that your first breaks, your initial breaks are going to come from, People in the networks.

[00:35:50] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. So people who you've met before, people who know what you're doing, and obviously if you've got some group like Warwick Enterprise to help you.

[00:35:58] Sumit: Anyone who can get you introductions, warm introductions because getting conversation is the most difficult part. Once you're in the conversation, you can present your idea in a very good way. You can sell your people, but getting the conversations is difficult and that's what networking does. It just opens doors for you.

[00:36:13] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. Okay. Last question, what are your goals or ambitions for the future?

[00:36:21] Sumit: My short term goal, I mean, that is, I don't think about it as a 10 year app. I mean, my simple goal is that I want to make sure that the business can function without me being involved. It's my idea to make myself as redundant as possible.

And that's not because I want to move on. It's fine. Of course, you kind of want an exit and all that. YOu have to realize that only when you make yourself redundant, can you go and do something better, something that is more value added. And that's something that I always think about, is that, how, okay, I'm doing this, how do I make myself redundant?

Can I get people in? Can I set up a process that makes me redundant? Keep that in mind in terms of goals. But yes, my long term goal definitely is that the company does great and the vision of the company is Increase our capacity to withstand shocks and stresses. That's where we, that's what a company vision is and I'm very well aligned to the fact that we are enabling humanity with better capabilities to withstand shocks and stresses.

I mean, COVID showed us that how poorly we were prepared for shocks and stresses. One event and, um, global supply chains all across the world collapsed. Shortage of food, shortage of PPE. There was nothing but shortages. There were goods being delivered late all the time. So, brought to surface problems that existed, but had, were not unearthed.

And what we've realized from then onwards is that there have been so many events globally that have disrupted supply chain systems. The Russia Ukraine war. Suez Canal blockage and it's kind of gets more and more to light how that the processes and the tools that we have to manage supply chains are kind of outdated and it is diminishing our ability to withstand shocks and stresses.

We have to kind of build that capability inherently in our systems. It's, it's, it's a demanding journey, but it's a fulfilling one and you get the most exponential learning rate when you open a business and that learning rate you will never get no matter what you do. in a job, anything else that you do, you'll not get the learning rate that you get inside of a company.

And so it's always for your personal development, it's always good. And for your, you know, for your future, it's always good to invest in something that is your own.

[00:38:39] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you listen and you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Huge thanks to David and to Sumit for telling us their stories and sharing their tips.

We've added links to both of their ventures in the episode description. Thanks also to Tom Greenaway for asking the questions. Don't forget here at the University of Warwick we have Warwick Enterprise, who could help you explore your ideas, develop your skills and launch your venture. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/enterprise . This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork. Well, our music is from Adobe stock music. We'll be back in two weeks. The Skills Cast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme.

Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] Laura Allison: I think it's quite important to consider that skills related to sustainability aren't just if you want to go into a career in sustainability, or basically all career pathways will have a sustainability aspect to some degree, and that will only kind of grow over time.

[00:00:21] Dave Musson: Hi and welcome back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick.

This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university, and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they develop theirs, and how you can too.

I'm your host, Dave Musson, and this time we're taking another closer look at one of Warwick's 12 core skills, specifically sustainability. In this episode, skills developer Stephen Burr caught up with Laura Allison , a qualified dentist who swapped canines for carbon literacy. Sorry, couldn't resist. And pursued her passion for sustainability, becoming a sustainability coordinator here at Warwick in 2023.

Laura has plenty to offer, including what sustainability actually means, why it's important whatever sector you plan to work in, and some insights as to whether eating bananas is bad for the environment. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes.

You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen, and you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast and there's a link to that page. In the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, here's Laura.

[00:01:38] Laura Allison: Yeah, so as you said, I'm, I work in sustainability at the uni as a sustainability coordinator. So we are based in estates in the energy and sustainability team. And yeah, been here for five months now, absolutely flown by, but we've done a. a good amount in that time.

[00:01:56] Steven Burke: Where did you come from before that? What's your background and how did you end up in this role?

[00:02:01] Laura Allison: Probably what some people consider a bit of an atypical pathway but I'm essentially a qualified dentist. Qualified in 2016 worked in dental practice and primary care for seven years and Over that time, kind of had a growing passion for sustainability, both in healthcare and in wider areas as well, and kind of started to bring about my own projects in terms of reducing waste, for example, really, really found it rewarding and so decided to go and get a master's in sustainability, which My pleasure.

which was at Warwick. So, you know, I know kind of what it's like to be a postgraduate student here. So I managed to get my MSc and then move into a role that was kind of crossover healthcare sustainability. And then I just wanted to immerse myself in it. So I made the plunge into into a full sustainability role.

So here I am.

[00:02:51] Steven Burke: Great. Well, what are you working on at the moment? What does the job involve?

[00:02:54] Laura Allison: I'm based around sustainability in the broadest sense, really. So my focus and projects has been based around engaging with as many people as possible across the uni students and staff about sustainability through different means, including kind of events and talks and kind of written content as well.

But again, on a wider scale, also planning how to incorporate sustainability into as many existing processes and pathways as possible across the uni. In terms of more particular things that we're working on, we've got an engagement strategy and development which is basically how to reach all staff and students to communicate about sustainability about the amazing things that are going on.

Because I think something that. we've realized is that a lot does happen across the uni in terms of sustainability, but we don't talk about it enough. We don't shout about it. So we want to shout about it more. And we also want to kind of create a two way dialogue so that, you know, we can, we can tell people about the amazing kind of journey we're taking and events and opportunities, but we can also open up channels for, for students and staff to, to communicate with us as well and kind of tell us their thoughts and ideas.

And. Another exciting thing, actually building on something that has been done before, carbon literacy training for the university. So, working alongside my lovely colleagues in WMG, Warwick Manufacturing Group, and GSD, or Global Sustainable Development. It's actually climate literacy training, so, initially it will take kind of a carbon centric view of things but we're kind of hoping to eventually expand it to kind of wider climate issues as well.

And the purpose of that really is to give every single person across the university a baseline knowledge around climate issues and carbon emissions and to equip people with the ability to be able to create a positive shift in terms of their behaviours to reduce impact. I think whether you're, whether you're an expert in carbon or whether you have Absolutely zero knowledge of carbon, you know, the training is for everyone and everyone has something to learn, whether that's through actually doing the training or whether it's kind of through engaging with other people and learning from them as well.

[00:05:02] Steven Burke: How would you define sustainability? Are there different kinds? If there are, how can we reconcile or prioritize these? And why do you think it's important?

[00:05:11] Laura Allison: That's a very good question. I think it sustainability means something different to every single person and I think that in itself is important because every single person will be taking action to try and move us towards a more sustainable world and also fundamentally I think that most of the difficulties in society today are due to humans acting unsustainably to some extent.

So defining sustainability will help us to also realize what is unsustainable. And to kind of move forward from that. I guess starting from the, the classic Brentland Commission definition that me sustainability involves meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

So I think to me. sustainability is fundamentally based around that. However, I think in addition to that, it's also about respect for me. We all know the old adage of, you know, leave it how you found it or, you know, treat others how you would like to be treated. And I think this kind of expands into sustainability kind of in the present, but also.

In the future, considering how things will be kind of long after we, we've left the planet for future generations and also respect for the planet, respect for nature and respect for people as well. And I think this kind of layer of respect feeds into the classic three pillars of sustainability. So you've got the, the environmental pillar, the social pillar and the economic pillar.

And this is also known as the triple bottom line. So, these three things are all interlinked and generally must all be considered for true sustainable change. I think that they all, in terms of respect, need to be respected equally to kind of keep the planet and our way of living stable for, for years to come.

So in light of that, I feel like All of these aspects need to be considered when we're trying to make sustainable decisions, whether that's just a single person making a decision or whether that's kind of a large group decision at all levels.

[00:07:16] Steven Burke: There's a growing trend for talking about sustainability in higher education, but real wide range and change seems to be happening quite slowly in this sector, and in many others as well. How can we make sure we engage with it meaningfully at Warwick?

[00:07:29] Laura Allison: Absolutely, and I think it's happening slowly for a few reasons. I think firstly, obviously universities are quite traditional institutions. So, you know, most have been around for decades, if not centuries. So I think that is a reason for moving more slowly, but also they are quite large, complex organizations and there can tend to be kind of a siloing effect.

So. through, through no fault of anyone. It's just a, it's a cultural thing of certain departments work within certain departments and kind of messages don't get across between departments. So, you know, in terms of engaging meaningfully at Warwick with sustainability, I think firstly, in terms of the universities being traditional, you know, they may have been around for decades or centuries, but the majority of the population of a university is young people.

And I think there needs to be a cultural shift there. The progressive culture is already there and ready but I think it needs to be fully adopted as a culture across the university by promoting student voices. And in terms of them being kind of large, complex organizations I think just fundamentally communication, just breaking down those silos.

It's, it's incredible the number of. Things going on in terms of sustainability across campus I've found particularly over the past five months just by talking to people and, you know, people are very generally very engaged and have their own unique insights and we want to try and, you know, harness this for, for change and empower people as well.

[00:08:59] Steven Burke: What skills do you think are important for engaging with issues of sustainability? or for developing solutions. How do you think they could be practiced by students?

[00:09:08] Laura Allison: I think sustainability issues can be quite broad and there may be additional skills needed for kind of more specific areas of sustainability.

But I think there are a few kind of common skills that are important across the board and I think it's quite important to consider that skills related to sustainability aren't just if you want to go into a career in sustainability or basically all career pathways will have. a sustainability aspect to some degree.

And that will only kind of grow over time. So I think growing sustainability skills across all areas of life is the most effective way to practice them. So, you know, it doesn't have to be in work or in university. It can be in your own personal life. And I think doing it in this way is also the best way to promote.

True sustainable change as well. Examples of skills, I think communication particularly is, is a key skill to, you just, you know, need to get the message across. So if, if we're talking about kind of a full and more formal environment, then you can increase these skills by engaging in round table discussions or carrying out presentations, report writing, you know, communication is.

You know, it's not just speaking but also kind of reading and listening as well. And in terms of more in your personal life, you can start conversations about sustainability as much as possible, practice speaking and listening in a variety of situations to, to gauge what other people's point of view is or to alter your approach accordingly and learn some new things as well, hopefully.

And engaging in these conversations is also quite helpful to realize how. dynamic and flexible you have to be to work in sustainability or in something associated with sustainability. The, the, the area is constantly changing and, and people's opinions and They're constantly changing and so is the evidence.

So I think just being able to kind of move quickly and dynamically is very important. And I think communication feeds into teamwork as well. You know, we can communicate our outlook on sustainability, but it's important to get different perspectives from the rest of your team as well. And that's, that's generally how our team get the best results.

We. We kind of chat through different aspects and we all put our own views and input in and generally the output that comes out is, is definitely higher quality. I also think that systems thinking is, is particularly important because often sustainability is part of the wider picture in relation to, to other topics.

So in a workplace, for example, you could. map the system that you're working within, so thinking about the groupings within the system or, or the boundaries that you're working within. And also considering systems that are comparable to the one that you're working in, so that you can kind of compare pros and cons.

But in everyday life, I think you can, you know, systems thinking, you can apply in every single aspect of your life. For example, Take, for instance, the meal that you ate last night for dinner. How does it integrate as part of the wider food system or waste disposal in your home? How does your method of disposing waste fit in with part of the wider waste system, considering all the perspectives?

And lastly, I think, related to systems thinking, I think systems thinking is thinking on a broad scale, but strategic thinking is thinking kind of on the long scale. And I think because sustainability goes into the very long term, you know, we need to plan how We're going to get to 2030, 2050 and, and beyond, you know, we really need to be able to plan from point A to point B and kind of use, use skills to help us to do this.

So personally, in a, in a working environment, this is something that has gradually come to me with experience by viewing how. People around me are approaching strategic thinking, but also reading, asking questions and kind of just showing general interest in the area. But in personal life, I think, again, similar to systems thinking, you can practice in, in almost every single aspect.

So if you just think of some of where you are at the moment, and then. something particular that you want to have done in a few years. For example, you could say in two years, I want to have, I want to be able to grow X amount of vegetables in my garden. How am I going to get there? So you need to think of it on a wider aspect in terms of why am I growing vegetables or like what benefits will this give me, but also kind of in the shorter term and smaller points, you know, how am I in different stages, you know, breaking it down into Buying the seeds or buying the plants and then planting and then maintaining it's all you know, it's it's a very broad and general topic But it's it's extremely useful in terms of sustainability to actually kind of getting the results that you initially planned to

[00:13:54] Dave Musson: There's more to come shortly, after this.

If this episode has got you interested in sustainability, then maybe you'd like to find out more about what's being done about it here at Warwick. Warwick is on a journey to becoming more sustainable. The University has determined that its research, curriculum and how it operates will make a positive impact in the world.

Its sustainability strategy, Way to Sustainable, sets out the path that we're all on together. For more information about sustainability at Warwick, including the University's commitment to sustainability and its Green Hub, That empowers our students to lead sustainability action. Visit warwick.ac.uk/sustainability, and don't forget to search for sustainability on the Warwick Award platform too, so you can develop your own sustainability skills.

[00:14:40] Steven Burke: What's the latest, totally new skill you think you've developed? How did you start to explore it and how have you got on with.

[00:14:46] Laura Allison: So I think for me, it's I. T. and data manipulation of something coming from health, health care. It's not something that you tend to use on a daily basis. So it's always something that's kind of been a bit scary to me, kind of standing from the outside.

But it's, although I would say it's not a staple skill in sustainability in many sustainability related roles, it can be an invaluable asset. You know, data is so important to get. the tree story of a situation, for example, determining how impactful a certain process is or how effective your interventions are.

So I have been doing some kind of learning, both for experience and I've recently been on a few courses as well. Learning how to present that data in an interesting and compelling way. And that's generally by looking at the data and identifying, kind of, right, what, what is my key message here? But also, what is my key message whilst considering the audience that I'm talking to as well?

Because without considering the audience, you know, you might be then delivering data that's completely different. completely obsolete. So you want to identify the key message and then you want to kind of choose and design the right visual to get that message across to your audience as well. And although it sounds like common sense, there's actually a lot of kind of detail in, in learning and.

kind of applying that skill every single day. It takes a lot of thinking, but again, the, the outcomes that you get from that are very valuable in terms of kind of getting people to a more sustainable way of thinking or better understanding how sustainability fits in with what, what they're doing. And as well, I think, you know, sustainability data is, is quite complex as well.

And learning this skill has helped me to simplify the data that I've been working with, which yeah, has been very helpful.

[00:16:38] Steven Burke: Can you give us a specific example of when you've applied this then?

[00:16:43] Laura Allison: Yeah , so we have over 5, 000 energy, energy meters across campus, which you can probably imagine the, the sheer amount of data that comes from that in terms of what we're using, you know, in terms of bills, how much.

how much we need to pay for energy bills and also if something goes wrong in terms of energy as well in terms of, you know, why, why is there such high energy usage in that building or in that room? So based on what I've learned, I've kind of looked at that data and basically streamlined for the audience that we're talking to.

So the energy team have meetings with, well, many different people across campus, but different academic departments as well. So if they can go to kind of Warwick Business School and say, look, these are all of your meters, but we've seen that this one is showing really high energy usage. Why do you think this is happening?

Kind of, can you explain this? But being able to kind of show that data in something like, for example, a Sankey diagram. So that's kind of, if you've got the full. energy, you've got like a block and then in little strands it kind of separates based on the amount of energy that goes into each meter and then you can show that particular problematic meter how much energy that is using as opposed to the whole building and it's just a it's a nice kind of colourful.

I would say more exciting way to represent the data rather than just arriving at the department and saying, look, here's an Excel spreadsheet. This is the area where the energy is high. Why do you think that is? It kind of helps people to kind of follow the process and also understand it in larger terms as well.

And thinking particularly, you know, is there anything that. people in departments can do to reduce that energy usage.

[00:18:21] Steven Burke: There's that communication becoming very important again then, so you're communicating this complex interpretation of a huge amount of data to A partner like the business school, because you want them to sort out the problem they have with that big room that eats all the energy upstairs.

[00:18:36] Laura Allison: Yeah, yeah, so then something like data, something like a nice, a nice chart becomes a tool for us to be able to kind of facilitate that communication, I think.

[00:18:45] Steven Burke: Which of Warwick's core skills have you used most so far in your current role? How did you develop them? How has this helped you to get where you are now?

[00:18:53] Laura Allison: So I would say communication. I think in the interest of variety, I think we use sustainability every day. It's probably more interesting to talk about communication.

[00:19:02] Steven Burke: I would argue that sustainability as our core skill is a lens on all of the rest anyway. So we can have sustainable communication.

[00:19:08] Laura Allison: Yeah, and can be applied across the board.

Yeah. So yeah, communication obviously comes in a, in a variety of forms, as we said, you know, speaking, listening and, and writing as well. So public speaking is something that's featured quite a lot in this current role, actually. Both to, to students and staff in terms of getting our key messages across, but again, that two way pathway of communication, giving people an opportunity to kind of ask us questions as well.

But I must say it's something that it's something that I haven't been comfortable with for a very long time. Public speaking is not my comfort zone, and I 100 percent now, but with I think, I think it has significantly improved through practice kind of by taking on. The opportunities as they come, but also in terms of creating opportunities to do public speaking as well.

And I found that very helpful in terms of learning something new from the process each time. So for example, how to address a certain audience or present information in an engaging way to a certain audience or even remaining calm in the, in the spotlight. I think there are certain techniques that you can use to kind of make, make yourself feel more calm and get the message delivered across more effectively. Creative writing we've done a lot of. We've recently released our Sustainable Development Goals report for academic year 22 23. And this was a really fun activity to write, gathering a lot of different information across the university in terms of operations and engagement, but also research and education as well.

So a lot of collaboration, but also quite fun in terms of, you know, what are, what are the exciting things going on across the university and how does that fit in with the, with the wider approach. So I think in my current role, that's where I've kind of grown in creative writing, but I think it's a, it's a fairly easy, relatively easy skill to, to learn outside of work as all you need is a, is a computer or a pen and paper.

And yeah, it's something that I've always had a passion for personally. So over the years I've kind of, ever since school days really, written kind of very short fiction or non fiction pieces. In lockdown I set up my own blog. Admittedly I had a lot more time back then to do that, but in itself it was a very A very useful exercise that has actually given me skills to, to implement in, in this current role.

[00:21:29] Steven Burke: So I think ciritical thinking is vital for our students in getting to grips with all the complex issues related to sustainability. How has your ability to think critically helped you to understand them?

[00:21:39] Laura Allison: Yeah, I think I totally agree with you 100 percent critical thinking is so important in, in terms of sustainability.

Especially in, you know, we're in a digital age, there's a lot of information. It can be very overwhelming sometimes and we have to sift through it. So I think critical thinking can be helpful to streamline all that kind of sheer amount of information. And helps us to kind of consider what's true, what's accurate and what's scientifically based as well.

And kind of thinking critically, I think, has taught me to take everything with a pinch of salt before. I delve deeper into further questions, for example, you know, what, what's the source of this information? Where has it come from? Is it from a reliable source? How strong is, is the evidence for it? And, you know, are there any reasons why it would be particularly biased or prejudiced?

So yeah, I think, you know, thinking in this way, as I said, streamlines the information but also makes the complex issues of sustainability easier to manage and understand as well.

[00:22:39] Steven Burke: The current global climate and ecological emergencies are probably the biggest existential crises we'll see in our lives.

How can we help students get to grips with tackling these issues positively and constructively, given the overwhelming danger they represent?

[00:22:53] Laura Allison: I think that's a really important consideration and I think First of all, personally, I think that self care is the first step, you know, we all experience a certain level of climate anxiety or eco anxiety, as it's otherwise called, and I think as cheesy and cliche as it is, I think we need to look after ourselves before we can help each other and help, you know, improve the state of the planet as well.

In terms of taking action, I think, I'm not sure if you've read How Bad Are Bananas by Mike Berners Lee. Very, very, very good book. Would recommend it. It's essentially, it has a number of different processes or objects that we use in everyday life and, and basically says what the carbon footprint is of them with quite a few surprises in there to be honest, but it just helps people, I think, become more carbon literate.

But yeah, I think in terms of being kind to yourself in that book, there's a, there's a very, very good quote that I, that I like and Mike Berners Lee basically says that it's not about making yourself miserable or beating yourself up from shortcomings. You know, we are where we are and the key is to move forward.

So we know that change is needed, but overall it's just an opportunity to make life better than, than it was before. And the most important thing is to look for, for positive actions that genuinely work for, for you as an individual. And I think thinking in this way, it can, it can be quite empowering, you know, another quote is that, you know, perfect is the enemy of progress. So a lot of people acting imperfectly is so much better than, you know, just a few people acting perfectly. And that, that applies to sustainability as well, I think. I think also a valuable tool and also a helpful behavior is global citizenship.

So we just, we just need to look out for each other. Once we've got past that first hurdle of looking after ourselves, but you know, we're all in the same position with this and I think, you know, it's many minds are, and many hands are better than, than one. And then I guess on a wider scale, interconnectedness, so that's a wider scale than just people in terms of global citizenship, it's, it's basically caring for everything equally, so.

Caring for people, caring for nature and, and the planet as a whole, and these are key messages in our Approaches as a university that we're, we're trying to convey to as many people as possible. How about Auburn on us then? Not as bad as you would think. I Think there was something in the, in the book that It's actually, it depends on a number of factors, but it's actually lower carbon to ride an e bike than a pedal bike because it depends if you're using green energy to charge the battery for the e bike, but sometimes the carbon emissions from growing and You know, transporting a banana actually adds up to more than charging the e bike battery, which I thought was interesting.

[00:25:47] Dave Musson: Stick around for more on sustainability right after this. It's never too early, or too late, to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities, so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates. It can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning. The Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk slash warwick award.

[00:26:52] Steven Burke: What are your top three tips for developing and improving your skills in sustainability related experiences?

[00:26:57] Laura Allison: So I think firstly talking with with as many people as possible, so You know, sustainability issues are really personal and mean something different to each person. And you know, people have varying levels of knowledge, but everyone always has something to learn about sustainability and also something to add as well, kind of, not independent of knowledge.

You know, we all have experiences that we can bring to the table. Second tip, I think, read around as much as possible, question things, as we said before, you know, critical thinking is, is so important. And there are some excellent resources out there that are kind of written by people across the globe that are either experiencing impacts of, related to sustainability and, or are doing some, something to push sustainability forwards as well.

And thirdly, I think, apply sustainability to the field that you're in. You know, sustainability is a part of everything. It's. It's almost difficult to think of something that sustainability isn't a part of and every field can become more sustainable to some extent. And I think it can be quite helpful in terms of growing sustainability skills to think how it fits in to your role that you know a certain amount about and you know how it works and the system around it.

anD thinking in. an environmental, social and economic from, from that point of view as well. And I think then you can also take, take that step further to plan and drive change in your field. So identifying what needs changing is one thing, but actually. You know, having the skills to, to influence people and to put that, put those plans into place are completely different.

For example, you could practice this by holding certain events holding training to, to raise people's awareness, or if you, if you're working on the more, more data side of things, you could work out the impacts of, of a certain process as well.

[00:28:51] Steven Burke: How do you see the future of Warwick amidst the landscape of the global climate and ecological emergencies?

For instance, how will transformations in automation, artificial intelligence, reduced energy production and consumption, or pressures like migration or extreme weather events affect how universities like ours operate?

[00:29:11] Laura Allison: I think that's a very important issue. And yeah, I think naturally, you know, we need to accept that.

There are certain effects from climate and ecological change that, that are already happening and that we need to adapt to. And we need to decide how to best approach these from a university perspective as well. I think with, with pressures such as climate change, it, it could affect us through, you know, as you said, extreme weather events, such as heat waves and flooding, which could affect our buildings and infrastructure, but also the well being of people on campus as well.

And so it's important to integrate this adaptation into our processes and operations and making a campus a resilient place that can withstand these changes. So for example, the, we actually do already have this in place for our design processes for new buildings, for things like cooling and adequate drainage, but we need to think about how, how we'll adapt this to existing buildings as well.

And in terms of migration, it's a really interesting one. I think potentially we could expect to see the intake of students and staff from, that are escaping climate change or conflict to increase. And I think it's really important that we continue to support. The integration and inclusion of, of migrants and refugees at the university.

So we are actually a university of sanctuary, which is kind of a certification for being a network of university people that are making universities a safe place for people seeking sanctuary and to enable solidarity and empowerment in, in this area as well. And, you know, I think we should continue to support this in as many ways as possible across operations.

In terms of. Automation and AI. I think it, you know, it will affect how we operate. It is, you know, it's changing already. We're lucky that the university is full of innovation and technology. You know, including sustainable transport, software, sustainable energy alternatives. And it's definitely something that we should kind of utilize.

And with time, we should be able to help drive changes that we can integrate into our operations from our research that goes on across campus is what we call kind of a living lab, which is essentially enacting our research in a real life campus. environment and, and then you can monitor how things unfold and, you know, if, if successful then such things can be rolled out on a larger scale.

[00:31:33] Steven Burke: Okay, just one last question then. Will technology save us?

[00:31:37] Laura Allison: I think it depends on what kind of technology we mean. And who controls it maybe as well. And, that's a very good point, and who controls it. So, I think personally, from my point of view, I don't think that we can rely on technology to undo the ongoing impacts of human living.

You know, one example of this would be geoengineering. I feel that it can't be a substitute for changing the ways of living that is causing the problems that we're experiencing now. I just think that we need to be less impactful as a society from the get go. But, having said that, I think that it will play a really key part in many ways.

So, I mean, we already mentioned Adapting to changes that are already taking place or will inevitably take place and AI can, can help us do this in many ways. I read something the other day about. AI, you know, is being used to forecast climate change hazards, whether it's kind of long term, such as sea level rises, or whether it's kind of more immediate effects, such as hurricanes and flooding.

I think this could be a tool that could be used to kind of save lives and also save, you know, infrastructure and the excessive costs to kind of repair things after climate damage as well. And also, I'm a particular fan of I do quite like a drone. But I have seen the drones have been used to kind of scope out wildfires.

So early wildfires can be found. Obviously it's a bit less dangerous than taking people over wildfires that are in helicopters, for example. So I think this is something really useful to give us footage of that as well as adaptation. I think. Using technology for kind of metadata, to manage metadata and strategy in terms of pinpointing actions that will help reduce impact.

So, as we said, sustainability data does often tend to be quite complex and quite large data sets as well. So if we're thinking about kind of carbon emission data, technology could help us simplify the process, made the process less prone to human error and could also help us to kind of integrate those findings into our existing strategy as well for carbon reduction.

And, I guess last but not least, probably one that people are the most aware of is technology to push forward low carbon ways of living, so. You know, most commonly seen wind power also solar panels, but I think also making the systems and the technology that we are powering more efficient is very important to reduce the energy use and hence the carbon emissions that are released as well.

And kind of associated with this electrification of things that we currently use fossil fuels to power. So. Probably what comes to mind for most people is transport, so, you know, electric buses for the win. So, yeah, I think in summary I think it comes down to what technology, what the technology is used for.

As you said, who is controlling the technology, but for the most part, I do think that technology will be a key part of our shift towards sustainable living.

[00:34:39] Dave Musson: You've been listening to The Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk slash skillscast. There's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Huge thanks to sustainability coordinator Laura Allison for her time and knowledge, and thanks also to my colleague Stephen Burke for asking the questions.

This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back in two weeks. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme.

Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward. .

[00:00:00] Tom Greenaway: Learning intercultural awareness for mass migration enhances the benefits so it can make it so much better in terms of your experience of your life. Your ability to be creative and be creative with other people and what you're learning about other people will all improve if you learn these skills to adapt to how the world is changing.

[00:00:29] Dave Musson: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is a show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university, and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they developed theirs, and how you can too.

I'm your host Dave Musson, and in this episode, you'll get to hear from some of my immediate colleagues in the skills team about something we've not yet covered here. What it takes to actually learn a skill. This time around, two of my fellow skills developers got together to talk skills. Steven Burke asked the questions, and Tom Greenaway offered his insights and expertise.

There's lots to cover here, including defining skills, complicated gymnastics moves. And Rubik's Cubes. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the skills cast on Spotify, apple, or wherever else you're listening, and you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast and there's a link to that in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, enough introduction. Here's Tom.

[00:01:39] Tom Greenaway: My name's Tom Greenaway. I'm a skills developer at Warwick. My background is in intercultural communication research.

So I've got a PhD in how people develop skills working in multicultural teams. Before I did my Masters and PhD, I lived abroad in Japan and in Martinque . And that gave me a lot of interest in how people communicate across cultures. And that kind of, that, that was what fed into my interest in intercultural communication and teamwork skills.

I then, after my PhD, I worked at the University of Sheffield, which was on a three year long project specifically on developing teamwork skills, trying to measure people learning teamwork skills. And then after that, I came to Warwick, and now I'm more focused on the instruction of helping people develop skills.

So I'm not doing so much research now, although I've done enough for a while, I think.

[00:02:33] Steven Burke: I understand how that feels. Okay, so you've got a fair bit of background on working with skills, so how would you define what a skill is?

[00:02:42] Tom Greenaway: I think the basic definition is that a skill is the ability to do something. We often talk about knowledge and skills and the way I understand that is knowledge is the information you put in your head and the skill is how you use that knowledge.

So to think about it like critical thinking we often say is a skill and we use the word thinking but actually what we test when we're doing critical thinking is we test the ability to communicate that critical thinking. You can't have one without the other in terms of knowledge and skills. All skills require a bit of knowledge, and all knowledge requires some skill to display it.

Even when we're very young, for example, tying shoelaces. When we're tying shoelaces, we are using the knowledge of how the knots work and the skills of how to use our fingers.

[00:03:31] Steven Burke: Okay, we work with some different sort of characterizations of types of skills, and there's probably quite a lot of overlap between them, but I think they mean different things.

What do you think we mean when we talk about transferable skills, employability skills. and core skills?

[00:03:48] Tom Greenaway: Part of me thinks that these are just labels which mean roughly the same thing. So originally the terms that we used or that kind of had a lot of currency were soft skills and hard skills and that actually came from the U. S. Army. So your hard skills were things like being able to shoot a gun or drive a tank and your soft skills were things like Being able to communicate orders or being able to think strategically. But for some reason people don't like the term soft skills because they think it demeans them or it sounds less important.

So they use transferable skills. Employability skills is pretty straightforward. It's the type of skills you need for a job. Transferable skills. I think when we say transferable skills, what we mean is. It's a skill that can be used in lots of different contexts. And it's quite important in skill development, and I touch on this when I teach people about skills, that there are some skills that are very context specific.

So, for example, learning how to shoot a gun, which is a hard skill, I guess. You really just shoot a gun, you don't learn much more than that, like aiming for the target. But it's not easily transferable to other situations apart from when you have a gun in your hand. Whereas transferable skills, like teamwork, you will be working in lots of different teams, and you'll work on lots of different tasks, and so you have to transfer it to different areas.

Or, like the one, the other one from the army, strategic thinking. You can apply that not just to warfare, but also to politics, to relationships, to commercial transactions, negotiating, like you can apply that to lots of different situations, so that's why we say. transferable skills. The final one, core skills, is what we call them at Warwick.

The Warwick core skills, which are the core skills that all students are supposed to have some level of when they graduate. And I don't think there's much difference between those and transferable skills or employability skills, but we have different labels because I don't know exactly why.

[00:05:55] Steven Burke: I suppose it could have something to do with the context in which they're discussed and sometimes applied.

So when we talk about the core skills, we're talking about foundational skills on which you can build a lot of other skills and knowledge. When We're talking about transferable skills, I think we're talking about skills that you can learn and apply in one context, but then you can reapply in another context that could be totally different, but in which the skill is still relevant.

Employability skills, as you said, are about skills you need for a job. or to get a job.

[00:06:26] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. And I'll just say that with employability skills, a lot of people think employability skills are transferable skills like their teamwork skills, but actually a lot of the skills that you learn are specific to your degree or to your discipline are employability skills.

So for example, being able to test a culture in a lab or grow a culture in a lab, which I'm sure is more frequent than testing one, is an employability skill if you want to work in a lab. Similarly, being able to write a poem is an employability skill if you want to be a poet.

[00:06:57] Steven Burke: There' not much work in poetry, but I take your point.

[00:07:01] Tom Greenaway: Well, there's not much of a market for it, but it's still, if that's the job you want, that's the employability skill. Whereas I think some people, when they say employability skills, they just think teamwork, communication, professionalism, organizational awareness. Ones that can be used in any job. Whereas for me, it's if it's the job that you want or you're interested in.

And that skill is relevant, then it's an employability skill.

[00:07:24] Steven Burke: How did you become so interested in how people recognize and develop their skills?

[00:07:29] Tom Greenaway: So I've always been interested in difficult problems, and learning skills and recognizing skills is quite difficult. Like there were, there was a study, well, the Office for Students did a study a few years ago, where they measured, they were trying to measure something called learning gain, and They measured learning in terms of knowledge, in terms of skills, although they called it cognitive gain and non cognitive gain, and non cognitive gain meant the skills.

So another term for skill. And they found that there was no way to measure non cognitive gain. As in, because skills are so variable and so different, how can you, at a kind of macro scale, measure skill development? It's really difficult and so the problem is there kind of waiting to be solved and I'm interested in it, partly because it's very difficult, partly because I feel that a lot of, not a lot, but there's a lot of literature out there on skill development, which isn't actually that helpful.

That's often developing something else, or it's more about your personality or more about your dispositions rather than doing the thing itself, doing something with the knowledge. So that's, that's kind of where I got quite interested in it in terms of the history of it, obviously I started off looking into cultural skills and that was.

Because I felt there was something there as in there's something that will help you go from being poor at communicating with people from different cultures to being good at it. And then it, that kind of expanded into teamwork skills. Where you're measuring kind of where I was measuring like how often people were using different types of teamwork behaviors in a meeting and seeing if that had an impact on teamwork outcome.

And it's really difficult, like it's very difficult to find. One is difficult to find evidence of improvement. Another is that it's difficult to decide what improvement is and then try to justify that because a lot of the research on skills development, particularly on these transferable skills. Hasn't gone very far, like it's quite limited, so it's still an area where there's a lot to be, a lot to read and also a lot to learn.

[00:09:42] Dave Musson: There's more to come shortly, after this.

Have you started thinking about your career options yet? Whether you're just getting started and have no ideas, or have a clear idea of what you'd like to do after you graduate, the Careers Team is here to support you in creating the career that is right for you. What can the Careers Team help you with?

Well, plenty! From improving your CV and writing cover letters, Through to preparing for interviews and job application tests, they are here to help you achieve your vision of career success. As well as supporting you throughout your time at Warwick, the careers team can also help you after you graduate.

They offer in person and remote services that are flexible to your needs and other commitments. To get started, visit warwick. ac. uk slash careers. That's warwick. ac. uk slash careers.

[00:10:35] Steven Burke: So, when does development start then? In terms of skills and, and maybe more generally, when does development start and how does it change throughout world?

[00:10:44] Tom Greenaway: I mean, development starts as soon as you're, you know, a very small child learning to do stuff. So what's the first skill, do you think? A small child, I mean, I haven't intensively observed small children, but things like crawling, walking, making noises that indicate whether you want to be fed or not, you know, these are all skills.

It's that whole. Information is in your head and then you're doing something with that information. So learning how to crawl is doing something with that information. In terms of kind of how it changes throughout our lives, generally we kind of, we assume that we learn faster when we're younger and that's actually not true.

It depends on what you're learning, and it depends on other circumstances. So, for example, if I've already learned something, let's say if I've learned how to give presentations, I've got good presentations, then I'm told you need to present in a new way to a different audience. I can actually learn that quite quickly, that new facet of that skill, compared to if I was a ten year old, because I would be learning presentation skills from the start, from scratch.

So actually, things do take, long if you're young. Another thing which kind of speeds up learning when you're a bit older is abstraction. So we're better at thinking abstractly as we get older. And that's true in areas like language, it's true in areas. A lot of the things you learn at university are abstract concepts.

And you're applying them and using them in different ways. But there are two things that do help when you're a bit young. And one is time. You have more time to learn when you're younger. We spend, in most countries, we spend at least 16 years. learning before we do any kind of form of paid work. Another thing is distractions.

When you're older, you have distractions. Like children, for example. Like work. Like, you know, things such as mortgages and all these kind of adult problems that we talk about. As well as modern technology, phones and so on. These all make it more difficult to learn. So it can change that way as well. I found that when I first got a smartphone I didn't really do much except Use my smartphone.

I had to work quite hard to learn stuff. So I enjoy learning languages I had to focus quite hard on learning languages and not looking at my phone And I think a lot of us kind of in the modern age struggle with that type I know the thing is that cognitive like we do decline as we get older But, the more you focus on learning, the healthier your brain will stay.

So, your brain will decline less quickly as long as you continue trying to learn new things. Um, and it doesn't take longer, it's just that we have less time normally. That's what a lot of the research shows.

[00:13:30] Steven Burke: Definitions of transferable skills and their relative importance both seem to be highly subjective. Everyone has a different opinion and they sometimes work really hard to justify it. Why do you think this is, and how can we come to understand it?

[00:13:44] Tom Greenaway: Bear with me, but I think definitions are both important and not important. So it's important to know what we're talking about, as in when we say teamwork, it's important to have a rough definition of what teamwork is.

I would say a broad definition of what teamwork is because it can mean so many things. But one, you don't need to get hung up on the definition. I don't think, changing a few words in the definition of teamwork will really change what teamwork means. I think some people, particularly organizations, when they're trying to sell you stuff, they will provide you with a definition of something as if that's a new concept or a new skill.

When actually it's something that people have been doing already, it just hasn't been sold.

[00:14:28] Steven Burke: You can define teamwork with a tautology, right? Teamwork is working in a team. Yeah, exactly. And work to make it more

[00:14:35] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, you can work to make it more complicated. And I think people often get hung up on whether or not terms are the same or whether they should be differentiated.

So a classic one is, what's the difference between teamwork or group? I was actually asked in a section of my PhD to define what the difference between them was. And when I went and did my reading, I then found that a lot of people use them when they're talking about the same thing. Is working in a team that different to working in a group?

Not that different, particularly in terms of the skills that are required to work in a team. Oh, one other thing to add. is I don't think, when we talk about definitions of skills, I don't think that it's unique to skills that the definitions are subjective. As in a lot of terms that we have, particularly abstract terms like democracy or freedom, how much easier is that to define than something like teamwork?

If you're using a term that you imply in different situations, by necessity it's going to have some subjectivity in some areas where it's specific to certain contexts. And I don't think that makes it a bad thing. I don't think it makes it more difficult to learn. I just think it's the nature of learning a transferable skill.

[00:15:43] Steven Burke: Yeah, I think you're right there, contextually, experientially, and historically. Dependent terms like this. Yeah, so working in a team would mean something very different 50 years ago on the other side of the country at a different envi working environment to our working environment, just as democracy meant something very different to the demos in ancient as to what it means now in a modern society.

[00:16:10] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I agree. I don't even think you have to go back in time, as in, I think working in a team, say if you're working in a team and one team you're working with are all in the same room with you. And you're working on a very technical project. Another team is that everyone is remotely based. They're all over the world.

And it's more about creativity project. And then a final one is a sports team that you're a member of. All teamwork, all completely different contexts, completely different ways of working in a team.

[00:16:36] Steven Burke: They're both definition of the team itself, and therefore teamwork

[00:16:39] Tom Greenaway: has to change. What I would argue is that there are aspects of working in a team that are common across all of them.

And that's why it's a transferable skill. But I wouldn't get high down in trying to define every kind of element of what that teamwork was. So if you understand it in context, then you can understand how you're applying it. If you're understanding it in context, you're along the way of learning the skill itself

[00:17:09] Steven Burke: So, how are we helping Warwick students to navigate the skills landscape for their employees?

[00:17:16] Tom Greenaway: So, one insight that stuck with me during my PhD was that employers themselves don't know what a skill is until they see it. So, it may feel baffling, but a lot of the time employers know a skill when they see it.

They don't have the set definitions themselves. So, when we're thinking about the What learning a skill is really what we're saying is the evidence of learning this. So what we do at Warwick is we encourage students to reflect on learning those skills. So they've got evidence of learning and evidence of using the skill and evidence and evidence of improving evidence of improving as well.

And some of that is this kind of story that we tell about learning a skill. But also, your qualification is also a certification that you are learning skills. So by the end of your degree, you should have learned a bunch of skills that come with learning that degree. That qualification is proof, to some extent, that you've learned.

Another thing is that there's a long list of skills. There's an endless list of skills. Even with intercultural communication. So there was a paper published a few years ago which listed all of the skills. that were related to intercultural competence. And the list went on for six pages, listing all the possible skills that could just be for intercultural competence.

So don't get hung up on that. Instead, look at the types of jobs you want, the industries you want to work in, look at the skills that they require and focus on those. Also focus on the skills that you're interested in because the stuff you're interested in is the stuff that you tend to learn. But don't worry about, okay, you've got to learn every skill.

Just focus on the ones you need for the

[00:18:52] Steven Burke: Can you pick out some prerequisites for ideal skills development? Or if it's trial and error throughout our lives, how do we incrementally refine how we improve- our skills?

[00:19:04] Tom Greenaway: This is a difficult question. I kind of struggle with it. So, there is definitely an element of trial and error in terms of how we learn skills.

This is one thing, going back to learning skills and how it changes throughout our lives. Children do not feel shame about when they make mistakes. If they make a mistake, they just try again, without a voice inside their head telling them that it's because they're stupid or because They can't do it, or because they shouldn't be allowed to do it.

Whereas the adults have voices a lot stronger. So the trial and error. I don't know if everyone does learn new skills throughout their lives. I think there are some people who reach a level of, kind of, they're happy with their jobs and they're happy with their home life and they're not really interested in developing more.

I would say, for your cognitive health, for your brain health, you should try and learn things throughout your life. Learn new things. In terms of pre acquisites, they do make things easier. So like the presentation example I gave earlier, knowing how to give a presentation means that you can then more easily learn how to give a presentation in a specific context.

Also, if you've got experience in something adjacent to the skill, so like the shooting example, so shooting a gun is a hard skill, but adjacent to that might be shooting an arrow. So you know how to aim something at a target and pull a trigger. It might make it, make it so that learning to shoot arrows is easier for you.

[00:20:26] Steven Burke: The maths is, the maths is similar. The maths is similar. Yeah, so the trajectory still needs to be taken into account. It's just going to be very different with

[00:20:35] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I prefer arrows because they're quieter. I'm not a big fan of loud noises. I would start off with the arrows, but most armies do archery.

They've moved away. They've moved away. Yeah, I think, and particularly for complicated skills, prerequisites are important. So I was reading an article the other day about Simone Biles, who's an American gymnast, and she can do this skill called the triple double, which is a double backflip and a triple twist.

So in the air, she's flipping twice horizontally, no vertically, and spinning three times horizontally. It's really complicated and she's the only person in the world who can do it.

[00:21:16] Steven Burke: It's complicated enough for you to describe, nevermind.

[00:21:19] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I can't even describe. If I see it, I can't even know that she's done it because there's so many twists.

But I'm assured it's called a triple double. In order to learn to do that, she didn't just wake up one day and go from zero to a triple double. She was doing twists. She was doing backflips. She was doing backflips with one twist, backflips with two twists. Two backflips as one twist, internalizing all of these different elements of the skill set, how to land properly and all of that, until eventually, both with the physical strength of it and with the mental dynamics of controlling your body in midair through those different twists and turns, she achieved a triple double.

There are loads of prerequisites there to get to that point of excellence.

[00:22:02] Steven Burke: Also, a process of trial and error, however, built into it too. Yeah. And lots of feedback. Lots of what you might call reflection in action. Yeah. In order to apply what you learn when things don't go right, in order that you can

[00:22:15] Tom Greenaway: Yeah.

So that's the other thing. The other Part of learning a skill, the prerequisite that's very important is the feedback. And when you're learning a skill, it's really important to have feedback. I kind of think of it as a measure of how well you're doing. So in a simple, simple terms. Imagine drawing a line that's 10 centimetres and then draw another line that's 10 centimetres without using a ruler.

Just keep drawing 10 centimetre lines and you'll quickly realise that you're not getting any better at drawing a 10 centimetre line because you don't have a ruler. You know, you don't know how long 10 centimetres is so you can never get better. No matter how many times you draw lines that you think are 10 centimetres long.

So the feedback loop is really important in terms of being able to measure it. And this is, when we talk about transferable skills, this is why it's so difficult because How do you measure, say if you're working in four different teams, how do you measure being successful at teamwork in those four different teams, particularly if it doesn't necessarily mean that you get a good grade, that you're good at working in a team.

Your team may win a football match, but you could be on the wing and not do much at all and your team could still win. So it's really difficult to measure. So a prerequisite for learning a skill well is to either have a measurement of what kind of improvement is or to be able to find ways of doing it.

When there isn't a way of doing it that's obvious, then reflected practice comes because then you're guiding your, your thoughts, kind of your internal monologue, into directing it towards what you've learned, directing towards how you could apply it to another circumstance. I think a final thing, which we don't really talk about is, it's very useful to have a teacher, so learning skills by yourself is very difficult.

If you've got someone to help you learn a skill, you'll make far more progress because they will know what good looks. Even if they don't have a 30 centimeter ruler or 10 centimeter ruler, they will still know what good looks. If you think about in a lot of areas like martial arts, you've got someone who's got a black belt.

How they know what is good in a martial art is just through years of experience of doing it. There isn't necessarily a guidebook saying this is good, this is bad. It's just through learned experience. And I think that's something which if you can find a teacher for a skill or a guide, you will find it a lot easier.

[00:24:36] Steven Burke: What's the latest, totally new skill you think you've developed? And how did you start to explore it? How has it got as far as you've got with it?

[00:24:44] Tom Greenaway: I brought it with me because I know it works very well on podcasts, the visual. I bought a Rubik's Cube.

[00:24:50] Steven Burke: Yep, for our audience, Tom is now holding a Rubik's Cube, a rather luminous looking one, not a traditional design at all.

[00:24:56] Tom Greenaway: No, I don't know what this design is called. But I learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube last summer, and the reason for that is, so, my mum's the type of person who, if she can't think of a stocking filler for Christmas, She just goes to a toy shop and buys a bunch of puzzles and toys for me. And last year I was moving house and I was packing everything in and at the bottom of one of the drawers I found two Rubik's Cubes and realized I'd never learned how to solve them and they were just there.

And your mum had even bought you it. She bought me, yeah, she'd forgotten the first time. So she bought me a second time, yeah. And, it was at that point, when you're moving house, you're deciding, do I keep stuff or do I donate? And so I had these two Rubik's Cubes and I was at this, I thought, well, if I keep them, then I'm going to have to learn how to solve them.

Because there's no point in having a Rubik's Cube in your possession. If you're not learning how to solve, at the time I was living in another house and I took them away with me and I started watching YouTube videos on how to solve a Rubik's Cube. And the first video was really bad and I really struggled to learn it.

The way you solve Rubik's Cubes is through algorithms. So you learn a series of moves and that helps you solve every single cube. So the algorithms are always the same and you just kind of go through the pattern you eventually solve. So I was watching these videos and actually the first thing I learnt about the Rubik's Cube was it wasn't as complicated as I thought it.

In that it's got six sides. By basic math, it's got, it's a cube, it's a cube with six sides. And you think that with six sides and nine colours on each side that there's that many pieces, so six times nine, which is 64. But actually there aren't as many as that. Because the pieces are connected to each other, you've got a fewer number of pieces because you've got basically corner pieces.

So you've got eight corner pieces. You've got the centerpieces. So you've got six centerpieces. Then you've got kind of edge pieces. So I don't know how many you've got of those, but you don't have as many as 64.

[00:27:03] Steven Burke: The importance is that the first lesson you learned was less complex.

[00:27:08] Tom Greenaway: Yes, less complex, but also So the colors around on different sides are connected.

So there's this whole thing of when, when I didn't know how to solve a Rubik's cube, I just tried to solve one side and then another side and then another side. And it doesn't work that way because the pieces are connected, you solve it in layers. So you do the bottom layer, then the second layer, then the third layer, and then the top.

And once I'd learned that, then the concepts were really important. And then I just followed the video watching how to do the algorithms. And I started off by kind of. Watching a bit of the video, playing around on the cube, pausing the video to check I'd done it, and then starting again, watching something, pausing it, trying it.

And then the first time it took me about an hour to work, it was like a 15 minute video, but it took me an hour to get from starting to solving the cube. And I had to do that a few times where it got a little bit shorter each time, so like 15 minutes, 45 minutes, half an hour. And then eventually I was solving the cube in time with the video, so it took me about 15 minutes.

Then I started trying to do it without watching the video and what happened was quite a few times I Got stuck and then I had to watch the video again And then eventually I was able to solve it by myself and then I got faster and faster and faster And I thought, ah, I've done it, I've solved everything.

Then, You know how YouTube has those recommended videos So speedcubing Sent me on to the YouTube algorithms, not the Rubik's Cube algorithms, the YouTube algorithms sent me on speedcubing. So the algorithms I learned for solving a Rubik's Cube are one of hundreds. There's loads of different ways of solving a Rubik's Cube.

And people race, they race each other to solve the Rubik's Cube the fastest. And they race against the clock, mostly against the clock actually. So I can solve a Rubik's Cube in about a minute and a half to two minutes. The fastest time solving a Rubik's Cube is about three seconds.

[00:29:09] Steven Burke: How is that physically, materially possible?

[00:29:12] Tom Greenaway: So that's why this cube feels a bit weird. Because it's called a speed cube. Although I'm not, I'm not teaching myself speed cubing. This just happens to be Christmas presents. Happens to be like a good cube rather than the old. Very kind of rough, plasticky, well, roughly made. So that's your accidental speedcube?

That's my accidental speedcube, yes. Yeah, and they basically, it's not just about learning the algorithms, it's about learning these finger triggers to help you flip and move stuff in very quick, very quick time. And also the way they solve it is very different to how I solve it, because I solve it layer by layer.

Whereas if they find shortcuts So maybe that they can solve the top layer and the bottom layer and then do the middle. And if that's faster for the way the cube is scrambled at that time, then they solve it. Yeah, but what I also learned is when I saw the speedcubing videos, I thought, oh, I've learned how to solve a Rubik's cube.

And then suddenly, kind of this vast space of learning opened up, where whereas I thought I'd done it, actually, it was just the tip of the iceberg. And if I wanted, although I didn't because I have other things to do, if I wanted to, I could Try and master all these other ways of solving a Rubik's Cube, all these hundreds and thousands of combinations to get better and to get faster.

[00:30:34] Steven Burke: The ever increasing complexity of Simone Biles's routine.

[00:30:38] Tom Greenaway: Yes, exactly. So for me, like, an achievement would be able to do a backflip, you know. That would, that would be the achievement, and I would stop there. But for the gymnast, yeah, there's not only is there the triple double Simone Biles thing, there's different types of backflips.

You know, you can do one in pike, You can do one tucked, you can do one with your legs splayed or with your legs open, you know, there's all sorts and all I'm doing, all I would want to do is learn how to get it so that my legs flip around and in one complete circle without dying.

[00:31:13] Dave Musson: Stick around for more about learning skills right after this.

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[00:32:13] Steven Burke: Right, what advice would you give to someone who's looking to take one of their core skills to the next level?

Pick one as an example if you like.

[00:32:23] Tom Greenaway: The first thing I would say is pick a skill which you, which feels achievable and has a clear outcome. So I would be looking at more specific skills. So if you think about the Warwick core skills, I would be looking at digital literacy, sustainability, organizational awareness, ones where There's a very clear kind of outcome.

The thing you need to think about first is where are you with that skill? So if we take organizational awareness, are you someone who doesn't even know what a CEO is, or are you someone who is intimately familiar with the steel market in China and India, and you know, you're kind of looking at very specific things in that area.

Most of us are kind of somewhere in the middle. You then need to pick what you can learn or what you can develop and have a specific goal in mind. And I would even say the goal is not enough. I would say it has to be a task that you can do with that knowledge. So when we say learning what CEO is, can you then explain it to someone else in a conversation?

That would be the task that demonstrates that you've learned that bit of knowledge. Like with the steel industry, learning that specific point about, I don't know, India's steel industry, Tata Steel, you know, learning about that, can you use that somewhere? That's where the demonstration of the skill is. I think for skills that are a bit more nebulous, like teamwork, those can be improved, but it's a more complicated thing because for teamwork, as we said, it's a transferable skill.

So, you need to find not just one team to work in, but multiple teams, so you need to look for multiple opportunities to work in a team, in different contexts, and you need to think about specific things about your teamwork skills that you want to improve. Is it, for example, managing a meeting? Then your task is to manage a meeting and to reflect on what you've learned from that.

It could be persuading someone else in a team to do something that they don't want to do. You know, pick up a specific aspect of it and focus on it. When it comes to transferable skills and the need to reflect, it's because our brains don't actively transfer from one context to another. We can't do that.

We need to think about it. We need to reflect. So the idea of, oh, this thing worked well when I was working in a sports team. Let's try it in, you know, a workplace team. That doesn't just happen. You have to think about it. You have to consider it. You have to work on it. And that's why the reflection of it is so important .

[00:34:58] Steven Burke: What are your top three tips for improving skills and consolidate in what you've learned?

[00:35:03] Tom Greenaway: So I think we've already gone over a few of these. Measurement is really important. You can't learn a skill without knowing what good looks like, learning how to improve. Another thing which we haven't really talked about, but is really important, is regular and purposeful practice.

And this does link back to the measurements again. So, for example with the languages, I'm currently learning Mandarin. And there's an app called Duolingo, which I'm sure people have heard of, and I've been using that, and I know that that app does not test me enough. So I have regular practice, you know, I have a streak of 400 and something days, so I've been doing this app for over a year.

But I know that it's not pushing me, it's just really consolidating, and it's very easy stuff. So I also have a Mandarin teacher who really tests me, like I have to speak for half an hour in Mandarin with her. And that's really hard, but I know that that practice is far more purposeful. I do both though, because I like Duolingo and I like the consolidation, but I also know I have to be tested.

So it has to happen regularly and it has to be purposeful. The final thing is if it's a transferable skill, you do need reflection. There are arguments for reflection on technical skills as well. So for example, learning Mandarin, sometimes it does help if I reflect on what I've learnt and how I can apply it in other situations.

Often, because it's learning a language and I don't know the answers, that reflection is more of a conversation with someone about, you know, if I say this in this situation, would it work? And they'll tell me, oh, it'd feel weird, or that would sound like you're chatting someone up, or they're all the mistakes you can make when learning a language.

And then the final thing, I know I've said three things, but there's a fourth, is, it's really useful to have a teacher. It's really useful to have someone helping you learn the skill. Teachers can be expensive, but They, they really do help with learning skill and giving you some accountability in terms of what looks good in the, what, in terms of what good looks like.

[00:37:11] Steven Burke: How do you see the future of transferable skills development for careers and employment?

[00:37:18] Tom Greenaway: There are three main issues I think that are going to affect all of us in the future. So one is climate change, the other is AI, and the third one is the mass movement of people. We've already seen, these are already happening.

Mass movement of people. Lots of societies are more multicultural than they were before. Lots of people living in cities. It's also the reason, one of the reasons why we had a pandemic, was people moving around everywhere and spreading the illness.

[00:37:44] Steven Burke: It's also strognly imbricated in the first one as well, the change or collapse of the climate system. will entail a greater movement of Yes, and

[00:37:53] Tom Greenaway: forced migration is based off the world heating up, places become deserts and stuff. I'll talk about AI first. To be honest, I don't think AI will change things that much. Basically, I think the role of AI is still to be determined. One thing that's clear is that AI cannot do the learning for you, so in the same way that a calculator won't make you better at maths, it might help you do things faster, but you still have to learn what adding and subtracting and dividing is.

And I think the problem with AI is that the AI doesn't know if it's wrong. So if you're using AI to, you know, to help you with your writing or to help you with maths or with programming or whatever, is that unless you know what's right and wrong, the AI could lead you in any direction. And so it's not going to replace the hard work you have to do in learning the skill, learning the fundamentals.

That was an interesting episode of South Park, where they were using AI to help. Send messages to their girlfriends, and suddenly their relationships with their girlfriends became a lot better, but it all fell down because The AI isn't a replacement for the actual talking in the relationship So once you no longer have the A. I. to rely on, you know, that really shows up your ability.

[00:39:14] Steven Burke: Using the A. I. instead of what they wanted to say themselves didn't make them better at saying the right thing at the right time.

[00:39:21] Tom Greenaway: For climate change, there's definitely a strong moral argument that the skills you learn should be considered for the impact on the environment.

I think there's a naivety in skills learning, particularly in higher education, that people will learn these skills and then use them to do good things. But the thing is that learning to become a better communicator, yes, it could mean that you're better at communicating to patients if you're a doctor or, you know, if you're working in local government to the constituents there.

But it could also mean that you're better at deceiving people, or it could mean like, you know, Donald Trump is a very good communicator. I don't like him, but he's a very good communicator. He's very good at convincing people to do things and believe things aren't true. And so just having good communication skills doesn't mean that you're gonna, you know, do things to help the world.

And so a lot of the communication around climate change has been to its detriment in terms of trying to fight it. Because it's muddied the waters, it's used people's understanding or lack of understanding of certain areas to their advantage in order to make people buy and consume more, which has damaged the climate.

More concretely, if you're doing something like learning how to be an engineer, or learning how to do HR and you work for a fossil fuel company, or an energy company, you know, is that the best, is it the best use of your skills to extract those fuels, you know, or to help people extract those fuels? That's kind of where we think.

Where I think the concern is with skills, not the learning of the skills themselves, but more how they're used towards the current challenges we face. It's, it's an issue of how you apply things like your own self awareness and how you apply your critical thinking skills within the context, of an industry that causes damage to the climate or to the environment.

And the final thing is the mass movement of people. So this links to kind of my specialism, intercultural awareness. The thing that we kind of don't really talk about with intercultural awareness is that historically intercultural interactions, intercultural encounters have gone wrong. So there's a long history of intercultural encounters resulting in slavery, exploitation, death, terrible things.

And with the mass movement of people If we're not learning how to get along, how to communicate well with people from different cultures, then we're at risk of these things happening again. I think, because of its historical context, it is really important to develop your intercultural skills. And because of what's happening currently.

Because otherwise it's the whole thing, if you don't learn history, you'll repeat it. If you don't learn how to work with people from different cultures, how to interact with them, how to understand each other, then you are at risk of the previous, very disastrous, I would say, intercultural encounters repeating themselves.

You're not so sure.

[00:42:20] Steven Burke: It's a question of choice of words, I think. The idea that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it isn't what I feel, to be quite an accurate portrayal of the reality. If you don't learn from history, you won't repeat the same mistakes, but you will replicate aspects of those mistakes in very different situations.

[00:42:41] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I think, I think it's that, yeah, the replication of aspects of it. Because our brains haven't changed how they've worked over the past, you know, several thousand years. We're still sceptical of outsiders, like that is part of how we've kind of evolved.

[00:42:55] Steven Burke: But also in a conscious way, there are many mechanisms, processes, systems and structures, and also people with specific agendas who will play on that and who will use it.

[00:43:07] Tom Greenaway: And I don't want to say that it's all been awful either, like a lot of intercultural interaction is one of the reasons why we've got such advanced technology over the past hundred years. It's also why we have. different cuisines and how some of those cuisines like fusion cuisines have some amazing changes and some like you wouldn't have a hamburger without intercultural interaction like the American hamburger wouldn't have happened without cultural exchange.

So there are all these benefits to it. And I think probably to end on a positive note, the learning intercultural awareness format migration enhances the benefits. So it can make it so much better in terms of your experience of your life. Your ability to be creative and be creative with other people and what you're learning about other people will all improve If you learn these skills to adapt to how the world is changing

[00:44:06] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the skills cast a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk slash skillscast, and there's a link to that page in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks to Tom Greenaway for plenty of wisdom and advice on learning skills, and also to Stephen Burke for asking the questions.

We'll be back with this duo later in the season when the roles will be reversed. This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. And we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks. The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award.

The University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] Sarah: I'd really advise you to not say yes to every opportunity, but say yes to opportunities that you might in school or in your undergrad haven't said yes to. I think that can really help one build skills in areas you haven't had the chance to develop them yet.

[00:00:17] Dave Musson: Hi and welcome to the latest episode of the Skillscast from the University of Warwick.

This is a show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode. You'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they developed theirs and how you can too.

I'm your host Dave Musson, I work in Warwick's skills team and in this episode we're hearing from some of the first students to complete our new Thrive program as they tell us about the skills they've developed while studying here at Warwick. Now before we go any further, I should probably explain what Thrive is.

Actually, I'll hand over to my colleague Sarah Bennett who runs the program to do the honours.

[00:01:00] Sarah Bennett: Hello, my name's Sarah. I look after the Thrive program here at Warwick. That's our women's personal development program for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Thrive's a fantastic program. It exists to help support our women students to develop their confidence, their resilience, and to develop a greater sense of agency.

[00:01:18] Dave Musson: So in this episode we're going to hear from four students who were part of Thrive's pilot program. They will tell you more about the skills they've developed both on the program and alongside it. If you'd like to find out more about Thrive yourself, visit warwick. ac. uk slash thrive. That's T H R I V E If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future ones.

You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen. And you can find transcripts of our episodes on our website at warwick. ac. uk slash skillscast. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, let's start by meeting our guests, starting with Kieran.

[00:02:04] Kiran: Yeah, sure. So I started my master's last year. And I decided to specialize in cyber security management. Something that after my computer science degree at Coventry there was the opportunity to take, whether I wanted to go down the academic route further or decide to go into industry, but I think for me it was the right time to specialize in this area.

[00:02:24] Lin: Hi everyone I'm Lin and currently I'm studying in mental health and well being, a postgraduate program here, and I come from China. I absolutely enjoy the Thrive program. It has taught me a lot about empowerment and a sense of agency, as you just said.

[00:02:43] Sarah: My name's Sarah. I am a second year politics and international studies student here at the University of Warwick.

So I'm doing my undergrad. And I think first and foremost, what I enjoy being about a political science student is that it allows me to kind of. Deconstruct these big mainstream narratives that constitute our modern world. And I think that's like, that's the most rewarding task I could possibly imagine.

[00:03:05] Stella: I am Stella and I take part in the pilot of the Thrive program. I am a first year student now moving to the second year, majoring language, culture and communication. And yes, I am very happy to take part in Thrive and sort of happy that I discovered this opportunity.

[00:03:23] Dave Musson: To get started, we wanted to hear from our guests what skills they've developed so far during their time at Warwick.

And there's quite a range, so let's hear more, starting with Lin .

[00:03:32] Lin: So professionalism, for me, it's like a whole package of skills. So I think I'm very lucky to be part of the Mental Health and Wellbeing program because Now I'm, I'm coming to the end of the program and we are now in a work placement phase.

So this is where I start to pick up this professional skills, which I spent three months working on a research project with lawyers, because those are my research subjects, but you know, lawyers, they are different from academia. They have their own way to work, they have their own way to communicate. But still, because my aim is to study them, so I need to find a way to both bring our academic traditions and their own, I don't know, professional way of mindset together so that both parties can be happy with the project.

[00:04:35] Dave Musson: Here's Sarah.

[00:04:36] Sarah: I'd say a bunch, definitely. I mean, being, being in such an international environment, I think I'd definitely say intercultural awareness, but also skills like ranging from from communication skills to, to definitely critical and innovative thinking, something I've was not exposed to a lot before I came to Warwick.

But I feel like first and foremost, probably resilience with, with resilience. I don't, I don't mean like that kind of neoliberal concept of, of self reliance of toughness, but more kind of the, or I, I would define this as the ability to mentally cope.

Yeah, and I think being, being a Warwick has, has definitely equipped me with quite a lot of resilience. And I'd say that in, in that sense, being able to adopt and overcome challenges, that's, that's just a super important pillar for. Well being and for staying sane. I'm very, very grateful for that.

[00:05:31] Dave Musson: Here is Kiran.

[00:05:33] Kiran: I think for me self reflection is definitely a key one. I'm also building upon my communication skills. Being able to communicate effectively and efficiently is something that I think I lacked in. Also, I think critical thinking as this is something that I may be doing in the background, but didn't pay any importance or significance to it.

I think these three to four skills that I've developed during my time at Warwick, have helped me to gain the position that I'm in today.

[00:06:04] Dave Musson: And here's Stella.

[00:06:06] Stella: I would say it is to sort of find myself studying at Warwick, because I was a Morse student, which is a student from the Statistics Department before I was a Linguistics student.

And I restarted after one year in Morse, because that time I was It was a self realizing that that might not be my main passion, learning mathematics. What most is very fancy. It's sort of cool and sort of the top one work major in, in this uni. So that was catchy in the first place, but after one year's learning, I wasn't about to fail, but still, I am not good enough and I'm not happy enough with what I am doing.

I am not that curious about what I was learning. So then I took one step back and. Think, huh, maybe I, maybe I should restart. Maybe I should revet review myself about what I truly love and where my passion truly lies. So I think to me, the biggest skill I need to be a work student is really to. know myself better, and then to enjoy Warwick.

[00:07:23] Dave Musson: One of the great things about studying at Warwick is that there are plenty of opportunities to practice these new skills, as our guests can explain, starting with Lin. .

[00:07:31] Lin: Yes, I'm really glad to see how Warwick tries to help students to develop and demonstrate those skills through this. Through these activities, really, because if you think, if you think about it, you can really gain a lot of new skills and opportunities and experience through these activities, but you just have to realize that And What's the deeper values behind these activities at a school set up for our students, but I think we have to, I don't know, be mindful about our lives so that we can really see the true value behind them.

[00:08:05] Dave Musson: And Sarah.

[00:08:06] Sarah: So I think it, it definitely started before I came to work already. I mean the whole like. preparation process. For example, things like getting a visa, getting health insurance, also such like seemingly very little things like booking a flight. I remember at this point, I've never been, I mean, I've, I've been on a plane before, like on a school trip and also for like an EU project, but I never really had to book a flight on my own.

So I was quite left alone with all of these things, but I think seeing that, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm exposed to these challenges, but. I, I can overcome them, I can sort these things out on my own. I think that's kind of the first instance when I could see myself developing that resilience and becoming more confident and more competent.

And then definitely when I, when I arrived at work, I was I was plunged into that completely new culture, a new country. I mean, I came straight from school. I had zero experience of, of living as an adult, of kind of young, living alone. And then I was here. I had, I had to manage all of these things, but at the same time I had to, to speak Yeah, a different language.

I didn't go to like a fancy international school where like half of your subjects are in English. I had like two lessons of English per week and then I had like 24 7. I remember that was, that was definitely one of the challenges that made me, that made me more resilient as well with challenges. A hundred percent.

So I don't want to romanticize it. I feel like it's always easy to romanticize these kinds of things when you talk about them in hindsight, but the whole process was, was challenging at all times. I think the constant jumping out of your comfort zone, stretching yourself, that gets tiring. And I think what, what stood out for me was, I think that being, being challenged academically or kind of these.

Suddenly not having straight A's anymore, like I was used to in school. That was just emotionally very, very difficult because that being that brilliant student felt so deeply ingrained in my personality. And I, I, I knew I, I kind of, yeah, I did struggle with that a little bit. Also the kind of homesickness at the beginning, it, there were a lot of moments where it felt like.

One step forward, three steps back, kind of like, oh, it's never going to get better. But I think that especially with resilience, these kind of skills are vital. If not to say these are kind of the core, what makes you, what make you resilient eventually. And about what I, what I enjoy the most or what I did enjoy the most about it.

I think when you encounter these obstacles, when you work on them and at some point you're able to overcome them. That's. That's like one of the best feelings in the world for me. And it gets so much easier, genuinely. Like for example, when I was first presented with all like the jungle of bureaucracy when you immigrate to a new country.

It, it felt like an impossibility. It was really that kind of burden. But now whenever I have to work my way through, like a general bureaucracy, I don't even mind it anymore. I like it really sometimes it became easy and, and sometimes even a little bit enjoyable, which is also kind of odd. My friends make, make fun of me for that.

[00:11:09] Dave Musson: Here's Stella.

[00:11:10] Stella: Yes. I think, well, now that I've come to the story, it's, it really is. Big how, because we do lost from time to time when we thinking about how I, how I see myself. I think that is already a very sort of popular concept that we need to be more highly aware of ourself, what we want, what we value for, what do they really mean and what, how we do it.

They are not just like sentence, like the headline of the newspaper or for the, you know, those psychological website. Headlines, they are something that we truly need to do and I think Thrive is then in that step helping me to know more, to dig in a bit more about what are they really? What is self awareness really?

And to me, I think the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway that from Thrive is they helped me to identify my emotions and to name Those emotions, especially when it's a strong negative ones, and you really want to figure out why? Why do I feel it this way and why I'm sort of lost of control and why they something driving mad or what is it really and is it madness really or is it sadness, disappointment, regret and what it is and so I sort of also the program and surprised me how deep that we go to it is not like a shallow talk on emotions like how we deal with it but rather we dig down to it.

Every single emotions, I think there is one sessions that we dig in to burn out, dig in to regret and angry. We said angry is an energy. I remember a lot of lines from those sessions and I am so grateful to sort of hear how, how deep we can go to and how many details that we might have missed out when we just think about self awareness.

We actually go a lot of down to different emotions and to. No, they always settle fetter, really.

[00:13:22] Dave Musson: And Kiran.

[00:13:23] Kiran: So there was a number of initiatives that were introduced by the university and as a postgraduate student you have to be careful because You are aware that you're only here for a year, however, you want to make the most of it at the same time.

So it's either you kind of go all in, but you need to make sure you can balance your studies as well. So I came across the Warwick Award quite early on and something that WMG offers, which is where my course is situated in the department, is the WMG Skills Plus. So this is something that From that initiative, I was able to kind of pick up on the way alongside my studies and then towards the end of summer, something that I thought was really useful was the Thrive Programme, which was undergoing on the pilot session.

So in these sessions, if I'm totally honest, I thought when I signed up, I was more going for it because of the Warwick Award. It was something that I kind of needed the core skill points at the time. But then when I took a step back, I, so I've. There was a set requirement, you only had to attend a certain amount of sessions, but I enjoyed it that much that I ended up attending additional sessions, because they really helped to develop my skills.

[00:14:33] Dave Musson: We'll be back shortly with more about Thrive, right after this.

Has this episode got you interested in finding out more about Thrive? Thrive is an interactive, in person programme for female identifying students, or non binary students who are comfortable in a female centred community. On the program, you will hear from inspirational speakers and have the option to work with a mentor to support you on your personal development journey.

Thrive can help you increase your self awareness through understanding your own strengths and values, grow your confidence through exploring boundary setting and building assertiveness, Feel empowered, overcome self doubt and increase resilience, make connections with like minded students, and start to build a community of support, and much, much more.

Thrive is open to undergraduates and postgraduates, is free to attend, and has two versions, an intense two day program, or a month long version. Find out more, and register at warwick. ac. uk slash thrive. That's warwick. ac. uk slash t h r i v e. A key part of completing the Thrive Programme is really understanding yourself and what range of skills you have.

Alongside that, it's also about recognising where you might still need to develop certain skills. That's certainly the case for our guests, who all recognise there are more skills they want to hone. Here's Stella.

[00:15:58] Stella: I think it's a sort of always learning process. It's never like, ah, I'm nailing it. It's always like I can do better and I understand myself better.

And I think the amazing part about knowing yourself in terms of your emotions is that you always have new. Materials to learn because things are always happening and you always then have new feelings about different things and you then learn, learn from that you're like, huh, I behave this way when those things happen and maybe next day, similar situations, you feel it differently and you're like, okay, the understanding I got yesterday might be wrong and my something else might have an influence on that.

So then I think that's the reason I feel sad, but actually not, it could be something else. So I think, with life going on, it's, it, the understanding will get sort of clearer and clearer and clearer. It won't, it might never touch the most clearest knowledge, it might never do that. We'll never reach the boundary or the edge, but still we're getting closer and closer, and that is how I think it's so sort of worthy to, Always discover, and never think, I cope with my emotion well, and I calm down all the time, so I, I don't need to still develop any skills on it.

We do, actually.

[00:17:25] Dave Musson: Here's Kiran

[00:17:25] Kiran: That's an interesting question, because I think some people have this idea, once they've completed their academic studies in the higher education system, that's it. I've very quickly learned, it's only the beginning. I think I've still got a long way to go, and. At the time, I might not appreciate that.

Once you've got this degree, you think, obviously, I'm still waiting for my results, but you think, oh, yes, I've got everything in hand. Now, this is it. I can just start working and keep going. I think for me, I need to take the opportunity to develop on organizational awareness, as this is something that will take time to understand the transition from academic to industry.

So even though we're trained to some extent of how to perform well in those environments until you're really in them. You don't know how to handle the situation. You're going to make mistakes, which will have an impact on the wider organization. Whereas when you're at university, if you miss a deadline, it's only really impacting yourself.

Reflection on yourself. Whereas if you're working in a team in the workplace, you've got accountability and responsibility to take action and make sure you do those things to a certain standard. I think that's something that will take me time to grasp and understand how I will go about those things.

[00:18:41] Dave Musson: Here's Lin .

[00:18:42] Lin: Well, I've definitely been developing those professional skills. Very early on when I was in high school, I was very interested in some of those leadership roles in, in school. I was a, but it's something about being a mentor to other boarding school no, to other boarding students. So that's where I start to feel like, okay, leadership comes with responsibility.

and you better do your job. And then that's how I started to pick up those skills where my supervisor's thing is essential for, for me to enter my career in later on. And then you just kept developing. And when I was in Thrive, I was thrilled to see that the skills that I have developed throughout the years has helped me to really fully immerse into the atmosphere with other students in the program.

[00:19:42] Dave Musson: And here's Sarah.

[00:19:43] Sarah: Yeah, I think that the process of acquiring resilience, that's my, by no means really like linear. And sometimes when I'm struggling with my mental health, for example, it's of course more difficult to not take these kind of setbacks or obstacles personally and to always be willing and, and ready to, to work through these obstacles.

I am very much a perfectionist and if things don't work out immediately, that's something that frustrates me still yeah, and I think that that's normal and I'm, I'm working very hard on accepting that, that I, I think that the fact that failure is, is an, is an opportunity to grow, a setback is an opportunity to grow as, as often I've, I've seen it in the past.

I think I still. There's still a lot I need to internalise.

[00:20:29] Dave Musson: Each of our guests, as you've probably picked up by now, have found they've almost specialised in a particular skill. So we wanted to hear from them what advice they might have for you to develop those skills yourself. To start with, here's Sarah's advice for building resilience.

[00:20:45] Sarah: So yeah, I think it doesn't matter at all whether you are an international student, whether you're a domestic student starting the undergrad or a master's student transitioning to a different university. With almost 100 percent certainty, probably if you want it or not, you're going to be exposed to lots of like new people, new places, new challenges.

And so I think essentially there are two options. Either you decide to sit in your room, let's say uni experience. Pass by without really touching you or you, you throw yourself out yourself out there and you embrace it. , I think as I encourage you to go for the letter, of course, it's, it, it might be scary to, to talk to someone new in like precious week or it might be scary to approach that professor after lecture, but that's essentially what's going to let you, you grow and I, I think be more resilient.

[00:21:35] Dave Musson: Kiran and Stella both found they developed their self-awareness.

[00:21:39] Kiran: Honestly there are a lot of opportunities outside of your day to day degree in terms of the initiatives and the opportunities that are available at Warwick. So one thing that was important to me was volunteering to be able to give back to the community to show how grateful I am for the things that I have.

So I did sign up to the Warwick Technology Volunteers where we had the opportunity to go. Into primary schools to teach kids how to code in Scratch. And that was something that I probably wasn't exposed to until a lot later on in my education. And I think by encouraging individuals at a younger age and making them more aware actually helps you to appreciate what you have in this university space.

The other thing is that your time management can be quite difficult when, especially if you're, despite whether you're living on or off campus or living at home or away. It's a new experience for everyone, so you're having to adjust, but to make the most of it. So the things that I got involved in have led me to a number of different things, being able to speak to different people, just exploring the website.

So I wouldn't have come across WMG Skills Plus if I hadn't spoken to the Creators Team. Warwick Award was something that was introduced, I think, last year, and That was determined that, okay, well I've got a year to do this, let's get on with that. Being able to attend conferences and events as well, I think, by putting those skills into practice really helped.

[00:23:08] Stella: Well I think first of all, go to Thrive Sessions. And we need sort of a starter, a starting point, and maybe Well, I am like, I'm the type of person who I sort of need to hear something else before I start to do something. So I would like a piece of advice or some sort of professional, suggestions before I put them into the action because in that way I might rely on those suggestions more.

I would feel like I am doing something. In the right way. So I will get that. So I think it is important to have some knowledge before we do something or just think it's right to me. Sometimes it might not be right to you. So is it worth to participate in those workshops and to listen to other stories and also Go through all the materials with the lecturers from The Thrives and sort of to learn from them.

And then I think it's easier to come up with a more personal, more customized skills that you want to develop on.

[00:24:22] Dave Musson: And here's Lin's advice on building your professionalism.

[00:24:25] Lin: Actually there's one. One approach, which I think a lot of people may, may think it's not obvious, but to me it's quite obvious because you can always see how your own lecturers or professors do things.

while they're teaching. To me, that's my personal approach. It's through by every time when I, when I was in a meeting with my supervisors or my profession the lecturers or my professors, I always I'm really interested to see how they put up a set of slides, for instance, how they talk to students, how they write their emails to different people, how they manage to Thank you.

To help students like me to, to really expand our experiences here. Just to help, to really observe them, how they do things around here. So that, you know, through those approaches, you can really grow a lot and learn a lot. But I just feel like not many people notice that.

[00:25:31] Dave Musson: We also wanted to hear how our guests plan to use these newly developed skills in the future.

Here's Stella.

[00:25:37] Stella: Oh, that's a, that's a really good question. I think we. It's, it might be the CV writing CV thing in the first place when, before we even enter the workplace. And I am working on it now as a first year student being summer grade. So I was sort of, don't really know where to go and don't really know how to write a good CV and, and keep contacting with my advantage teachers and try to get some help.

And I think in the, in the preparation of writing CV or writing cover letters. It already requires way more self awareness skills than I realized, because how to put your personal stories and experiences in a A4 paper that is challenging, and you need to, you want the self to stand out. stand out and you, you only have the resources that the HR gonna, gonna be able to see, human resources people are gonna be able to see.

It's just that paper. So how you make yourself special and how you tell the story and you tell it yourself. So I do consider that as a huge part of self awareness, how you put them in. And so I think I, Even though I have almost zero experience in workplace, I have some maybe failed experience in writing CV, but still loads of them.

So I do consider that as it's very hard. It's not like a one end thing, you know, You know who you are and then you put in an article. It's different. It's different from that. It's more like you are building your skill along with writing about seeing me, should we say? And so just in, in the writing CV process, writing I would say looking for a job process.

I think self awareness is then super important because you also need that to find a place that you really want to go, find a role that you really want to play, find a job that you really want to apply for, and sort of examining what you like.

[00:27:45] Dave Musson: Here's Kiran.

[00:27:46] Kiran: I think for me, leadership. So something that I want to do in technology space is I don't necessarily want to specialize and become an expert in one field.

I'd like to become more of a generalist and understand the key concepts at a high level of view, but make sure I do understand the core concepts. And I think leadership's important. It's something that, despite being at university, may have been on a group project, so I was the postgraduate faculty representative and I had the opportunity to explore with the board and present ideas to them, and even though there's elements of leadership there, I've never managed a team where it's mattered to get to the next stage, so I think, yes, we have group projects, and I think they do mean a lot, Sometimes you can choose those group projects, you can't choose the people you work with, and you need to understand.

their strengths and weaknesses and understand that delegation is important. I think some people can get caught up in that they've got to do things in a certain way, but being able to trust people. But going forward, I would want the opportunity to put this to practice because I'll be honest, in group projects at university, sometimes a person won't show up, so you'll take their task on.

Whereas if that's happening in the work environment, it's not necessarily possible to consume all that work and get it done for it, delivered into that deadline. So I think I would like to take the opportunity to see where I can grow in that space.

[00:29:16] Dave Musson: This is what Sarah had to say.

[00:29:17] Sarah: So I think resilience, that's, I'd say, one of these skills that going to be needed in, in any kind of workplace.

And I assume it's also appreciate, appreciated by many, many employers. Professions wise, I don't really see myself settling down in the next couple of years. Like I, I'd like to work in different places all around the world with different people. And, and because I, at Warwick, I saw, and I started really appreciating that kind of diversity I didn't have before.

And I think that process of building a new life. And, and settling down in a new place and dealing with all these obstacles again that come with, yeah, building, building your life in, in a new place is going to require a lot of resilience and that's why it's going to come in very handy.

[00:30:01] Dave Musson: And here's Lin .

[00:30:01] Lin: Well, I'm glad to find that those professional skills are also, are also transferable skills. So maybe in future in workplace, I know better how to write an email. I Hope I can get better at making presentations and to present my ideas to, to anyone who's interested in listening to me. But really, I feel like now I'm already in a zone of workplace already, because through the placement project, I feel like I, I am working.

I'm not a student anymore. That identity has shifted. So. I just need to practice more and hopefully I can apply them in different areas that I might work in in the future.

[00:30:48] Dave Musson: Stick around for a little longer as our guests have some great tips for you coming right up. It's never too early or too late to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it.

The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities, so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates. It can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it.

Registration is quick and easy so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning. The Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk slash warwick award.

So to wrap up this conversation, we wanted some practical tips from our guests about where you and any other student listening can develop your own core skills while here at Warwick.

That might be as part of the Thrive Programme, and we can absolutely recommend doing that if you're eligible for it. But it could be elsewhere. As we've heard before on this podcast, once you start developing your skills, it can get quite addictive, especially being here at Warwick where there are so many opportunities available to you.

Anyway, here's Kiran.

[00:32:20] Kiran: there's a number of different ways you can go about it. But this time won't come again and I think I might have realised that afterwards. Yeah, I heard it a lot while I was at university that these will be your best years or you'll never got the chance to do something again. So putting yourself forward and seeing what suits you because there are a number of different elements or things that are offered at university and they're not going to tick.

The box is for everyone. It's something that you have to put your time and dedication into and take seriously. You can attend a number of workshops, but if you're not engaged to making the most out of it. You'll probably feel worse or kind of drained because you've taken that time out of your day to do something just to tick another box to say you've done it.

But I think that's something that I've had to understand and my advice for that would be if the Thrive Programme interests you, take the opportunity to give it a go. It's structured in a way where It fits around your schedule and there's not that much time taken out and that can give you a real boost.

The same with the work award, there's, if, I think if you make that as your kind of overall goal, even if you're just So for postgraduates, I think the point system, it worked in a different way in terms of how much you had to get compared to an undergrad. I think seeing what's out there and speaking to people.

And engaging with them to see what would suit you and then give it a go because if you don't like it at the end of the day you can step away. Most likely you will love it and take something away from it and be able to build from there.

[00:33:54] Dave Musson: Here's Lin .

[00:33:55] Lin: Well I know Warwick has tried his best to create these professional environments for students.

But I think also it's vital for students themselves to realize that at some point they are, they will not be students anymore. And, and once you graduate from Warwick, the world requires a very different mindset to cope with. So while we're still at school, I think the best thing I can think of is just to try different activities and, and be curious about what's going on around you.

For instance I, I never thought that I would have the opportunity to record a podcast here. This is something new for me as well. So these, these little experiences really helped me to. to keep develop my own skills. And yeah, I just think, because for a lot of students They really didn't realize that they have so much more, like the school has so much more to offer for them, so, but they always maybe like stay in their own little bubbles and, and they don't realize that they have many new experiences they can explore.

But if they can be more daring to ask, and to speak more curious about how other people are living there. academic life. They might have something new to gain. So I think that's really important to be open and just be flexible, really.

[00:35:27] Dave Musson: Here's Stella's tips.

[00:35:28] Stella: Don't feel bad whenever you discover you might get something wrong, or you did something wrong.

It's fine, and always know that the ability of, you A knowledge problem and be able to solve or at least improve that thing is something that you need to be proud of it rather than sort of hanging on that that past decision to be like, how could you do that? And now it makes me feel so bad. So always say like plan B.

I want to think plan B as, B not as a alternative letter of plan A, but plan B for. back myself up for always love and, and hug whatever I embrace, whatever I want to do.

[00:36:17] Dave Musson: And finally, here's Sarah.

[00:36:18] Sarah: So I'm not a fan of this kind of narrative. Oh, say yes to every opportunity that I feel like that's always targeted at like new students that yeah, yeah, plunge yourself into everything because at university, you're, you're most likely going to be presented with, with so many amazing opportunities.

And if you say yes to. every kind of cool ish opportunity, you, you're most likely gonna, gonna burn out, and that's not what's, what's going to make you happy. At least in my experience, I, I kind of struggled with that a little bit in my first year that I, I've said yes to a lot of things that kind of overwhelmed me, so I think being an essentialist is also a good kind of advice.

But a piece of advice I heard from someone very recently, and I resonate with a lot, is that when you're presented with a number of opportunities that seem like equally good, the most kind of foreign one or the most kind of strange one might be the most rewarding one. And yeah, I think in my experience that really is true.

So I think that I'd really advise you to not say yes to every opportunities, but say yes to opportunities that are, that you might in school or in your undergrad haven't said yes to. I think that can really help one build skills in areas you haven't had the chance to develop them yet. And I think most importantly and above all, have a lot of fun.

Don't get disheartened if If like things don't work out immediately or you don't find your passions or your future career in like the first few instances of trying new things. I think that with, with persistence and fun and a little bit of resilience. Your university experience is going to be exciting and it's going to be colorful and it's going to be full of new learning experience and certainly full of new skills.

[00:38:00] Dave Musson: You've been listening to The Skillscast , a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future ones. You can find the skills cast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you're listening.

And you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick. ac. uk slash skills cast, and there's a link to that in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much to Sarah, Lynn, Stella, and Kieran for their time and insights and best of luck for the future.

If you'd like to follow in their footsteps and take part in Thrive. then be sure to check out warwick. ac. uk slash thrive. That's warwick. ac. uk slash t h r i v e. This episode was hosted, mixed, and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back with a new episode in January.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick. ac. uk slash warwick award.

[00:00:00] Jim Judges: Look out for modules that will allow you and, and stretch you and don't be afraid of perhaps stepping out of your comfort zone because all students will be in the same boat. You'll get support and help and you will learn new tools, new techniques, and you'll have a better story to tell in the future.

[00:00:20] Dave Musson: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why they think skills are important, how they developed theirs, and how you can too. I'm your host Dave Musson, I work in Warwick's skills team, and in this episode, we're taking a deeper dive into one of Warwick's 12 core skills. Specifically, digital literacy. I was joined by Jim Judges, who is an academic technologist here at Warwick, and has more than 20 years of experience working in a digital realm.

Across our conversation, Jim offers insights into why digital literacy is important, how it might change in the future and why it's crucial for students to think about it while they're at university.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you're listening to this. And, you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk skillscast . And there's a link to that in the episode description. Oh , if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay. Let's meet Jim and talk digital literacy.

[00:01:38] Jim Judges: I'm Jim J judges. I work here at the university of Warwick as a senior academic technologist. And that means that I work in the central team supporting users of. academic technology, in particular the VLE, the Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle, and also some other associated tools, you might have heard of some which are Padlet, Vevox and maybe one or two other tools and activities associated with the use of the VLE, but I would reckon the majority of our work and my work is supporting users with using the VLE. To help support online distance and blended learning. And yeah, we support everyone across the university with a main focus on academic staff and those supporting academic staff.

So our aim is to help those involved in teaching and learning and to. slowly but surely improve the student experience through that work.

[00:02:41] Dave Musson: And tell me a bit about your career background before you got this role.

[00:02:45] Jim Judges: Yeah. Well, I see myself as a educationalist. I've worked in education for a long time. And I did a when I was about 26, 27, I changed careers from working in food production.

Would you believe I used to make French fries, chips. and the like with McCain's, but I had a career change in my mid to later 20s and did a teacher training program in further adult and higher education, ended up teaching science and chemistry in particular at A level and GCSE in further education colleges.

I did that for 10 or more years and then in the early 2000s, I had the opportunity As technology was coming more to the fore and being used more to support education, I had the opportunity to support the use of technology in teaching and learning as a ILT champion Information Learning Technology champion, and that job grew.

And I was involved in supporting other staff at the sixth form college then in using technology and eventually took up a job with GISC, who are a national body supporting educational institutions, the use of technology. And I was an e learning area advisor for the West Midlands for a while.

After that I've always been involved in supporting technology for the last 20 years or so. I moved to BCU, I did dabble with teacher training in post compulsory education, but still also supporting the use of technology. I worked freelance for myself for a little while as a freelance consultant.

And then ended up at Warwick about 10 years ago and I've helped, in fact, right from the start with the rollout and the development and the growth of the VLE Moodle since 2012. And I've been working with it and the associated activities I mentioned earlier since then.

[00:04:25] Dave Musson: So, one type of chip to another type of chip!

[00:04:28] Jim Judges: I like it. I'm not sure I'd thought of that, but if you want to know anything about chips, I'm the man.

[00:04:34] Dave Musson: The last 20 years or so where you've been, you've had this focus more on technology. What, what's been the appeal there? What's, what's kept you in that part of the part of things?

[00:04:42] Jim Judges: Well, it's a good, a good question, actually.

I think one of the interesting features of working with technology and supporting others is the fact that no two days are the same. So you get involved in a whole range of different. Aspects of, of work here at the university and anywhere, anywhere else. One minute you might be helping an individual with a particular challenge or trying to do something reasonably straightforward, but perhaps doing it for the first time as they build their content.

And another day you might be helping a group of staff who are thinking about planning something further ahead and want to consider how technology could be used. The variety is is a big factor, I think. And of course, as your question might suggest, the technology landscape has changed perhaps the one constant is the human side of things and people will always need support and people will always have a variation in terms of their own skills, confidence, and competence.

So as long as you're keeping abreast of developments and helping to act as a conduit, then you, you're able to help. But the other side to it to answer your question, in addition to the variety is I suppose that background that I have in teaching and then training and support, and the satisfaction in helping others to find their way with technology and tools that can sometimes be challenging, but often, like anything, once you have some practice and experience and a little bit of help along the way you can get there in the end, yeah.

[00:06:09] Dave Musson: So the main focus of this chat is digital literacy, which is one of the the 12 core skills here at Warwick. I guess to start with like, what does digital literacy mean to you? How might you go about defining it as a skill?

[00:06:20] Jim Judges: I think on the surface digital literacy can be just the skills you need to operate the technology that you have in front of you or that you have a available, but it is, as we know much broader and deeper than that.

And I, and I think that perhaps one of the skills that maybe somebody in my role needs and, and anybody in any role where you want to make a good, effective use of technology, are some of the broader skills beyond just knowing which buttons to press and which boxes to tick. And that are the sort of problem solving skills and the critical thinking skills that go with it.

And perhaps some of the associated analytical skills as well. So on the one hand, there's the technical side, how to do something, how to use something. But then there's also, well, the problem solving and possibly also the creativity of being able to use a particular tool in a particular way. So, although I'm probably not I might be waffling on a little bit, but I might be not answering the question directly.

I think the point I'm making is that it's a broad area and there are many associated skills not just the obvious ones you might think of.

[00:07:31] Dave Musson: We can't get away from potatoes, can we? Waffles.

[00:07:36] Jim Judges: That's true. We didn't make potato waffles, but we did make instant mashed potato, but that doesn't help you!

[00:07:42] Dave Musson: You touched on this earlier, but I guess by nature of being working in a digital sphere, I imagine that digital literacy skills have changed a lot over the last few years. I guess, what changes have you seen? And I guess to double up with the next question, like, what have you had to do to keep up with these changes as well?

[00:07:59] Jim Judges: Definitely changes. And of course, we've seen ourselves since when I became the ILT champion in Sixth Form College in 2001, perhaps, you know, the rise certainly of the internet. And although it was already. Becoming available, the everyday nature of using tools like Google, first of all, and then of course, the arrival of the smartphone and digital devices, perhaps a bit like the one we're using today, but certainly the ones in our, our pockets and accessibility of, and lower cost, easy access.

So there's been a big change in terms of the, the technology getting smaller, lighter, niftier more connected, connected to the internet. There's, there's that change. And in addition to that, I suppose, what's the other part of the question that I should be answering?

[00:08:47] Dave Musson: What have you had to do to keep up with these changes?

[00:08:51] Jim Judges: Yeah, that's, and that, that's a good question, actually. And to a certain extent, it's a bit of a cheat because it's not just imposter syndrome that, that makes me suggest I might be a fraud, but it's actually the fact that it's almost impossible to keep up with everything. But the way that you do keep up is by being open to networking and learning from others.

So we're in a very privileged position where we work in the central team in the will work with individuals and teams sometimes to answer their questions, to solve their problems. But we also run workshops and sort of show and tell type sessions where academics and others share what they're doing, and we can act as a a conduit so that we can learn from others and share what others are doing with other departments and other individuals.

So, a combination, I think, of doing the learning so that you're actually using the tool and you're building content as far as the VLE is concerned, you're using it to, create perhaps courses and modules that people might use, but also being prepared to ask others to share what they're doing and learn from them.

So that combination, I think of, of that and, and another practical way that we do need to keep abreast of what's developing is visiting and going to conferences and such events where there are presentations by those other institutions and individuals that perhaps have got there before you and done certain things and thought about certain problems and solved them, or, or are prepared to share their experiences when things go wrong.

So I think attending conferences, appropriate ones, either related to technology enhanced learning organizations. We recently had the Association for Learning Technology Conference here at Warwick. Last year I had the pleasure Moodle Moot. And although it's always fun to travel here and there, these conferences are always a great place to network, meet other people, learn from other people, but also hear how other people are doing it.

So that's an important part of the job as well.

[00:10:54] Dave Musson: There's more to come from Jim after this.

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So bringing it on to how this becomes a bit more relevant for students who might be listening. Digital literacy skills that they're often cited by employers as something that they look for in new hires. And that's regardless of sector that they're going into, whether they're going into a career such as yours, or they're just going into something completely different.

I was curious, what, why do you think this is? What, what is it about digital literacy skills that are so important for students to have at that point when they enter the workplace, do you think?

[00:12:05] Jim Judges: I think that can be used perhaps as a differentiator. So from an employer's point of view, you've got a degree.

Great. So have the other 27 applicants, how effective and efficient are you going to be? As an employee, are you going to need to learn on the job and take the next six to 12 months learning the basics of the Microsoft tools and how to use email and how to do the basics or even more complex activities, perhaps using a spreadsheet, even if it's the first time you've used the tool, then you'll be needing perhaps to go on a training course or asking for help.

So. So apart from anything, you're going to get an employee who's going to hit the ground running, I think. So there's that, that idea. I think there's a realization, however, that you can't expect an employee or an applicant to, to know everything. But I think the a good level of digital skills can show that the student has a certain additional type of intelligence, perhaps, or capability, and that that can help separate and although it might be the case that applicant B, who doesn't have the digital skills, may be able to get up to that speed, applicant A has already proved that. So I, I think that that can help and it would be certainly seen as a, as a positive, but I think it's more than just the fact that they're going to be able to hit the ground running.

I think it just, just show that they've got this level of competence. And if you've been able to already master and learn a particular technological tool or software package, then it's likely you'll be able to apply those skills to using another tool or another package that may well be bespoke.

So... I think a combination of yeah that idea of the effective, efficient employee hitting the ground running, but, but maybe also just an indication of what the applicant's capable of, but also could easily be used as a differentiator when you're looking to decide between a couple of candidates perhaps.

[00:14:10] Dave Musson: Now, I know you don't necessarily work directly with students, but I was curious to get a sense from you, like how digitally literate you think our students are?

[00:14:19] Jim Judges: Yeah, it's a good, good question and, and in fact although we don't support students directly, we do provide some resources and support materials for students and I have a couple of grown up daughters who've recently been through the university system and seen them go through education and so have a, have a a view and some experience on with that, I think, and I think the answer is that of course when it comes to two students, nevermind 2,000 or 20,000 students, then there's bound to be a variation in terms of confidence and competence with digital skills.

It would be not too much of an assumption to suggest that the majority of students will be confident with certain use of technology. So, for example, communicating with each other using possibly social media or other communication tools, WhatsApp, for example, or even texting. So, and, and finding basic information, finding things on a phone that, that many students, I don't want to make assumption again about our student body, because I know that it will vary in backgrounds and experiences, but you might assume that they would have the ability to buy something online and and perhaps use a tool to order an Uber, for example.

So that's a technical skill which they might take for granted, but not everyone in the population will. And the elderly population, as an example, typically might not, on average, have those same skills. So they'll be digitally confident with some tools. But there might be lacking in others. It's often the case that students have been through the education system in the UK and elsewhere, may well have skills with tools like word processing using Microsoft Word.

And often, it wouldn't be unusual if they met PowerPoint and used, used that. It's surprising, however to find that a lot of students might not have met something as straightforward as spreadsheets. And and when you think about how powerful they can be, and how useful they can be, then something as straightforward as that might be something they haven't met.

But they'll have a fair grounding in the basics of, perhaps, basic computer literacy, I think, on the whole. But other tools, perhaps, and the actual tools that help them to produce something, make something, possibly edit something, like a podcast or a video, less so, although that's got even easier through you know the likes of TikTok and and, and YouTube encouraging those things.

But the majority may not have produced something digitally. Furthermore, they will have some experience and competence in finding the information they need, but I think there'll be a great variety. in the confidence and ability to access information efficiently and effectively. So using advanced search techniques is something that not all students will have confidence in.

Some will be very good. And we'll have learned kind of how to access the Boolean operators in the background of Google and others will be sort of hit and miss and wonder why they get a load of adverts before they can find what they want. And even something as simple as Google, which seems to be our friend, but we always have to be a little bit critical and cautious, they might not realize that you can search by particular date range.

So it might be the case that you actually want only to know about the last year of something or something between a particular date and being able to find those options might be useful for example. So I think, I think there are those detailed digital literacies that will definitely vary.

And I would expect there to be quite a tale of. Students who perhaps haven't been exposed or been shown ideas like that. I certainly think that moving on from the search skills, the critical use of information online is another key skill as well. And that's something that I think needs to be taught.

Some will be better than others, but being critical users of information that we find online is important for all of us. I was looking at an advert this morning, one of these adverts has mocked up to look like the BBC news, but it was obviously fake. You could tell from the language that was being used that this poor celebrity had had their photo attached to some campaign that I'm sure they had no knowledge of.

And if they did, then they need to be worried. And it clearly wasn't from the BBC. But so the casual observer it was. And these items are relatively easy to spot, but what about the other news that we're being fed and other information that we're getting? And that's before, of course, we get help from the library, perhaps, but also thinking about how to be an efficient researcher.

And how effectively can you find what you're looking for, whether that's in a book or a journal? And how easily can you use that information? And that's before we get onto the thorny issue, perhaps of what artificial intelligence might do to education and the impact it might have on information searching and content creation.

[00:19:08] Dave Musson: So if you were, if you were thinking about a cohort of Warwick students who were about to graduate and you were thinking particularly about their digital literacy skills, are there, say, three skills that you would expect the majority of students to be able to evidence at the point when they, when they leave here and they go into the workplace?

[00:19:28] Jim Judges: Yeah, I think I think the idea of confidence, critical, searching for information would be high up the list. And if you think about the changing world that we're in and have experienced, then of course, one thing we can be sure is that things will be different in five years and 10 years time. So I think that sort of critical thinking skill and critical use and advanced searching is really, is really important, but perhaps on a more practical measure, the confidence use of current technology.

And not just being able to write an assignment, but perhaps being able to use advanced tools and techniques in word processing tools like Word, being able to do more advanced things with PowerPoint that might be, for example, recording your content, making a video might be using the design features and, and the like, and And what else?

And I mentioned earlier perhaps a favourite of mine. I don't know if I'm, I think I was going to say, I don't know if I'm old fashioned in my thinking. But the Excel spreadsheets are still here, still being used and can save a lot of time when it comes to planning, budgeting, thinking, laying out anything that involves perhaps numbers or other activities where a spreadsheet could be useful.

So I think knowing about knowing about those and as with any applicants, I think wherever you're going, then it might vary and depend on the, the job you're applying for. But I think being able to tell a story of how you've used technology effectively, perhaps imaginatively, so that, so that I think that if students have been exposed, for example, to making a video, making an audio recording or doing something with images, possibly in a portfolio we'll give them more to talk about and, and also.

Be able to demonstrate the skills that they may have, but they'll be able to make that more obvious and talk more confidently about it, yeah.

[00:21:26] Dave Musson: We'll be back with Jim for a little more after this.

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AI has been mentioned and it's an obvious talking point when it comes to digital literacy, I think, given the advancements we've seen in the last few months ...

What sort of effect do you think AI is going to have on the digital literacy skills of tomorrow?

[00:22:46] Jim Judges: Yeah, I actually think that it's related to what we were talking about earlier. And that is in terms of the advanced search skills in, in that AI is here. It's very powerful. It's going to continue to improve, but being able to interact with that efficiently will be a key skill.

So in other words although AI is pretty clever, and it can produce some smart sounding content and ideas, the content it produces will be a lot better if the input is smart and intelligent. So I think learning how to interact with the technology, and understanding perhaps how it works, but certainly what makes it work best, will be key.

So I think, I think the idea of confident, competent... Advanced search and entry type skill will be really important when interacting with a I and that therefore makes me think that what we haven't done yet, but I think all institutions are grappling with because it's so new for the majority of us, you know, AI is something that was in the future until perhaps January this year, maybe you might say, and here we are only nine months later, and it's already seems to be having a big impact.

There's no doubt it'll have a big impact on the world, and it's already being used in the workplace, and people are using it on a daily basis. So therefore we need to be ready for that. But just taking one step back for education institutions like ours, the challenge at this moment is for us to think about how can we help.

Students think about their use of AI, so there's a lot of attention being focused on how it might be used to, let's say, cheat, plagiarize, and to gain an advantage, and although that's bound to be a concern, because we want to make sure that any assessment is done on a level. playing field. I think before you get to that stage, before we worry about whether students are being honest or not in the work that they hand in and we should assume the best rather than the worst, but also help them with that.

But I think before then we need to think about what about the use of AI for project management, time management support. You might say coaching mentoring, how can it be used to make a student's life better, happier, more effective and safe time so they can do some of the other things that are going to help with well being, for example.

Those challenges are the same that we face as as employees in terms of what about us and what about our CPD and how will our employer. Help us to make use of AI in our work, rather than perhaps being self taught. We need to have some help and guidance in making sure we're critical users. Of this technology, but there's no doubt it's obvious.

It's here to stay. There's no doubt. It's going to have a big impact. I'm not worried that it's going to replace too many jobs or even where it does, that it might displace them into, into other work. But I think for those individuals, those students included in that who have those have the flexibility and the experience with other technology, then hopefully they can move with that, that changing landscape.

So hopefully we'll open up all sorts of exciting opportunities. But if there's one thing we're going to bet on, then, then certainly it's going to be a growth area. So I think having confidence. In the use of AI and an understanding of how it can be used and perhaps connected, then that won't do any of us any harm.

[00:26:16] Dave Musson: And thinking more generally about the workplace, like, do you see digital literacy skills as ones that will continue to be highly desired by employers? And like, what, what aspects of digital literacy, I guess, maybe aside from AI are going to be most important?

[00:26:29] Jim Judges: Well, no, that's a, that's a good point because I think it follows on from, from, from that.

Yes, AI will take care of a lot of, perhaps, the day to day, possibly humdrum, routine aspects of work, let's imagine. That's the case, but nonetheless, I think the basic digital literacy skills that we've spoken about, The basic computer literacy skills will always be important. I think the information skills, the search, advanced skills that allow you to be an efficient and critical researcher, to find and then use information critically will be important.

Of course, security is ever important. You might say along with the rise of technology has come the, the rise of challenges, difficulties, and cybercrime, which affects the individual as well as organizations. So an awareness and understanding of security will, will be important. I wonder about coding and programming.

Obviously there are, there are opportunities there and that will interest some. But again, I think that maybe AI will be able to help us do the difficult bits of writing the program. What will be more important will be the perhaps creative and innovative and hopefully ongoing need for the human aspect, which will be the ideas and the way of connecting those.

I'm not sure if I've answered your question, but I think I would guess that digital skills will remain important and I would guess that they will continue to be used as a differentiator in the way we've described earlier. And that will help any, any applicants, I suppose, stand out the more confident and competent and the more experience you've got.

And I, and I think going back to that point, that it almost doesn't matter if when you arrive to speak to an employer, if that particular tool has been superseded. by a new tool, then as long as you can talk confidently about your use of technology, then that, that should represent a certain mindset and ability to work with technology.

[00:28:33] Dave Musson: And just lastly, what would your best advice be to any students who want to go and improve their own digital literacy while they're at university?

[00:28:41] Jim Judges: I think be open to opportunities as ever. So a practical option might be to look out when you're making, when you have module choices, to look for those that enable you to make use of technology.

So there may well be some modules that say, in addition to being able to produce an assignment, you'll be expected to perhaps produce a portfolio. We might think, oh, that sounds interesting because I haven't used a portfolio. So you'll perhaps be using a new tool, or it might, in some modules, ask you to, to create a video, make a presentation, maybe make an, an audio recording. So look out for modules that will allow you and, and stretch you. And don't be afraid of perhaps stepping out of your comfort zone because all students will be in the same boat. You'll get support and help and you will learn new tools, new techniques, and you'll have a better story to tell in the future.

But as well as thinking about the modules that might offer the opportunity, then look out for training opportunities. They may be offered by Warwick. So it skills provide online self paced learning as well as more traditional timed and dated workshops that you might want to make use of. So. So do make use of those as and when they arise, and as ever, be open, as I think most of us are, but be open to learning online, and the great thing is now that apart from YouTube, which is still a fantastic resource for finding the answer to many things, then you might consider using AI Tools for example, built into the browser or chat GPT or others to act as a coach and mentor to, if you're not sure how to do something and you haven't got a friend or a tutor who you can ask, then why not see if AI can help, I have a feeling it may well be able to help us with With that type of activity and almost act as a personal tutor to help develop your skills.

So I think, think about it, as I say, without wanting to. Paul, cold water on the hard work and interest that students continue to demonstrate in their chosen subject area. The degree subject will get you so far, but having a wider, broader story to tell and confidence with digital tools certainly won't do you any harm.

[00:31:06] Dave Musson: You've been listening to The Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you're listening to this.

And, you can find transcripts of all our episodes at warwick.ac.uk/skillscast. There's a link to that in the episode description. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Huge thanks to Jim Judges for his time and his wisdom. It really is appreciated.

This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back in two weeks.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme.

Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[Music]

Lamita: After the four we mark she kind of just said 'you know where to go, I told you what to do, now you figure out how to go from here,' and I was like that terrified me, but it was also really exciting to have full control over myself and what I'm doing.

Dave Musson: Hi and welcome to another episode of the skills cast from the University of Warwick. This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at University and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they developed theirs and how you can too.

I'm your host Dave Musson, I work in Warwick's skills team and in this episode you'll get to hear all about the URSS scheme from four students who completed it in 2023. In case you were wondering, URSS stands for Undergraduate Research Support Scheme and it enables Warwick undergraduate students to carry out an interdisciplinary summer research project and receive a bursary towards it. As you'll hear from our guests, the scope of the URSS is huge and everyone gets a different experience and skill set from it.

My colleague Tom Greenway caught up with four students who completed their URSS in 2023 and I'm going to guide you through their conversations so you can learn more about the scheme. And, if you feel inspired by the end of this, applications for the 2024 version of the URSS open on Thursday the 16th of November, so why not take a closer look? There's more details about how to do that coming up.

Anyway, as ever if you enjoyed this interview please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts and you can find transcripts of our episodes on our website - there's a link to that in the show notes. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app because we'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay let's get into all things URSS and we'll start by meeting our four guests.

[Music ends]

Alex: I'm Alex, I'm coming from Romania, a seaside city actually a really important harbor city that we have on the coast of the Black Sea and in terms of me I'm studying data science. I'm going to my second year and I'm a bit older than you you'd think and that's because I had some gap years because of some personal problems, some health problems. So yeah that's about me for for a quick quick brief.

Lamita: So my name is Lamita, I'm an international student from Dubai but ethically I'm Egyptian. So I'm currently studying Biomedical Sciences, I'm going I'm going into my third year, so I'm doing a URSS project with the life science department now.

Mohammed: I'm Mohammed, I'm going into my third year now studying physics. So this summer I've been doing a URSS with the astrophysics group we've been looking at exoplanets - so exoplanets are planets that are outside the solar system.

Riley: My name's Riley, I'm from China - currently an economics student and going to enroll into year three in September right now.

Dave: I've already given a brief outline of what the URSS is but here's a little more detail. In a moment you'll hear from Riley but first here's Alex.

Alex: So URSS stands for Undergraduate Research Support Scheme - somebody told me about it a friend of mine did this in his second year I think he's doing a PhD now and he told me about this experience that you can get a bursary for something and you'd have the chance to study and do a research on something that you're passionate so that's a bit about this URSS in a brief description.

Riley: I would say that it gives you the opportunity to find the topic that you're passionate about and somebody to mentor you, to supervise you during this period because it's important to have a supervisor and then it allows you to develop some skills, some ideas to see what you like what you don't. URSS is basically research opportunity for undergrads provided by the university. So basically you can apply for a bursary to do any research that you are interested in. So what you are asked for is to kind of find a reasonable research topic and then reach out to a staff in your department, invite him or her as a supervisor and apply for it - that's it.

Dave: Everyone's motivations for joining the URSS are different, so we wanted to understand why our four guests put themselves forward. Kicking us off is Riley.

Riley: I'm always one to find out opportunites to some research cuz I'm thinking about doing a PhD in the future maybe and it's very valuable for an undergrad right, and I feel like it's very exciting if you can use your knowledge to do some research to try to explain some parts of the real world and it cannot be perfect you know but that's the imperfection that always allow you to find out new questions and then do further future research. And also URSS could strengthen my CV.

Dave: Now, Lamita.

Lamita: I really do enjoy being in the lab and working in research. Personally I was applying for internships my second year and I had well in BIO has something called rotational tutorials and you get assigned different professors and they assign you research and you guys discuss it like with your tutor group and one of the professors the one I'm working with right now for it - Alberti - he was doing this research on natural project products which I'll explain when I get into my URSS project, and I was fascinated like was something I've never read about before it was really cool and so I reached out to him and I already knew he had a student I didn't know he was ready to take another one so I reached out to kind of discuss his research further and like see how his lab works and eventually kind of got into it where I was asking if he had the position. It was more because I specifically liked his research that I wanted to get the opportunity to like do it myself and the URSS was kind give me the opportunity to have that. In a way it's intimidating to kind of talk to them because you do have like they're very you don't want to seem like dumb in front of them in a way so you're asking them and then if you you feel like you might miss say something but honestly I don't think people really should be a lot of I'm not sure about other departments I know in the biology department everyone is so passionate about what they're doing like the moment you give them the chance to talk they they they'll go for it. Honestly it's incredible how passionate everyone is about what they're doing and what they're researching.

Dave: This is why Alex applied.

Alex: I think my reasoning would be a bit more different than the usual student that applies for the scheme and I'm saying that because I work with WBS and WMG during these two years that I had the gap for my studies and there I had a chance to explore as a research assistant to explore a bit their research and I really liked it and I thought that it would be really cool to do my own research project not only help others to achieve their goals. So yeah basically it was a mix of okay I want to do something by myself to see if it's different if I get something out of it.

Dave: Here's Mohammed.

Mohammed: When I was thinking about applying to the URSS, like I said it was more about wanting to know what research is actually like so I applied wanting to see what physics research is like and what the culture around research is like so what the academics are like and what yeah what goes on basically behind the scenes. It was more about the research even though exoplanets are interesting I mean the I took two modules I've taken two modules now on astrophysics and it's been quite interesting so just to explore that as well that was quite interesting yeah.

Dave: Mohammed's answer brings us on to another aspect of the URSS that is different for everyone and that, of course, is the project. So, let's find out about what our guests worked on. Mohammed has already given us a little bit of information so let's go back to him first, before hearing from Lamita, Riley, and Alex again.

Mohammed: So, day-to-day what it's like...sometimes I'm in during the day and I'm doing say data reduction or I'm writing my writing my report, I'm talking to my supervisor about next steps I'm coding a lot, I'm looking at data a lot that kind of thing - but sometimes I'm not in during the day, I'm in during the night because I use the telescope so I take photos using the telescope - I image the stars, I imaged the exoplanets. We've had a few issues with the telescope as well so we've had to like troubleshoot and try and fix the problems so it's really really varied yeah.

Lamita: I think I mentioned it's a natural product research specifically I'm wearing a natural products from fungi so it's like you're kind of you're looking for either new compounds that's producing like through so all species like species have like biosynthetic Pathways where they produce certain compounds and specific like fungi and bacteria release these compounds to kind of help them survive in the environment as well and these compounds could have anti-cancer effects antimicrobial effects so they can be in treatments in sunscreens, hand sanitizers, anything like they could be these are the products that people look for and they screen for to see they can put into different products or medicines so it's this specific fungus species called tricoderma conops - I might be pronouncing that completely wrong. The researcher I'm working under it's kind of a side project connected to hers and so she's working on the species because it it's present with proprietaries that have that have been affected with a specific bacteria species that kills them off essentially like this bacteria species infects Papaya it's called AUM malora I think and it it's kind of devastating for people who are in specifically Malaysia because they do export and the Papaya is a very big part of their economy and the fungus seems to have some sort of kind of inhibition to growth so she's testing like the products it can produce to see what is the compound specifically, and what they could if they could they could find it and then maybe mass-produce it in a way to make some sort of like bacteria side, so that they could protect the Papaya trees.

Riley: My research is to find the causal effect of the New Jersey family leave insurance, so basically a kind of Paid Family Leave and then I want to see the causal effect of this policy on the parental time use say if they really use this policy so firstly they take the leave and then if they really use the leave to take care of the children. New Jersey is the second state in the US that's enacted the this kind of policy and the US is the only Advanced country in the world that don't have any national entitlement. So actually I want to study California but someone has done that before so that's why I turned to New Jersey and actually the policy took into fact in 2009 and was updated in 2020. So basically I want to do a comparison between this two years and see if parents react differently. Basically you can use this leave to take care of any the elders in your family, any ill people in your family, or your children or new babies. So it's not perfect that's why the study is not perfect - ideally I should focus on the new parents to see if they take care of the infant but you know the limitation of the data so maybe I'll do it in future when I'm capable enough I would do further research in this area.

Alex: My project, yeah good question. I'm working on something called natural language processing. It's a part of the machine learning and the AI boom so basically because it's usual for us as humans to talk and to engage with words and voice and meaning behind is ways that we've encoded information so we take all this text data that we've generated that and that we're using and then we're trying to teach an algorithm how to interpret that in different ways - either it be your voice assistant from Siri or Google Assistant that we use on the phone - they're using natural language processing, they're trying to understand our voice and then come up with a reply themselves. Yeah, so what I'm doing is a similar thing - so I'm using this technology called NP on the IMDb data set. So basically I gather tons of data from there my script most of the movies and series from from that platform using an API and I'm training some Transformers specific technology in the NLP area, which is a bit more advanced compared to what you've been describing. So basically it takes a paragraph - I'm not sure how many words I think it was 2,000 and something words that can be included in a paragraph - and it tokenizes the words and like all the connections between them. So the way it processes thess tokens is it tries to find cative words as well but it's to get the meaning from the previous and the next words that are coming from specific ones so I'm using this transform technology to try to better understand how stereotypes are present in movies and series, and in the end to see how they're impacting the general audience how they're perceiving some subjects and also try to see if maybe some of these movies are that are stereotypical are earning more money or getting more views or, I don't know, having better actors or more well-known actors and yeah to see how all these stereotypes and biases are impacting the the entertainment industry. In the end there are more things that I'm looking at some of them are, for example, racism norms - words towards different areas like religion or countries and different groups, but also stereotypes in the meaning of that Italians eat pizza or they like pasta or I'm including. I have big really five areas that I'm encoding, but for now I'm putting all them together to see if it's stereotypical. I'm not different differentiating yet between them.

Dave: We'll be right back with more chat about the URSS after this.

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Dave: It's never too early - or too late - to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part-time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognizes and showcases the skills you're building through those activities. It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation.

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Dave: So, by nature of the URSS being a fairly intense period of research, you won't be surprised to know that students completing it acquire a lot of subject matter knowledge. But, being a podcast about skills development as we are, we also wanted to hear about what skills our guests have picked up doing the URSS. So here's what they had to say starting with Riley.

Riley: I would say reading skills maybe try to abstract important information from endless literature and then try to keep your mind clear no matter how much information you're getting from the sources, right. You need to get the important stuff for the stuff you want that are useful and you can use or whatever yeah useful information. If I want to work in some company say consulting or banking like economics students usually go to that areas I always need to learn about new industry red so I feel like it's kind of the same thing it's not just academic research but research in general.

Dave: Here's Mohammed.

Mohammed: There's quite a lot. I mean if I start from the beginning I'd say getting to know how to use telescopes was quite cool there's a lot that goes on how what telescopes are, how they work, how the camera works - you have to do calibration, there's a lot of noise because stars are very dim so you can't see them but I mean you can see them but there's a lot of noise around them so learning how to do that so that was the at the beginning and then I also learned about transits. So transits meaning these eclipses that happen so learning about their geometry learning what we can learn from them so like we can learn about mass we can learn about their atmosphere there's a lot of things we can learn from it. So reading all those like scientific papers that were that describe the these methods and their results and things like that also actually just reading knowing how to read scientific papers and going going into research the research itself is I think is a bit of a skill that you learn as well going into papers reading them and how do you or what do you learn from that what do you keep and what do you leave those kind of things and then I'd say learning a lot of new code code it took a it took it it was a bit of a learning curve cuz i' done coding before but this is like or you're doing it every day you're using it on new things every day you're solving new problems every day so learn a quite bit of code learn how to use terminal and GitHub and all of that because we use that a lot in in the department quite interested in going into machine learning and artificial intelligence and data science and that kind of thing. So I was talking to my supervisor about this and he was telling me okay we have a few people who do this kind of thing already in the in the department so if you want to talk to someone just let me know I'll introduce you and you can talk to them. So I went to talk to this person called David Armstrong I think and he's using machine learning to basically analyze a lot of data on planets and things like that so we had a lovely conversation about okay what what are the master's like what the phds like what how is it being used in the field right now, how is it being used in physics, where to go if I want to get into this that kind of thing so it was quite helpful. I also had another conversation with Ingrid. So Ingrid is another postdoc I think and she was telling me about I wanted to learn about these certain types of stars called eclipsing binaries so these are two stars that are going around each other and they kind of block each other's lights and that kind of thing. Okay so I mean yeah so eclipsing meaning they Eclipse each other in binaries meaning there are two of them so to learn about those I talked to Ingrid as well and she she's like an expert in this so she told me all about all that I needed to know for my project as well so it's quite interesting that you could go to anybody and all all these people are so like diverse in their research you can learn about them and kind of get inspired and take from them kind of.

Dave: Here's Alex.

Alex: Firstly, I think one of the things was time management because as I mentioned I was doing this role with WMG, so my involvement with the URSS was part-time. It wasn't a full-time commitment during this time. So one of the very first thing that I had to do is to plan really well, so now you can see I have my tablet as well with me I usually was taking notes of meetings or trying to put work hours for the WMG work and to know that I allocate time for the research as well. So that's one of the first things that I've learned from from this and then I think communication came secondly and that's because one of the main things with URSS is that you have to do a public engagement. So I had this in in the back of my mind that I had to do all this cool stuff with AI machine learning NLP but I have to find a way to communicate it as well and to put it into a perspective for somebody somebody that's not in the field and definitely to talk with my supervisor about all these CRA Technologies - he's aware of them, has less experience, it's like it's similar to it's a similar experience to what I had as well. So it was a learning curve for both of us but we had to communicate and pinpoint the different struggles that I had or to seek for advice because Stefano was quite helpful in in this from this perspective I learn a lot from him in terms of, okay, I'm struggling with something how do I cope with it how do I find a solution or how do I move on?

Dave: And Lamita.

Lamita: So probably resilience would be another thing that I've learned because with research some things are working some not so you have to find a way to be to be able to adapt quickly and move forward and again a lot of kind of self-confidence in a way actually cuz so she was like she was at the start very much with me but then I think around after the four week mark - I did an 8 week project - she kind of just like left me to my one why is it like I have control of my day cuz she did explain all the methods at this point and I she just okay you know where to go I told you what to do now you figure out that you figure out how to go from here and I was like that terrified me but it was also really exciting to have full control over myself and what I'm doing. And also the environment is very relaxed like you don't need to be there 9 to 5 exactly, you could come maybe 10 11 if you know you don't have too much to do that day or you can leave early if you prefer that, so it gave you a lot of kind of a different of independence that would just living with yourself. Because it is different when you're just okay you have to take into account okay you have to cook for yourself you do this this this but lab work you have to think okay I'm doing this this this and I need to do this before I to do this this this before this and it's like a lot of arrangement you have to take into account how much time you need for everything cuz if you don't give yourself especially cuz I can't stay in the lab past 6:00. If something runs over I cannot stay to continue it or yeah it's it's more like they don't want to have URSS undergrads in the lab for that late just cuz for our own safety because there's not going to be as people there present to help us if something does go wrong, so they don't want us to be in the lab very late that I think that's one barrier a lot of people have when they think of like maybe further research with phds or Masters - and specifically research is that it's very independence based, and that's what one barrier I had myself considering that because I do want to go into research and was like do I really want to do the PHD, cuz it's very you're it's you it's just you you don't really you have like someone to kind of corroborate with they and report to but you the one taking the next steps and it's it's intimidating.

Dave: While we're talking skills development, it seemed foolish not to ask our guests what other parts of their Warwick experience - aside from the URSS - have helped them develop skills. Again, there's quite a range to take in here.

Alex: Quite a few I've already mentioned WMG and WBS for the research assistant roles. Just to give a bit more context to them, for the WBS I was doing something a bit similar with Stefano using NLP for other means with WMG we're working on data as well because that's what I'm passionate about and that's why I apply for the role. So we've built some tools and work on some some libraries on a library called Pam and other things that are related to battery data and the project with Amic we are trying and hopefully by the time we publish this episode it's it's going to be a a solution that's working. We're trying to detect battery folds for this Air Electric aircraft because you don't really want the aircraft to it's not based on gasoline or other other so you don't want the batteries to burn or crash during the flight. I think it's an important part of Warwick, we have a a good society community here and I would like to mention Warwick Racing, but I've I've been involved there for for a while. So Warwick Racing, it's an engineering based community so they're trying to build a one seater race car, which in the end is scrutinized and tested at Silverstone, which is quite exciting because it's a popular place and especially in the UK and the Formula One cars are actually racing there too. It's a bit different compared to Formula 1 cuz we are not really racing that much we are focusing more on building the car so hence it's an engineering problem.

Lamita: So I'm in quite a few societies. So there's like two main societies that I think I was I attended the most in my at least my second year my first year didn't do as much as I would have hoped but I'm in STAR and make a smile. So they're both kind of volunteering societies yeah student action for refugees so they have a volunteering sessions I think two to three times a week where you go you teach English to refugees they also had certain programs where you online where you'd help them with their University applications, in terms of like where to look for information and that we we were not an advisory in terms of like what to put on their things but just to help them find information because sometimes that is that is one one barrier there just finding where to look for what you need and Meg smile I'm currently one of the exacts right now it's kind of a a kids point teering thing so you we dress up as Disney characters princesses superheroes and you go to kind of hospitals and children homes to kind of give them a little bit more joy in life when maybe their everyday life isn't as happy. So yeah it's been it's been really fulfilling I had I think it was a few weeks ago I was a mermaid so I it was like a proper mermaid like I had the tail and I was in a pool and I was swimming as a mermaid and it was the excitement these kids were like when they saw me like just one kid just screamed 'mermaid' and ran towards me. It's so sweet to see kind of the happiness they have when they see their favorite characters or like mythical creature I guess.

Mohammed: So starting with societies I'd say getting involved with Cobalt society as the president I mean I was the editor for them, for the first sub editor for the first year and then president for the next year. It teaches you a lot of things. I'd say first of all I had to it kind of taught me that I have to take initiative if no as a president especially I have to take initiative. I have to have my own ideas, goals, what I want to do with the society because yeah if you're not doing it nothing's going to happen so that kind of mentality learning that from being a president of a society then you can take that even into your life it's like if you don't do anything nothing's going to happen. So learning that was quite important I think for me and then managing a team, learning a lot of like so I think that's just general like communication skills, leadership, teamwork, yeah that kind of kind of thing iit's quite fun and quite nice sometimes you know. There's differences and you have to resolve differences that kind of thing Cobalt Society is very like creative so it's not physics related at all so people are like from English literature or humanities is usually like liberal arts and that kind of thing even though we do have other stem people as well stem people that not in Creative but so there's a lot of different people coming together and they're submitting all these art submissions basically and we as the exec team had to bring that all together and make it into a beautiful magazine and that took quite a lot of organization as well. And so yeah we had to work over 10 week periods to create one issue, so yeah it was a lot of deliberation a lot of planning and I think I learned a lot.

Riley: This is kind of a kind of pity for me you know cuz I kind of wasted my year one. I did join some societies but I failed to get any position maybe I don't know how to interview, how to market myself at the time, I don't know what, maybe my English I don't know but I felt. And I was planning to do some voluntary work but I didn't, I was trying to go to some social event but I was too lazy. If I could go back to my year one I will definitely do more and then try to take more opportunities, try out more things to enrich my experience or at least make my life more interesting maybe what think that I develop my skill in University of Warwick maybe I make some friends from various countries, so we exchange our ideas and share the cultures that kind of thing yeah. I forced myself to do the URSS right and I became more engaged in my course work as well and then talk to my lectures more and try to go to some societies, even though I don't have a position and I just go there and then look around and see what people doing there.

Dave: Developing skills never really stops and doing something like the URSS is a good way of not only acquiring new skills, but putting you out of your comfort zone and making you realize what you might still be lacking. It's been no different for our guests who all recognize skills they'd still like to develop.

Alex: So I've learned a lot about research and AI for this URSS programing but I would say there's still room for improvement in communication I know I mentioned that I've learned about that but a big part of doing research is being able to present it to the others because sometimes they're really hard problems or there really something that ex about the details or or something that's really in some technology or some some scientific world, so it's important to find a way to present it nicely to an wider audience to to stakeholders to whoever is involved in the in the team or in in the research to get grants to maybe startup a company out of that. So I think I still need to work on communication and from from the perspective of a data scientist, visualization is another important topic and by that I mean taking all the data and all the insights that you gathered and trying to it's a form of communication as well but a visual one and I do believe that people tend to understand graphics and visual stuff a bit more easier than words I do believe that we learn by doing. I value theoretical knowledge and reading and studying a subject but in the end for me at least it's the I get the most by doing it. So in terms of communication, yeah, I'm trying to seek all these opportunities that allow me to talk about what I'm doing to put me in front of an audience cuz that's a different skill - it's one thing not talking to you over a microphone with no audience around us and it's different when you present to 100 people.

Riley: One I feel like still feel like I should make more friend not in a sense that we play around but we can really share some ideas and they maybe they can kind of lead me to a new channel of my life. I feel like I'm kind of introvert now I don't want to talk to people but this is no good I feel like it's like now I don't know how to talk to people the way I make friend is they come to me they try to approach me and I'm happy to talk to them but if you want me offer to talk talk to someone I don't know how to I don't know how to start. I don't know what what to say, I just don't know

Interviewer: But you did for the URSS you were talking to people

Riley: I forced myself to do so and that's about academic stuff I'm kind of confident in that area and I can always have something to talk about when talking to about my research, economics or stuff like that. But in terms of making friends - especially as this international community right - we have different cultures. Sometimes I don't know how to start off, I don't want to be rude I don't want to be uncultured and I try to keep poite but I don't know if my idea of polite is the same as the others right so that's why I'm always kind of scared of making friends.

Mohammed: So I think building on the URSS, getting to see how useful coding is and recently I've had this kind of new interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning in general, so I think to build on that I want to pursue that a little bit more now - especially going through my third year - it's my final year so bachelor's final year, I want to pursue that fully see where that goes. Cuz I do think it's quite relevant even in in sense of physics and then the world going forward is quite a big thing so I do want to pursue that as a skill, kind of master it so that I can be I can use it in real life to learn new things.

Dave: There's still a bit more to come right after this.

[Music]

Dave: If hearing our guests in this episode talk about the URSS has got you thinking that you'd like to give it a go yourself then good news - you can! The Undergraduate Research Support Scheme enables Warwick undergraduate students to carry out an interdisciplinary summer research project. The scheme is open to all undergraduate students from any year or course, with the exception of exchange students. You get to shape and lead your own summer research project and each applicant can request a bursary of up to a maxim of £1,500 for home and overseas projects.

Applications for the 2024 URSS open will open on Thursday the 16th of November 2023 - find out more and make your application at warwick.ac.uk/urss. That's warwick.ac.uk/urss.

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Dave: A lot of students might complete the URSS to give them a sample of what life as a researcher might be like and help inform their plans around their future. We wanted to know from our guests if their URSS experience had given them any insight into what they might like to do next. To start, here's Lamita.

Lamita: I knew my goal was some something lab based hopefully research because just lab technicians can get a bit repetitive with actions. I guess it depends where you are and what you're doing but lab research was something I've always been interested in. I was very focused on going to industry just cuz it seemed I guess more rigid rigid in comparison but then I saw how kind of flexible the academia a little bit was at least maybe it was maybe the lab I was in but it was a lot more relaxed in terms of uniform and hours and actions and kind of what you're doing and it isn't as scary as you can imagine it there's always going to be people around to help you in a way I got quite lucky that the the lab team I was with they're all very very friendly. Some people don't have that it does depend on the people you end up with it is slightly luck but also if anyone's considering that you should meet the team you're with before you commit maybe it's been really really interesting to see the different perspective it that that door was kind of closed off to me initially cuz I was kind of scared to even consider it an option but I feel like that is definitely something I might consider going into I'm it's it's convinced me for sure to kind of go for the now on in the University. I was maybe considering going for the Masters or something external but the mbio it's first of all I think it's slightly cheaper than going for us a proper Masters and it it's it's easier than move to a different place and it just opened the whole new door for me I guess.

Dave: Here's what Alex thought.

Alex: So I actually had a thinking about this question and that's because as I said in the beginning I'm coming from Romania, which isn't that developed in terms of research as yet unfortunately. So it's starting to grow but definitely you we as a country have the mentality that is not that worth it and is not bringing us enough compared to how much time and money you need to put into it. So I was really biased as well I had had a stereotype of bias towards research that is not useful but with with this experience and all the previous that I've talked about I now realize that even though you can you could be unlucky and work on something for years that might not be used or might end up being to ahead of the time, or some some unfortunate result. You learn a lot by doing it so even though you don't find something useful at the end you still have all this period of learning and all this time that you GA a lot of knowledge you become an expert in in a field and yeah ring up I would say that I would kind of like to maybe move further into Academia after I'm finishing with this degree or find a company like WMG or there are two companies that I really like - deep mind and open AI which are in the artificial intelligence field, and they're focusing like their main focus is research because they're trying to get ahead of everybody else and further this technology.

Dave: Here's Riley.

Riley: It's more like because I want I'm thinking about doing a PhD so I go to do the URSS, but when doing the URSS I feel like research is really the thing I want to do in the future cuz I didn't find it tedious like some people they did but I feel like it's more like a challenge and then even though you may find what you've done is kind of useless but it's not it's like you will find it useful as some point in the future and then you see oh I did this before I can use this piece of data or I can use this analysis I did before or this assumption or stuff like that so every effort he paid in that it's valuable that's what I feel like the most attractive part of research.

Dave: And here's Mohammed

Mohammed: I'd say just having a bit more experience with the coding and data and that that kind of thing has helped me also seeing the the the magnitude of data that we have is so huge so there's this teles sorry this satellite called test and it it's tasked to just look at exoplanets it's a NASA satellite and it has so much data for like a lot of data and somebody needs to go through it and it's quite hard to you know oh you handpicking it that kind of thing seeing the amount of data that we have now and this is just one part I mean across the fields we have a lot of data that needs to be used kind of so and seeing that that was very helpful.

Dave: To wrap things up we wanted to take this opportunity to get some advice from our guests - specifically, what advice would they give other students about developing their skills while studying here at Warwick. Here's what they had to say.

Mohammed: So first of all you have to kind of somehow open up your field of view about how many opportunities you actually have and also just to appreciate that being at Warwick there's a lot of things going on and there's a lot of opportunities that are open to you and there's a lot of people you can meet and it's all very exciting. You have to acknowledge that cuz sometimes you being a okay there's nothing to do kind of mentality but there is a lot of good things going on. I think start with societies cuz making connections with people is usually a very good thought to getting to know about the opportunities they're doing learning about what they're doing learning about what's available cuz people usually help each other okay this is happening this is happening. I only know about the URSS because one of my friends from the Islamic Society actually did it last year so he told me about it and it seemed quite interesting - so it was just this research project he was doing over the summer seemed very cool he had a little paper at the end of it as well just to show for it, a poster it's quite cool so just to you know cuz before that I didn't know it was a thing and then I knew and then it was quite interesting so I went into it.

Lamita: So I'd say like first try and learn about what your opportunities are see what's interesting and then just go for it ooh honestly the work really does offer quite a wide range of things to do and to learn from I think like there's obviously the URSS this gives you so many different skills depending on what you're doing. There's obviously every society that kind of promotes teamwork Communications all this there's also I think like I think there was a Teamworks project they had assigned they had over the summer where you were assigned like different people in different countries and you guys worked on a project together online. So I think it's one big advice read the emails! The emails that they send you have so much information I'm not sure if other departments have this but I think the I think the URSS gives us an email that has lots of like different things that we can do that's how I found out about a lot of things. Read your emails you'll find so many opportunities there that the university offers that you might miss otherwise. I didn't read it in my first year and I missed so so many opportunities I could have had like I remember in my second year I was stressed out cuz I had friends who read the emails and they did so much things that I just didn't because I did not read the emails.

Riley: As I said don't waste your time just try as much as you can take any opportunity try to make your life as full as possible as exciting as possible don't just let me staying in my room and then do nothing. At least read some books, talk to someone your teachers, your classmates try to approach people, talk to them, networking even though you have already wasted some of your time no worries never too late to make a difference. Like me, I started my URSS in my second year and then forced myself to talk to someone else so that's kind of a positive start I I hope so just begin whenever you realize you have to yeah that's it .

Alex: Yeah that's a fun one cuz we've discussed about lot of things but it might be something that became more common but I don't really believe in giving advice and that's I will explain my reasoning in a bit. And because I'm working on this stereotypical and biases project right so I might have a better understanding now on how different we are as individuals, so even though we're coming from different places we've done different studies, we like different things, we've grown in different families other depending on on the context. So I don't think there's a particular thing that you can tell an individual that would work for them and hence I think it's better for everybody to try and do whatever they feel like and maybe as myself I'm putting I'm trying different opportunities, I'm applying for anything that I'm finding because even though two years ago I was in a really bad place where uni was kind of kicking me out, I try to come out come up and have a plan and that's when I decided that I want to try anything that's happening here at Warwick. So perhaps maybe that's something that people can replicate or try themselves.

[Music]

Dave: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen and there's a link in the show notes to a page on our website where you'll find transcripts of all our episodes too. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Huge thanks to Riley, Mohammed, Lamita, and Alex for telling us all about their URSS experience, and thanks also to my colleague Tom Greenway for asking the questions.

This episode was hosted, mixed, and edited by me - Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork while our music is from Adobe stock music. We'll be back with another episode in two weeks.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's employability skills award and development scheme. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:00:00] Sam Merrix: The difference between having a skill and developing it, and being able to market and sell it, is being able to talk about it, and talk about it in a way that's going to have impact. Probably the biggest misconception, is that people will think that, if they have done enough things, if they have gathered enough skills, they're going to be the successful candidate.

[00:00:23] Dave Musson: Hi, and welcome back to the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This is the show about how to learn and develop your skills while at university, and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why they think skills are important, how they developed theirs and how you can too. I'm your host Dave Musson, I work in Warwick's skills team and in this episode we're getting some skills focused careers guidance from the excellent careers team here at Warwick. My colleague Tom Greenaway caught up with Sam Merrix and Kelly Coles, both senior careers consultants at Warwick and both people who are well worth listening to if you want to give yourself the best chance of standing out to employers and kick starting your career.

In this chat, you'll hear tips on how to market what skills you have to potential employers, how to find out what skills those employers are looking for, as well as advice on how to prepare to talk about your skills at assessment centers and in job interviews. Feel free to take notes as there's lots of great stuff in this episode.

If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can find transcripts of our episode on our website. There's a link to that page in the show notes.

Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, let's get started. Here are Sam and Kelly.

[00:01:51] Sam Merrix: Hi everyone, my name is Sam Merrix. I'm a Senior Careers Consultant here at Warwick, as Tom has mentioned, and I work specifically with students from the Department of Computer Science and the School of Engineering.

[00:02:03] Kelly Coles: Hi everyone,

I'm Kelly Coles. I'm a Senior Careers Consultant that works specifically with Warwick Medical School.

[00:02:10] Tom Greenaway:

Great, so why, you're both Senior Careers Consultants. I don't know if I've ever told you, but when I was in secondary school we had... This session in P P S H E, which is like your you know, how to life skills, I guess.

And it was like managing, it was like you were given a career and you were given a budget and kind of you had to manage your life. Very important stuff for an 11 year old. But I was, my job that they gave me was careers advisor. And, well, you, you think nice. I thought, you know, why can't I be like a footballer or.

You know, an engineer or whatever, I was given careers. So I, ever since then, I've kind of like, what would make you become a careers consultant? So maybe you can tell us how, how did this happen?

[00:02:58] Sam Merrix: I suspect it's a really individual journey. And I am surprised that someone gave you that answer at 11 years old because I don't think it's the kind of career that people start out with at that age.

And I think it's probably one that most people kind of fall into rather than necessarily pick and then work towards in terms of a really long amount of time. But it certainly was, for me, something that I kind of fell into and is a nice illustration, I think, of something that we refer to a lot in careers work, which is called planned happenstance, which is the idea of just giving something a go and following the path and seeing where it takes you.

But it's also a nice illustration of the fact that placement years are really valuable things to do.

Tom Greenaway: So you did a placement year?

[00:03:50] Sam Merrix: I did do a placement year, yes, when I was at university. And my placement year was actually at my university in market research. I thought I wanted to go into consumer behavior, that was something I was really interested in at the time, so that was the placement year I chose to do, and actually ended up Enjoying far more the other stuff that involved working with students, like the open days and the recruitment events.

So went down that path after I graduated and back then we didn't have a whole lot of funding for careers teams. So I was actually a marketing officer who was in charge of putting on a careers fair. So bit of a multifaceted job there. And then that's kind of what led me down to careers work because it was always something that I kind of saw then from that point and worked towards.

[00:04:43] Tom Greenaway: Did you have a placement year, Kelly?

[00:04:45] Kelly Coles: I didn't, no. And my journey starts a little bit, I think, before. I actually wanted to be, and I wasn't told this by my careers advisor at school, who was my PE teacher which I find quite amusing.

Tom Greenaway: Your PE teacher was your careers advisor?

Kelly Coles: Yeah, they weren't. It's that whole school anomaly where just somebody picks it up who perhaps doesn't necessarily have, The training that, that career professionals do now.

[00:05:13] Tom Greenaway: I was, mine was the economics teacher. But they only taught economics to sixth form. So they had loads of free time, so they were probably giving careers.

[00:05:21] Kelly Coles: As just something else to fill the time. Extra hours, yeah. Yeah, so, I think, careers advisors of days gone by were a bit more like Al Murray, the comedian, you know, when he does the pub landlord.

And girls have to be the secretary or nurse. And I think I was going to be a secretary. And and actually what I wanted to do was to be Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs. That was my aspiration as a, as a teenager at school. And thankfully didn't follow that path because although I found psychology and particularly criminal psychology, really intriguing.

I think the reality of doing that job just does not fit for me as a human. So probably for the best that I've didn't follow that journey but I always knew that I wanted to do something to help others. And that's kind of been the cornerstone of everything that I've done on my journey towards this profession, really and ended up working in lots of different roles, doing that kind of work and then ended up within education, working within a support team, and I was the manager of quite a big team, but was very intrigued by what my colleagues were doing in the careers team, and I thought that the work that they did Looked really interesting, really varied. And so and so that's kind of how my journey into it began. And happily so. Because I think very few and far between are people that really love their work.

And I feel very fortunate to do this work. So, yeah. We spend a predominant amount of our time awake at work. If you think about how. That balances out, particularly if you work full time. And I think if you can find whatever it is that's going to get you out of bed in the morning, particularly on a Monday morning, and makes you want to still go and do whatever it is that that job is then you're very lucky.

And it won't be 100 percent of it, because I think they're even rarer. As long as that balance is there, then I think that's something to kind of work towards at least. So,

[00:07:38] Tom Greenaway: as you know, this is a skills podcast. What skills do you need for your work as senior careers consultant?

[00:07:47] Kelly Coles: So I think kind of interpersonal skills are at the heart of being a a careers consultant or a senior careers consultant.

And that's kind of twofold. So our work is kind of split in half to a great extent. It's a bit of an oversimplification. So one half of it probably is the kind of working one to one with people to have those conversations and to offer guidance. And so the ability to kind of build rapport really quickly, put people at ease is essential in relation to that.

And then working to build relationships with internal and external stakeholders really kind of lends itself to the other side of what we do as well. And I guess alongside the interpersonal skills, you need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with a diverse group of people and to be able to kind of tailor that communication to your audience as well.

And kind of another key skill I think you need to have is the ability to organise, but also be able to flexibly adapt to meet the changing needs and demands of a service, or just because your workload is changing particularly during busier periods. So for example, the start of term, you need to be able to kind of prioritise and shift things around quite flexibly

[00:09:14] Kelly Coles: I think probably Just having kind of a bit of emotional intelligence when you're working particularly one to one with people is important.

[00:09:23] Tom Greenaway: So like let's say a student walks in. Are you trying to figure out what their emotions are? Adapt how you talk and what you, the advice you give to meet that kind of need?

[00:09:35] Kelly Coles: Potentially, yeah. So if a student was to come in, for example, and they weren't sure what to expect in a careers appointment, and were perhaps a little bit nervous. Then I'd probably spend a little bit more time just kind of having a bit of a relaxed conversation with them before I started the appointment.

So you need to be able to kind of recognize how people are almost and to know when to push a little bit more or when to kind of. Maybe just take things at a slower pace. So I guess that's an example of that in terms of kind of when you're organizing things or dealing with external partners or working with colleagues across the university, for example, then similarly, there'd be some instances where I'd probably be a little bit more bouncy or relaxed or lively.

But then there are other times perhaps potentially where you need to be a bit more formal in your approach to someone. So it's having. That ability to kind of understand who you're dealing with, what their needs are, to be able to make sure that when you're working with people, you do so in a style and at a pace that works for them.

[00:10:46] Sam Merrix: Yeah.

[00:10:46] Tom Greenaway: Yeah. Like there are meetings where you need to use your serious voice and there are other meetings where you're like, hi everyone, I'm really excited about what's happening. You know, you have to be kind of high energy. Sam, what about you? What, what skills do you think you need?

[00:11:01] Sam Merrix: Well, I was just wondering if you'd actually come along to some of my meetings!

That was a nice demonstration. I think Kenny's covered so many of the skills that we need so well, but it's probably worth pointing out that our skill needs are adapting because the range of work that is being done in the career space is changing and the way that we are delivering our service is changing.

And that's not just at Warwick, that's across the board within higher education and probably in other, other education settings as well, really. This new term that maybe some students might have heard of, but probably not of embedded employability is something that it's not necessarily new, but it certainly is becoming increasingly popular is meaning that The work that we're doing is changing and so our skill needs are changing.

So we find ourselves in a position now where we are engaging with more teaching type activities, like delivering lectures and being able to have that lecturer voice that you demonstrated so well there, Tom, and being able to hold. The attention of 200/300+ students is not something that perhaps we would have needed to have done years ago, but it's certainly there now.

And also being able to deliver our work in a really tailored way in that space, knowing how we're going to talk about careers actually fits into the module that we're turning up to talk about careers in and how that fits within the wider course and curriculum that that forms part of.

[00:12:32] Tom Greenaway: On the embedding employability, I think what we mean by that is a lot of employers now they want the degree to be able to demonstrate skills that are useful in the workplace, which we're going to talk about a bit later, but that's kind of what the embedding is.

On the adaptability, I think probably a lot of students aren't aware that you guys get moved around a bit in terms of departments and in terms of what your responsibilities are within the, within new department, and you have to adapt to that and become almost overnight experts in a whole new field.

[00:13:04] Kelly Coles: And the other thing kind of over recent years that has increased massively is our own kind of digital skills. So to keep pace with the change, changing landscape generally, but also with the pandemic, we went from. Being able to kind of walk into a room and deal with our delivery in person to having to have all of these new digital skills to enable us to deliver and do what we do in a very different context now.

So it's a continual, I guess.

[00:13:35] Tom Greenaway: And recruiters are using more technology as well in there. Like they're using AI to scan CVs. They're asking students to submit video. Responses to questions. So now you've got to learn all about those techniques.

[00:13:48] Sam Merrix: Absolutely. And also we've got to sit there and actually give it a go ourselves to see what happens.

We've got to ask ChatGPT to write a cover letter and a CV to see if actually it's going to turn out something that's good. Or we can spot what a recruiter is going to spot. Which is the pitfalls of that idea, which inevitably some of our students are going to have, and we're going to need to be able to help navigate.

[00:14:12] Tom Greenaway: So, we've mentioned skills a bit already, but what do we mean by skills? And why do we keep talking about them to students?

[00:14:20] Sam Merrix: I mean, I think here, what we mean by skills is such a broad term, but we're focusing more on the employability of it. So to me, the skills are, things are going to help you do the job.

It's not just how you're going to get the job, but it's how you're going to do it once you've actually started working.

Tom Greenaway: Would you agree?

[00:14:41] Kelly Coles: Yeah, definitely. You can develop skills and you can be taught skills as well. So that's really important to know. And there are different types of skills. So in your degree, for example, you might learn really technical skills, things that are very specific to the knowledge that you're developing for a particular profession, for example, and then there are transferable skills sometimes called soft skills, which I really dislike personally.

But these are kind of skills that you could apply to. any given role or task that you might need to do. But these are the ones that are really valued by employers because they mean very often that you can transition into a role and contribute to either a team or to the business overall and do that really easily.

And so from a recruitment point of view, employers are very much looking for and have an idea of the kinds of transferable skills that their new recruits would need to have.

[00:15:40] Tom Greenaway: That actually links on to the next question, which is The difference between developing a skill and kind of marketing it or showing off to employers.

So what, what do you think the difference is?

[00:15:50] Kelly Coles: So when you develop skills, you, you are improving them or enhancing the basic skills that you might have. So for example, through getting work experience or through Other opportunities that you might undertake, you can always improve or enhance the skills that you've got.

So for example, things like teamwork or communication, but it's very different to being able to market it or show it off effectively, where lots of people tend to fall down in the recruitment and selection process is that they're not able to reflect on and articulate how they develop that skill and what that now means they are able to do with it and it's the difference between being able to do that or not that really kind of gets you over the line when you're applying for a job and you need to be able to do that really well to tell a future recruiter how you could apply that skill in the context of the role that they're recruiting for and if you can't, if you don't do that really thoroughly and in the right level of detail, then you're not going to be shortlisted or successful in your applications.

[00:16:54] Tom Greenaway: We're going to talk about that in a little bit, but just Sam, what do you, did you have anything to add?

[00:16:59] Sam Merrix: Nothing other than my complete agreement to everything that Kelly's just said. But I think what we're saying here is that what this really boils down to is a skill and developing it and being able to market and sell it is being able to talk about it. and talk about it in a way that's going to have impact. Probably the biggest misconception is that people will think that If they have done enough things, if they have gathered enough skills, they're going to be the successful candidate.

Because if you've got your first class degree and all these great experiences on your CV and all these great skills on your CV, surely you're the obvious candidate, right? But the problem is, is often the person who can talk and communicate that they've got these skills the best, that's actually getting the role.

So as Kelly said, it's the thing that gets you over the line. It's being able to explain that skill, being able to go through how you did something to demonstrate and evidence that skill exists.

[00:18:01] Tom Greenaway: I think that's quite important because a lot of the skills we talk about, let's say, teamwork, intercultural awareness, professionalism, time management, all of those, when it comes to applying for a job or being in an interview, it's how you, it's the talking about it that gets you the job.

It's not like you could have, I don't know, you could have worked in 10 different teams in a range of different scenarios. You could have been a leader in a lot of them, but if you can't talk about it, then you're not going to get the job, even though the experience looks impressive. How do I know what skills an employer wants?

[00:18:36] Sam Merrix: This one probably has two answers to it. There are some standard skills that we can pretty much safely assume that most employers will want because pretty much everyone's going to work as part of a team.

[00:18:49] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, we've already said communicationas well.

[00:18:50] Sam Merrix: Yeah, absolutely. And you're going to need to be able to communicate with other people, you're probably going to need to be able to write an email at the very least.

So there are some kind of standard skills, if you like, that an employer would want at graduate level. And I suppose the slightly more cheesy one is to say, well, have you looked at the skills listed in the Warwick Award? Because there's a reason they exist there, I suppose.

[00:19:13] Tom Greenaway: You also have to look at the employer as well.

[00:19:17] Sam Merrix: Yeah, absolutely. So, the skills that you need are what an employer wants. They will tell you. It's not going to be that much of a guessing game, it is going to be obvious and so if you do the right research, you'll be able to understand what skills the employer is wanting. So that's looking at the job description.

Often there will be a set of skills there, either they're listed out nicely for you and you can just take that list and work from that. Or they'll be interweaved throughout the actual job description itself. You'll also be able to see these things present on general careers pages or other parts of the website that an employer has.

So... So actually doing that research before you apply to a job is absolutely the key to making sure you're communicating about the right skills.

[00:20:02] Tom Greenaway: Skills often take quite, quite a while to develop, so you almost need a bit of a gap between knowing what skills the employer wants, and then if you realize that you don't have all those skills, you then need time to develop them before you apply for the job.

Because if you decide, like, I don't know, in your third year, what job you want. You don't have enough time to develop the skills of that job.

[00:20:29] Sam Merrix: In some instances, that can be the case. Absolutely. If it was particularly something really quite technical, maybe if you decided you wanted to be an engineer and your degree hadn't developed any really technical engineering skills at that point, then maybe yes, you might need to consider.

Those options from there, but a lot of graduate recruiters are after transferable skills. And so that means that actually lots of the skills that you're developing within your degree will be transferable to lots of different careers and different sectors. So you may already have this. So you may already have the skills, you just might not know that they are there.

[00:21:06] Tom Greenaway: What do you think?

Kelly Coles: Yeah, on that note, definitely. The number of students that I speak to that disregard a lot of their previous experiences that they've had at school or at college on their journey to where they are currently, it happens more often than not, to be honest, and students are very often surprised when you kind of take them through that kind of process of reflection on what they did in a particular job and help them to think about the skills that they've already used and gained and how they can be applicable to a range of roles in the future. And so all experience is good experience, but it's just thinking about how you reflect on it. And then how you frame that experience to demonstrate those skills effectively. Equally, the sooner that you start to kind of think about where you might be heading.

So as you mentioned, you can kind of begin to kind of reflect on where you're currently at and where you might need to be. That will be really helpful as well. As you kind of move towards your graduate job.

[00:22:12] Dave Musson: We'll be right back with more from Kelly and Sam after this.

Have you started thinking about your career options yet? Whether you're just getting started and have no ideas, or if you have a clear idea of what you'd like to do after you graduate, the Careers Team is here to support you in creating the career that is right for you.

What can the Careers Team help you with here at Warwick? Well, plenty. From improving your CV and writing cover letters, through to preparing for interviews and job application tests, They are here to help you achieve your vision of career success. As well as supporting you throughout your time at Warwick, the careers team can also help you after you graduate. They offer in person and remote services that are flexible to your needs and other commitments.

To get started, visit warwick.ac.uk/careers. That's warwick.ac.uk/careers.

[00:23:09] Tom Greenaway: So how do you show off your skills to employers? So like if you're writing an application or doing an interview or in an assessment centre, how do you show the employers that you've got those skills and you can do something well in terms of that skill? Do you want to go first, Kelly?

[00:23:27] Kelly Coles: Yeah, so the first thing to think about is your audience.

You need to know who's recruiting you? And in that context, you can kind of think about different industries are probably looking for different skills to be showcased in different ways, or they might value different skills and how they're presented. So do that kind of piece of research first and then for any application or whether it's an assessment center or an interview, you need to spend some time thinking about all of the skills that are being looked at or that make up the criteria for the role that you're applying for and create some nice, well rounded detailed examples of when you've used those skills in action.

We talk quite a lot about the STAR technique within careers, and it's a really kind of fail safe, nice structure to use to help you kind of tick off and make sure that you articulate kind of all of the elements of a, of a description. But the main thing to really highlight is that when you're talking about what you've done previously, not to focus on the duties that you performed.

What's really, really important is to evidence the skill you used to do it. And that's kind of the main piece that you should be. Focusing on within your example.

[00:24:42] Tom Greenaway: There's also the achievement as well from using it.

[00:24:45] Sam Merrix: Yeah. So that's kind of what you mean by the, the R in star. So for anyone that's listening that maybe hasn't come across it before it's situation, task, action, and result/reflection.

So that achievement would sit in that result or the reflection, and the bit that Kelly is saying to focus on is the action because the how you did something, the action you took, and when we say the action you took, we mean you took not the entire team because your whole netball team is not being recruited for the job. It's just you. So that action will be what helps you articulate that skill.

[00:25:19] Kelly Coles: I think the action. Theoretically you're supposed to be about 60% of your answer. Yeah. So if you like numbers and then you like statistics, kind of that's what you're aiming for. So

[00:25:29] Tom Greenaway: If you have a two minute response, at least a minute of it is the actions is what you did.

[00:25:33] Sam Merrix: And the same really applies when you are writing an application as well. So, so many people will do exactly what you described there, Tom, and we will spend all their time on their CV describing the activities that they might have done in a particular experience. But not actually focusing on the skills that they gained from them.

And that's how you make your experience more relevant, more connected to the job and how you start to see the value in it as well. Because if you just describe that when you were working at Tesco as the time that you were putting all the stock on the shelves and handling the cash register, you're not going to be able to see the value in it because you're not writing about that yourself.

But if you talk about how you developed your time management skills, because you had to simultaneously manage all these tasks at the same time, and how you developed your communication skills to having to work with customers and a variety of people, then you'll start to be able to see that value in it yourself.

[00:26:32] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, and this kind of links to the next question. So once you've got this down, how do employers assess? If you've got the skills you say you have, because I think some, some students, that's kind of a mystery as in, I write my application, I send it off. How do I know if what I've written is good? Like, I mean, we know that, like, what do they do? They, they score it?

[00:26:54] Kelly Coles: So there's usually a matrix that is used particularly for more formal roles that you would apply for. And the way that that is kind of broken down is whether you meet the criteria. Or there can be a zero if you don't meet it at all. So you, or provides some information, a good amount of information, or what you're looking for is to exceed the information required.

[00:27:22] Tom Greenaway: So that sounds like zero to three.

[00:27:23] Kelly Coles: Yeah, or it might be to five, you know, it just depends. But what you want to be is the person, whether it's, whether you're being shortlisted, or whether you're going through the interview process. Is you want to be the person that provides the right level of detail to exceed what they were looking for and that particular criteria.

So for example, if one of the criteria is to have worked and contributed in a team, if you just say, yes, I worked as part of a team, well, okay. That's a one, but if you say I worked as part of a team and we, we achieved this and I communicated with my colleagues, then you're probably going to hit the middle ground.

But if you talk about how you adapted your communication skills when you worked with colleagues to achieve a task, and this was my outcome, and this was my result. Then you're probably going to smash that and get a five.

[00:28:21] Tom Greenaway: And then the way they do it is they look at all your answers and they give you, they add them all up and then you get like a score and then they compare you to the other candidate.

And if you get the highest score, yeah. I think that was a big shock to me when I realised that people are actually scoring my responses from like 0 to 3 or One to five or whatever, and then it actually becomes a lot easier to understand how to do well because you know that there's, there's actually a kind of a scoring system and it's almost like a game.

[00:28:52] Kelly Coles: And if you approach it a little bit like, well, this is what they're looking for, so how do I very best demonstrate that to them? And ultimately I've sat on lots of recruitment panels. And you're literally sometimes there and you've read on somebody's application, for example, that they've got this, this experience and you're quite, you know, you're looking forward to hearing about it and finding out how that's helped them develop their skills and so on.

And you're almost willing people to tell you to, to give the detail. And people are very often really nervous. And so they're rushing to get in and out of that interview as quickly as possible, for example, or if you're a student and you're applying to 50 billion different graduate schemes, rather than tailoring your application and making a small number of well developed applications.

You're not giving it the time that it needs to kind of explain things in the detail that's required. So, how you approach those things is really important and the level of detail and the right detail. is key to kind of being that person that makes the biggest impact. And that's what, what you want to be.

Tom Greenaway: What do you think Sam?

[00:30:01] Sam Merrix: I think Kelly touched on a really good point there, or kind of actually demonstrated it, a good recruiter will always want you to do well. And that's not something that people know or remember or think about. They often think about this nerve-wracking situation and think about the scoring or think about the test or think about how they're being judged.

But actually the person on the other side of the table wants you to do well because they want a lovely pool of candidates to choose from that could all be great. They don't necessarily want you to do bad. So that person should be doing a good job and making you feel comfortable. So hopefully that maybe provides some reassurance if you are starting to feel quite nervous when you're in an interview situation.

[00:30:49] Tom Greenaway: I've come across some people who feel they have to lie about what skills they have or they have to overstate what they've done. So say if they worked in a team, they have to say that they were the leader rather than They were just a team member. What advice do you have for students who feel that way?

And what can they do?

[00:31:07] Sam Merrix: It's definitely not advisable to lie on your application, or in the interview at all. And the main reason is, unless you are exceptionally good as an actor, as you get pressed with more and more questions, inevitably, that lie is going to fall apart at some point. Whether that's because you couldn't answer the first question at the interview, or whether once they've asked a few more things, it's just become apparent that you just don't have enough to talk about there.

So I wouldn't ever advise anyone lie or, or... overexaggerate everything that you talk about on an application form or CV or your LinkedIn for that matter should be things that are true and that actually you'd be happy to talk about. So I wouldn't go down that path.

[00:31:56] Kelly Coles: And if you did and you managed to blag it, then when you actually get into that role, then there might be so much pressure on you.

It would become quite evident quite quickly. I think I think honesty is always the best policy. And just be genuine and just be authentic because recruiters want to hire you very often. And if you get to interview stage, they think you can do it on paper. And you literally just need to kind of prove to them in person that you can.

[00:32:25] Tom Greenaway: I think one thing I realized as well is that a lot of candidates are more impressive than they realize. And it's that thing of, it's more often you'll find someone who's got all the experience and can't articulate it. It's very rare you get someone who's got very little experience, but then interviews really well.

It's more often the case that people are, have more experience and skills than they can actually, than they realize they do. Would you agree with that?

[00:32:52] Kelly Coles: Yeah. And I think, you know, when you kind of said, should people embellish or make it seem more than it was, I don't think you should do that. But I think a lot of the work that we do in the careers team often is helping people recognize where their skills lie and what they've actually got to offer. And so that kind of, it's really important to spend that time reflecting on what you've done and what that gives you and what you have to bring to the table.

[00:33:24] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, we haven't really talked about self awareness yet, but from speaking to other careers consultants, it's a big and important skill in kind of finding your career and finding what you want to do.

[00:33:37] Sam Merrix: There's also awareness of just being in this particular environment that perhaps is a very good university with lots of amazing students at it and maybe trying to understand that this is a competitive environment that you're in already. As like you say, Tom, so many people don't know how great they are.

And that is certainly the case for so many of the students that I have the fortune of working with. So many people will come in and say, haven't done this. They haven't done that. I haven't done the other. And then when we pull out their CV, they've done some amazing, brilliant work and they're not necessarily taking that to heart.

And that's where your confidence should be coming from. So knowing that. So actually you might be comparing yourself to somebody who has done some other great stuff, absolutely, but actually you've done great things as well.

[00:34:27] Dave Musson: There's still more advice to come from Sam and from Kelly. Right after this.

It's never too early, or too late, to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that. Pulling from your academic modules, as well as anything else you get involved with, such as volunteering, sports teams, societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more, the Warwick Award recognizes and showcases the skills you're building through those activities.

It also highlights training and development opportunities, so you can craft a full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates, it can be personalized to allow you to shape your own employability skills development, and it is ready for you whenever you're ready.

Registration is quick and easy, so why not join more than 12, 000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning the Warwick Award. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

[00:35:34] Tom Greenaway: I mean we've already talked, given a lot of advice to students already, but what advice would you give to students who've just started thinking about developing their skills?

[00:35:41] Kelly Coles: The biggest thing I would want to say, I think kind of echoes what Sam has just said, I think students are so busy comparing themselves to everybody else or thinking that they've got to find the perfect thing.

[00:35:55] Tom Greenaway: The perfect internship.

[00:35:56] Kelly Coles: Yeah, graduate job, and I think it's really. Easy to become hung upon that and then become very disillusioned, perhaps, if you, if you're not getting accepted for those things straight away.

And I think there's so many ways that you can develop your experience. You can develop your skills while you're here at university. And that self awareness piece is really important because unless you really know you, then you don't really know what. Might be a good fit for you and very often people have just followed this path.

Okay, school, college, uni, not really thought about it. Just thought, well, I have to make a decision here. So I'll pick this, this and this. And I don't really know why I'm doing it. Maybe or I'll pick this degree because that gives me broad options or flexibility and I can think about it later.

[00:36:47] Tom Greenaway: Or you may pick a degree because you like the subjects, but you haven't thought about the job.

[00:36:50] Kelly Coles: Yeah, or where it, where it might lead you to. So starting to kind of think about what, what that could lead to is really important. And then you can start and kind of piece the other parts of that puzzle together.

[00:37:03] Tom Greenaway: I think it's really interesting because, so for example, my degree was a French and I didn't do that because I wanted a job in languages. I did that because I wanted to go abroad. So the main aim for me for university was to have a year abroad. And then as soon as I finished university, I lived abroad for another two years. That was what I wanted. I wasn't really thinking about where it would lead, which had its benefits and had its downsides because I really enjoyed living abroad.

By the end of it, I was like, okay, what do I do now?

[00:37:35] Kelly Coles: And that's fine, you know, because it depends what your priorities are and they're all really different for everybody. And I think sometimes. Whatever your own values on what's really important to you at a given time can become overshadowed by the process that people think they need to follow to get from point A to point B and everybody else is going to.

To that point be over there and that's where I should be going, 'well, why should you, why should you not be going to live in France for two years and having a brilliant time and, and getting that, that experience and then deciding what to do?' So is this about your journey, which you need to walk at your pace and ultimately what, whatever your particular goals are or priorities are.

Then what's going to get you towards them in the best possible way for you at that given time. So, yeah, but again, that goes back to knowing what's important to you.

[00:38:28] Sam Merrix: To me, it kind of comes down to something you said there, which is not rushing the process. And that is something that I see quite a lot.

A lot of the students that I work with, they do already have an idea of what they want to do. with their degree, and that's why they've chosen it, which is great. But what we need to do is acknowledge where we are in that process. We can't get necessarily the golden internship straight away. That isn't going to happen all the time.

And it's about acknowledging the steps that should come before that. So actually how important it is to join a society or do some extracurriculars or have a part time job or do a project of your own outside of the course that's going to add some value to building your skills, to give you things to talk about in interviews, to give you things to talk about in your CV, to add something to your portfolio of work and making sure that you're not rushing into the thing that you think you should be doing just because it's the next thing big thing, because obviously, as Kelly said, you've gone school, college, university, you've been focused on GCSEs, A levels, degree, so you've been focused on those big steps, and now it's about starting to break that down and going, okay, the next big step isn't internship, it's getting some experience to get that internship to then move forward to that graduate job.

[00:39:46] Tom Greenaway: Yeah, I definitely think the experience part as well, because that's something we, we want to encourage students, skills to move with the work award is. Whilst you're at university, building those experiences, and often you find, we've found with a lot of students that the experience then leads to the next step.

The experience builds the skills and also builds the self awareness. So if you spend a few hours volunteering somewhere, you get the experience of volunteering, but also you kind of know after a few hours, whether or not that's something you want to continue doing. And we have it with the URSS scheme as well, where some students are like, okay, this is, they decide, yes, I want to do research as my career.

And other students are like, well, that was really interesting, but I'm more interested in, in something else other than research. And it's just through gaining the experience.

[00:40:38] Kelly Coles: It's that exploration as well, because very often if you've got quite limited experience until you do that exploration and you try something a bit different or you do something a bit outside of your comfort zone, then you don't know.

And I think also, you know, you could have an idea for a really long time that you've, you know, you might always have wanted to be a doctor, for example, but then actually when you go and do your first work experience shift actually on a ward. You might think, Oh, actually, do you know what, this is not for me, you know, I still want to work with people, help people, but actually, I don't think it's, it's being a doctor is, is the thing, for example, so exploration is really important, and that gives you new things, gives you, sometimes it will affirm what you thought about a particular thing that you wanted to try, or it might be the thing that just makes you think, Actually, you know what, the reality of that is quite different to my expectation and actually I might think about this slightly differently.

So you know, all of those things are really valid and part of that journey as well. And often finding out what you don't want to do is just as important as finding out what you do. Yeah.

[00:41:46] Tom Greenaway: Okay. We've got two questions left. So the first is kind of briefly, what final advice would you give to students regarding skills and finding work?

[00:41:55] Sam Merrix: I think we've already covered so many good points. It's kind of a little bit hard to come up with something So I'll go for the thing that's a bit different to everything we've already talked about and I get asked a question all the time; How many jobs should I apply to? and that will guarantee I get a job.

And the answer is that's not how it works. The strategy is always one of quality over quantity. So we want quality job applications to be our focus, not the number of applications that you're actually making. If you send out your CV and your cover letter, and it's exactly the same to over a hundred companies, you're not going to hear back from them. It's not going to happen. If you spend a few hours working on a really good application, you research the company, put time into it, you understand the role and you're actually So if you say you're more motivated to actually do this work and spend this time on it, that will come across and that will pay dividends.

So there's no magic number that any of us can give out and say, hey, if you make this number of applications, it's going to equal the job. But what we can tell you is that those quality applications will get you further. And because you've already done this research, you've already thought about how your skills relate to the things that the employer wants.

You've already come up with lots of these examples that can turn into these lovely STAR examples. You've already done lots of prep to help you at the interview too.

[00:43:23] Tom Greenaway: I agree with that. I think one thing that's not talked about as well, but linked to that is the just the data protection part of it because your CV will have personal information and you want to be careful about how much it's out there, because I found like one time I made the mistake of submitting my CV onto a jobs website and then found my CV randomly online like a few years later and it was that CV and it was just there as kind of, you know, you search my name and that TV came up somewhere and you know, you don't always want because your CV will also have like your email address.

You might have your phone number. You don't want everyone to have that. You want to not only choose who you apply for in terms of quality, but also make sure that you're, you know, that you're kind of a rare find rather than someone that's just your name's everywhere. Do you know what I mean?

[00:44:24] Sam Merrix: Be known for the right reasons.

Tom Greenaway: Be known for the right reasons. I think that's what we're getting at there, yeah, absolutely. How about you, Kelly?

[00:44:30] Kelly Coles: I think the only thing I would add to what Sam has said is part of that research. It's thinking about the kind of organization that you want to work for and it's really important to make sure that you kind of know where you're applying to and that it's actually an organization that is aligned with your values and the kind of work that you want to be doing and has the kind of culture that you would want to be a part of.

And I think that can be really overlooked as well by students. You know, the job might look all shiny on the outside, but actually, you know, if you don't research the organization, it could be working in a kind of way or a kind of culture that really doesn't fit or work for you. So that's also really important.

[00:45:19] Tom Greenaway: Cool. Okay. Final question. Bit of a personal question to end on, which I know we're all very excited about. So are there any skills that you still want to develop and do you have any plans for developing them?

[00:45:32] Kelly Coles: So for myself, I think things like leadership and strategic awareness is something that I would like to be better at from a work perspective and then out of work, I think I would like to be a better cook and so my cooking skills could do with improving.

And I'm also learning Spanish, but I'm just very basic at the moment.

Tom Greenaway: Ah, muy bien.

Kelly Coles: Muy bien. French was my my GCSE. I didn't do Spanish, so I'm keen to kind of have that under my belt.

[00:46:02] Tom Greenaway: Y tú, Sam? No. Cómo, cómo piensas?

[00:46:06] Sam Merrix: Please don't test my language skills. That's a test. I will fail! Probably with very similar to Kelly looking to do those leadership skills for me now and from a more personal point of view, it's probably hitting some new personal bests within my gym regime. My hundred kilo deadlifts are very close.

[00:46:32] Tom Greenaway: I feel like I've learned a lot and it was great to talk to both of you.

[00:46:38] Sam Merrix: Thanks very much.

Kelly Coles: Thank you for having us.

[00:46:44] Dave Musson: You've been listening to the Skillscast, a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple. Or wherever else you get your podcasts, and there's a link in the show notes to a page on our website where you'll find transcripts of all our episodes. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Our guests this time were Sam Merrix and Kelly Coles, who are both Senior Careers Consultants here at Warwick. Thanks to them both for their expertise and best of luck with the cooking, the Spanish and the deadlifts.

My colleague Tom Greenaway was asking the questions this time around. Thank you Tom.

This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also designed our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back with a new episode in two weeks.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's Employability Skills Award and Development Scheme. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward

Fay Inverarity 0:04

I realised quite quickly as I started picking up opportunities at Warwick that it's the best time to kind of capitalise on the opportunities on offer. And there's kind of a huge opportunity there to prepare yourself while you're still at University for that entry into the workplace.

Dave Musson 0:18

Hi and welcome to the first episode of the Skillscast from the University of Warwick. This show is all about how to learn and develop your skills while at university and how to use them to set you up for a fantastic start to life once you graduate. In each episode, you'll get to hear from a range of different people from across Warwick's campus about why skills are important, how they develop theirs, and how you can too. I'm your host, Dave Musson, I work in the skills team here at Warwick, and I'm really excited to bring you our first interview. Our guest this episode is Fay Inverarity who graduated from Warwick in the summer of 2022, and secured a place on the graduate scheme of Barclays Bank, and who did an incredible amount of skills development. While studying here, I was lucky enough to catch up with Fay in September 2023, and she shared some great insights about how to develop your skills while at university, which you're going to hear in this episode. Among other things, Fay shares how she's found her first year of work, she talks about how she developed a range of skills while studying here, and she reflects on the importance of, well, reflecting on your own skills development, particularly when thinking about applying and interviewing for jobs. If you enjoy this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the Skillscast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Oh, and if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, let's get started. Here's Fay.

Fay Inverarity 1:50  

I'm Fay, I studied at work between 2017 and 2022. graduated with a BA in German Studies in 2021 and then graduated with a Master's in Translation and Cultures in 2020.

Dave Musson 2:04

And what have you been doing since then?

Fay Inverarity 2:06

So after leaving Warwick, I accepted a place on the Barclays retail banking graduate scheme. I'm about a year into the scheme now actually, based in Northampton, which was great for me because it meant I didn't have to leave Coventry after I graduated.

Dave Musson 2:19

I think that's really interesting talking to you, when you're a year into work, I think many students are probably really intrigued about that, that first year of moving into a post-university world and into work. So how has that first year of work been for you?

Fay Inverarity 2:35

I mean, it has been an adjustment. I feel like you go through that sort of like change in approach and lifestyle, anytime you have that sort of big leap or big change, whether that's going to university, starting your career or kind of moving companies. So yeah, it's definitely been an adjustment. And I was quite used to being able to really plan my time throughout my day, like leaving in like social and work and study. Whereas now it's a bit more structured. I'm definitely getting used to it. And it's it's becoming the norm, but so far, loving it loving the work. Yeah, it's going well.

Dave Musson 3:05  

So the main focus of our chat, and I guess, I guess this entire podcast is about developing skills in particularly while you're at university. And you did a lot of that while you were a Warwick - did you know when you first arrived on campus as that fresher that you wanted to build your employability skills at the same time you were doing your studies? Or was this something that you realised once you got into work and started studying?

Fay Inverarity 3:30  

I didn't really come to Warwick with the kind of the focus on employability skills or like the intention to build those employability skills, I was mainly focused on kind of coming, getting the degree and I thought, I'll think about that later when I get to like applying for jobs. But I realised quite quickly as I started picking up opportunities at Warwick, that it's the best time to kind of capitalise on the opportunities on offer. And there's kind of a huge opportunity there to prepare yourself while you're still at University for that entry into the workplace that kind of I always go back to this, but I was really shy when I first came to university. So I never would have been the person to like, put my hand up or do anything outside of kind of what was mandatory for the degree. But once I started pushing myself to take on new opportunities, I grew in confidence. So it was almost like once I started building those skills, it kind of wasn't too difficult to then build on them. And that was like, when I started to see myself coming out of my shell, I started to really see the benefits and like the potential that there is while you're at uni, to build those skills and prepare for a job.

Dave Musson 4:30

So what what sort of things were you involved with at Warwick? And what sort of skills did they help you develop?

Fay Inverarity 4:34

I won't list them all for you because I was here for five years, so I did quite a lot! But I'd say some of the highlights were serving on an SSLC, being a resident tutor in Sherbourne, working at the SU, working an exam invigilator at a school near the campus, I worked in Germany on a year abroad as a language assistant and kind of more formally, I did an internship with HSBC. With especially chairing the SSLC and being resident tutor feel like those opportunities particularly developed my kind of communication, intercultural awareness problem solving. In those roles, I was really thrown into like challenging situations where there were kind of multiple parties, different peers, and you kind of had to help find a resolution. So really helped me develop those and put me in opportunities to develop those skills. But I also think the fact that I did so many different opportunities really helped me develop my self awareness, I constantly had to change my approach my tact, like, every opportunity requires you to approach it in a different way. And being able to think about that and adapt really then helped build that self awareness.

Dave Musson 5:38

I mean, you said yourself, you did a lot. Was it difficult to balance all of that skills development with your studies?

Fay Inverarity 5:45

Yeah. I mean, I think this was a lesson I really learned in my second year of uni. And that was a time where there was kind of more opportunities on the table than I actually had time for. And I mean, I'd even say now, like, it's still a thing I'm trying to get used to is like, when to turn down opportunities and when to say no, you know, something's not serving anymore. And it's taking up a lot of time, I think it's about kind of being honest with yourself. And with those around you kind of looking at an opportunity and saying, right, I can commit three hours a week to this opportunity, and communicating that with the, with the organiser or the people involved, most of the time, they'll probably turn around and say, Yeah, that's fine. And then you're not going to find that down the line, you're overwhelmed with the amount of time or input that's required for it. And sometimes they'll say, oh, no, we're we're looking more for somebody to commit 10 hours a week. And that's still kind of a win win, because you then avoid an opportunity that's going to kind of overwhelm your diary. And they can go and find somebody that's able to commit the amount of time that they need. But it definitely is almost a skill in itself. Learning which opportunities to say yes to in which to kind of leave on the table. And something I'm still still working on today.

Dave Musson 6:52

By your own admission, you were a bit of a shy student when you first started, and wouldn't necessarily put yourself forward for activities. So like how, how easy was it to find these things? Because I think that would probably be a question that certainly freshers would have is like, they're probably aware that there's lots going on at university, but not necessarily knowing where to look. So thinking about your own experience, like how easy was it to find all these things that you ended up getting involved with?

Fay Inverarity 7:24

I mean, once you started knowing where to look, it then became very easy to find the opportunities. And almost once you start taking opportunities, other things get recommended. So it's almost just the difficulty of finding those first few things that you want to get involved with, I'd say speaking to your department, so for example, I said about chairing an SSLC speaking to your department about the kind of opportunities or like things that are roles that are on offer within your department, and put your hand up for those and put yourself forward for them. But also, there's different platforms out there, like I used unitemps quite a lot to find different long term and short term opportunities that I could get involved with. So there's a wide range of places to go. And then you kind of find that they help you build a network, both within the union outside and the nearby areas. So you can continue to kind of find more roles and ways to build those skills.

Dave Musson 8:15

Obviously, university as a whole is a life changing experience. I mean, thinking about the skills development aspect of your journey through Warwick. How do you think all of that skills development, changed you from that shy, fresher that arrived on campus to the person you were when you graduated?

Fay Inverarity 8:34

Yeah, I mean, I can say I was like a shy, fresher. And it was always night and day to kind of if you can compare me 18 to like me at 22 when I graduated, it really just helped me build this real sense of confidence and kind of belief in myself. I think before, I would never think that I could take on challenging situations or have to take on new opportunities. Whereas the Warwick Award and kind of the skills that you can develop while you're at work, and while you're at university, really showed me how much I am the potential that I have and how much I'm capable of. So now to bring it back to kind of an employability thing. When I was in interviews, I would maybe be asked like, whether I thought I was capable of taking on this situation or hypothetical questions. I never really believed that I was actually capable of that and the confidence that all of these opportunities and all of the different things I got involved with at Warwick gave me really meant that then I was actually believing myself in interviews and I think things like that really do come across. So yeah, it's one about having the examples. I then had a much more built out CV but I also was so much more confident and believed in myself way more.

Dave Musson 9:40  

We'll be back with more from Fay right after this.

It's never too early or too late to start thinking about what you might do after graduation and what skills you need to do it. The Warwick Award can help you do just that pulling from your academic modules as well as anything else you get involved with such as volunteer during sports teams societies, internships, placements, caring responsibilities, part time work, and plenty more. The work award recognises and showcases the skills you're building through those activities. It also highlights training and development opportunities. So you can craft the full range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The award is free for all undergraduates and taught postgraduates, it can be personalised to allow you to shape your own employability skills development, and it is ready for you whenever you're ready for it. Registration is quick and easy so why not join more than 12,000 students by signing up now and taking your first steps towards earning the Warwick Award? Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward.

You mentioned the Warwick Award there, which obviously I have a vested interest in and was going to ask you about when you were part of our pilot. Just before you graduated, you managed to achieve the gold level, how did that feel? How did that rank among all the other things you achieved while you're at work?

Fay Inverarity 11:02

I mean, I'd already been kind of on the skills development journey before heard about the Warwick Award. And it almost was just this great way of reflecting on everything I'd done. I think until I started doing the reflection on the different opportunities and the skills that I developed, I never really looked at what like, wow, I've done so much. And it really it just gave me such a sense of achievement to kind of look back and then have almost this but not like a full stop because you never stop kind of growing, but something to just recognise how much I've done. So yeah, it really kind of put it into perspective and felt like a huge achievement for me.

Dave Musson 11:36

And you mentioned those reflections as well, which are obviously a key part of the award and there to help students build up those bank of examples of where those skills did you just mentioned, it was, it was useful to do that reflection and in terms of helping feel more concrete in your head of what you achieved, but in terms of that, as an exercise or writing those reflections as well, was that was that useful when you're preparing for job interviews? And all of those kinds of things?

Fay Inverarity 12:01  

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it was just useful. For me, I think it was one of the best parts of the award, was having that opportunity to really reflect and go back. I mean, I knew I wanted to apply for a graduate scheme. And the nature of applying for graduate schemes is that the interview process, and the application is really long. And it's really difficult. And it's quite, it's quite intense as well. So you become a little bit almost like brain fog to what you've actually done and what your examples are. So I found that almost this sort of structured approach that the award gave to like reflecting on my experiences meant I had this bank of answers that I could go back to I find the when you're in an interview, trying to think on the spot, there's an answer to like, a lot of a lot of interviews will be kind of competency based interviews where they'll say, can you tell me about a time when you've done X, Y, and Z? When you're trying to think of the example on the spot, often the delivery falls away. So it feels a little bit flat? Because you're thinking too much about trying to what did I do? What was the outcome, whereas the work was meant I had this idea that I could quickly go back to find the example and then focus all my energy in the interview on delivering it and really giving it some pzazz on winning the interviewer over. So really, really key with that reflection really helped me secure my role.

Dave Musson 13:14

Now you've been in your job for a year, which skills in particular that you developed at work, do you feel have been most useful for you in your work?

Fay Inverarity 13:23  

I think I'd probably say problem solving. So I've noticed this when I was interviewing that, often, I was asked about can you tell me about a time where you've had a situation where you've to think on your feet and solve a problem where there's been multiple people involved and differing opinions, or approaches. And I feel like as I've gotten to my role, I can kind of see why they're looking for people that have already, you know, demonstrated that they have that skill, kind of being able to mediate discussions where there's difficult stakeholders where, you know, nobody can kind of agree on what the next step should be. I was able to do that in things like chairing an SSLC and especially RLT as well when you're resolving, like conflict or issues within like the halls of residence, because I already had that skill. It's been something I've picked up quite quickly at work, and it's something I use every single day. So that yeah, problem solving is definitely a big one.

Dave Musson 14:15

And on the flip side, is there any skills that you've had to develop since starting work that maybe you wish you'd perhaps had chance to practice more before, like why you still have work?

Fay Inverarity 14:27

So I'd say, leadership, and I know that's not one of the 12 core skills, but I also think it's kind of all of them. When I leave the graduate scheme, I want to kind of roll off the scheme, I want to go into a leadership role. So at the minute, I'm really trying to focus on finding opportunities to lead teams on the pieces of work, I kind of wish I'd taken a bit of a step back and looked at just how many of those skills had already built while I was at Warwick and use that to find opportunities to go into leadership roles and test the waters in in terms of leading while while I was still at uni. I think if you look through this meals, they're almost they're the things that make a great leader. So I wish I'd kind of use that a little bit more to develop my leadership style before I came into the workplace. But yeah, definitely want to. I'm working on finding opportunities for now.

Dave Musson 15:11  

Good, good. So I'm curious on this one. So, in your opinion, why is it important for students to not just focus on their studies, but also work on their employability skills while they're at university?

Fay Inverarity 15:23

I think we've gone over the fact that I think having that reflection and developing my skills while I was at uni helped me secure the role. But also, I think it gave me a huge advantage once I started in the workplace. So I really surprised myself by how quickly once I entered Barclays and did my graduate scheme, how quickly I could pick things up, and just how often I would use the skills that I developed at Warwick to almost give me that head start that I didn't have to worry about things like, you know, how do I write an email? How do I approach the stakeholder because I'd already built those things like communication and professionalism. As part of the opportunities I've taken up at university, I was able to focus more on kind of building that knowledge rather than the skills and like communication, things like that. So yeah, I mean, I find myself even now going back to those skills when I'm doing Personal Development Planning. So while yes, it helped me get get the role, but it's also given me this, this head start. So I'd almost say capitalise on the fact that whilst at university, it's almost a safe space where you can try things and you can be bad at them, there's, there's not quite the same amount of kind of safe space at work, where there's a bit more pressure, while you're at university, you can take an opportunity and then decide it's not for you, and you know, step away from it. And it's just the best time and it's a very safe space to develop those skills. And then it gives you that head start, once you do get into the workplace, you're not then trying to develop the fundamentals.

Dave Musson 16:50

And just lastly, I'm wondering if you had any tips for students listening to this, not only to help them develop their skills while at university, but also I guess, think about how they can showcase what they've learned when they're coming to applying for jobs?

Fay Inverarity 17:05

Yeah, if I kind of split that into two parts. So the first part around kind of how to like advice on developing new skills whilst you're at university, I'd say put your hands up for the things that you don't know whether you'll be good at it, quite often will naturally go to putting our hands up and the things that we know that we'll be good at that we've already got the skills for. If you're not sure if you'll be good at something, it kind of suggests that that maybe there's a gap there, or it's something you've not tried before. So while you're at university, put your hand up for those, try them, if you're not any good at them, like it's fine. At least you've learned that about yourself. So yeah, those are those are the ones that I will go forward. And those the opportunities that seek out the sort of second part now, advice in showcasing what you've learned when you're applying for jobs. Again, I'd come back to that reflection piece like the more detailed you can be in noting down all of the things that you did as part of different roles that you've done, and the outcomes of those as well. That's also a thing that a lot of people want to hear in, in interviews is what was the outcome of things that you've worked on, the more detailed you can be in your reflections. You'll find it easier to link questions in interviews to those examples, if you've got them, got them noted down and you've got quite a bit of content there.

Dave Musson 18:14 

Brilliant. Well, Fay, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast and for coming back to Warwick - albeit virtually - and the best of luck for the rest of your career.

You been listened to the Skillscast a podcast about skills development from the University of Warwick. If you enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend and consider following the show so you don't miss any future episodes. You can find the skills cast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts out. And if you're listening on Spotify, be sure to answer the question we've added to this episode on the mobile app. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Our guest this time was Fay Inverarity who graduated from Warwick in 2022. Thanks so much to Fay for her time and her insights and best of luck in the rest of your career.

This episode was hosted, mixed and edited by me, Dave Musson. I also design our artwork, while our music is from Adobe Stock Music. We'll be back with a new episode in two weeks.

The Skillscast is brought to you by the team behind the Warwick Award, the University of Warwick's employability skills award and development scheme. Find out more at warwick.ac.uk/warwickaward

Transcribed by https://otter.ai