Warwick Award help centre

The Warwick Award has been designed to help you showcase all of the skills you will build throughout your time here, and set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. By completing the Award you'll develop a range of core skills that employers have told us they want to see in new graduates, you'll learn how to reflect on those skills, and you'll build a bank of examples of how you've built those skills that you can use when applying for jobs.

The Warwick Award gives you the opportunity to develop vital skills that will improve your employability after graduation. The Award is open to all undergraduate and taught master’s programme students, and can be completed at a pace that suits you over the course of your degree. For undergraduates, it will appear on your Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) transcript, while postgraduates who complete the Award will be issued with a digital certificate signed by the Vice Chancellor.

The Award is based around 12 core employability skills that we’ve worked with a range of employers to identify as being crucial for your next steps after graduation. These skills are:

• Critical Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Self-Awareness
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Information Literacy
• Sustainability
• Ethical Values
• Digital Literacy
• Intercultural Awareness
• Organisational Awareness
• Professionalism

The Award recognises the transferable employability skills you will develop through completing academic modules, extra-curricular training courses and co-curricular activities you get involved with during your time at Warwick. It also highlights training and development opportunities so you can craft a range of skills to help set you up for a fantastic start to life after graduation. The Award can be personalised to allow you to choose activities based on your own interests and focus on the skills that matter the most to you and your future.

Find out more: watch the webinar

Want to know more? Watch this video recording of our webinar which gives an overview of the Warwick Award and the Gradintelligence platform:

Registration is easy to do via your Gradintelligence account.

Your official Gradintelligence account is created automatically for you shortly after you enrol on your course. You will have received an email from Gradintelligence to your University email address asking you to ‘activate’ your account. Once you have access to your Gradintelligence account you’ll easily be able to sign up to the Award.

If you experience any difficulties accessing the two-factor authentication code during your registration, please check your spam/junk mail folders. If that still does not resolve your problem then please email Gradintelligence's Helpdesk who will assist you directly.

First time using Gradintelligence at Warwick?

Activate your account using the link sent to your University email address (search Gradintelligence to find it). If you cannot find this, you can easily reset itLink opens in a new window.

Previously accessed your Higher Education Achievement Report or a digital Award Certificate?

Use the username and password for your account. If you need to reset it, you can do so via GradintelligenceLink opens in a new window.

Used Gradintelligence before at a different University?

If you have more than one Gradintelligence account you can ‘merge’ your accounts into one. Both accounts must be activated in order to merge them together.

Please follow the steps below to complete the merge:

1. Login to one of your accounts (this will become your primary account username and email address for all future access to Gradintelligence).
2. Click on ‘User Settings’, represented by a cog icon in the top right hand corner.
3. Under ‘General’ settings scroll down the page to a section titled ‘Merge Accounts’.
4. You will then be prompted to login to your second account. When you do so all your data will be merged into one account.
5. Once this process is completed you will be able to switch from one university to the other by selecting from a drop down menu in the banner at the top of your homepage.

If you experience any difficulties accessing the two-factor authentication code during your registration, please check your spam/junk mail folders in the first instance. If that still does not resolve your problem then please email Gradintelligence's Helpdesk who will assist you directly.

We recognise a broad range of University organised, student organised, or externally organised employability skills based activities, undertaken on/off campus where the 12 Core Employability Skills are developed.

Activities must include specific links to development of the 12 core skills and must include a reflective element to be eligible.

Activities usually need a significant length/depth of skills development to be eligible for the Award; usually this is a minimum of 5 hours in length, to be able to claim the minimum 1 Core Skills Point (CSP).

You can search the platform for all currently recognised activities that you are eligible for. If you have taken part in an activity of 5 hours or more that you think has developed employability skills please let us know. If you have undertaken a stand alone, one-off activity that you think has provided relevant skills development, you can use the ‘Make a Case for Recognition’ activity and we will assess its eligibility for CSP.

Alternatively, if it’s an activity lots of students have taken part in, let us know at Link opens in a new window and we can check if it meets the criteria and can be added to the Award.

We’ve designed the Award to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Sometimes there are activities that don’t meet our minimum requirements for inclusion. This is usually due to two things. First, there may be no way to verify how much time you spend on skills development in the experience, either because you have no evidence to provide or because there is no-one in an associated position of responsibility who can verify your involvement.

Second, the time spent on skills development in an experience might not be enough to be worth 1 Core Skills Point, which is normally worth around 5 hours of skills development. Anything under 5 hours long is likely to be excluded. There are some exceptions, such as our own Warwick Award induction pathway activities.

Core Skills Points (CSP) are awarded to each activity in the Warwick Award. The number of CSP you can achieve from completing and reflecting on an activity depends on the length of activity and number of skills development hours contained. 1 CSP equates to approximately 5 hours of skills development, however we also take into account the depth of skills development and quality of the reflection.

The CSPs you gain from activities accumulate. Once you gain a specific number of points (which varies per award stream), you will achieve a Warwick Award. You will be issued a Warwick accredited certificate and the award will display on your HEAR record.

We have created a Self-Reflection toolkit. It explains what self-reflection and reflective practices are and offers some techniques you can use in your reflective practice. These should help you to answer our reflection questions effectively, as well as aid you in reflections for assessments, or following experiences where reflection is a valuable thing to do.

We suggest you spend the following time writing reflections:

• For 1-5 CSP activities, your reflections should take 5-10 minutes to answer the reflection questions.
• For 5-10 CSP activities, reflections should take 10-15 minutes.
• For 10-20 CSP activities, reflections should take 20 minutes.

On our Core Skills Framework, Self-Reflection, is the ability to perceive and evaluate your cognitive, emotional, and behavioural processes, and set actions for development. That means learning from experience and applying those lessons. Reflective practice is about turning self-reflection into an activity that can be carried out in a measured way, drawing on other Core Skills including Self Awareness and Critical Thinking, and contributing to your Professionalism as a key part of professional practice.

Reflection is valuable because it helps you learn from your experiences, learn about yourself in different situations and contexts, and draw conclusions about what you might do in similar future experiences.

Many of our reflection questions are designed to encourage you to write concise, positive examples of when you have used specific skills. These examples can then be reused for job applications and interviews. They will be saved on your Warwick Award profile for as long as you need them after you graduate.

This may depend on the activity, but usually you can do so once you have finished it or spent long enough doing it that you can give detailed examples of how you have practised and developed your skills during the experience.

In some cases, you might not be able to access the activity on Gradintelligence until you have completed it. In others, where you can register yourself for the activity, you can decide when to reflect and claim your points. For part-time work activities, for example, you might want to wait until you’ve done at least 100 hours because this will gain you the maximum possible 20 CSP. In some cases, like SSLC Representatives or Students Union executive roles, we expect you to wait until you’ve been in the role for two full terms.

We don’t want you to use ChatGPT or other online LLM-based tools to write your reflections. This is, very simply, because if you do this then you are not reflecting on your experiences. The whole process becomes pointless.

We don’t want you to write very much and it doesn’t have to be perfectly written. It just needs to be a reflection of your experiences: how you felt and what you learned or gained, from your point of view.

If we think you have not written your reflection yourself, we will ask you to do it again. Usually, the text produced by AI in response to our reflection questions seems superficially appropriate but does not meet our definition of ‘self-reflection’, and/or does not contain any specifics about the activity or the personal experience of it.

We suggest you spend the following time writing reflections:

• For 1-5 CSP activities, your reflections should take 5-10 minutes to answer the reflection questions.
• For 5-10 CSP activities, reflections should take 10-15 minutes.
• For 10-20 CSP activities, reflections should take 20 minutes.

It will take you longer to open your LLM tool of choice, enter our questions into it, read and refine the responses, or refine the outputs with more prompts, and then copy them into the reflection window, than it will to write it yourself.

You will find your accredited modules on your My Warwick Award page under ‘My Curriculum Award Activities’. This will list any modules you have completed that are recognised by the Award. You can also see the CSPs associated with each module. If you are unsure whether your module is recognised by the Award, you can search all recognised modules at the top of this page.

You will usually need to submit a short reflection on your skills development to claim the points for your accredited modules. These modules will be listed as ‘in progress’ under your curriculum activities and you will be prompted to ‘submit for Award recognition’. In some cases, you will already have reflected on your skills development as part of the module and your points will be automatically verified.

Developers read every reflection to check it meets the criteria. Some will require additional evidence to verify – refer to the activity instructions to check what you need to provide (verifications).

We cover a wide range of activities with specific criteria for verification which can affect the time taken for activities to be verified. We aim to have each activity verified as soon as possible. If you have questions about an individual activity contact us at skills@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window. Note that during the summer break verification might take slightly longer because of staff annual leave.

There are many reasons why your activity may not have been verified such as insufficient evidence, missing reflection, or the skills developers may be waiting for external confirmation of your participation in the activity.

If you have individual queries about a specific activity, please get in touch with us at skills@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window.

The Warwick Award Digital Certificates can be accessed via the Official Documents page from the Gradintelligence Homepage or the Student Wallet via the left-hand menu option. Please note that unlike your academic certificates, the Warwick Award certificate is only available in a digital format.

We've put together guidance on how to access your certificates and badges, as well as how to use them, on a separate page of this website.

Forage is a University of Warwick partner that works with hundreds of organisations and provides a digital work experience platform. With these virtual work experiences, you can complete real remote work experience placements with real companies. They’re a great way to learn about and try out entry-level positions in a range of organisations, as well as building skills too!

Find out more about Forage and virtual work experience: watch the webinar

You can claim points for serving on a student society executive here.

We require you to provide evidence that you held the executive committee or leadership role you are reflecting on, each time you submit to this activity. That evidence should be in the form of an email reference confirming you held the position and completed your duties, from either the current president of the society, or the societies executive team at the Students Union (at studentsactivities@warwicksu.com).

You can electronically share your official documents with any desired third party, such as future employers, through the Gradintelligence service. The procedure for sharing your document is as follows:

• Log into your accountLink opens in a new window.

• Access the ‘My Documents’ option from the homepage or your Wallet and click on the ‘Share’ icon of your chosen credential.

• Specify the details of your share request, enter the recipient’s information and email address, and click continue.

• On the next page, check your details are entered correctly, tick the box if you consent to your document being shared and click ‘Share Now’.

An e-mail, which includes a document access token, will be sent to the recipient’s email address so they can view your verified Warwick Award certificate.

You can include your Warwick Award in either the ‘experience’ or ‘education’ section of your CV. You should include the following details about the Award to assist the reader:

Name of the Award, the awarding body, and the year awarded.

Your award name will be one of the following and your awarding body is the University of Warwick – for example:

• Warwick Award (Gold) – minimum 300 hours of activity for undergraduate students.

• Warwick Award (Postgraduate) – minimum 100 hours of activity for master’s students.

It’s important to mention the number of hours of activity as this helps to convey the commitment that completing the Award required.

It's useful to briefly explain what you did to achieve the Warwick Award, such as ‘Awarded for volunteering, being a Departmental Student Representative, serving on the institutional teaching and learning review panels, and completing four extra online training courses’ or similar. 

You may wish to go into more detail about some of these aspects if they provide particularly strong evidence that you have demonstrated a skill which an employer is looking for.

You can access a wide range of resources to support you in writing a CV through our careers serviceLink opens in a new window. You can also book an Application Review AppointmentLink opens in a new window to help you write about your award in your CV.

Job interviews are another opportunity to sell yourself, and a great opportunity to discuss your Warwick Award accomplishments.

Select the skills development activities that you participated in that are most relevant to the specified job requirements to demonstrate your suitability for the role. Return to your portfolio of reflections and read through the evidence you have already produced through the Warwick Award to prepare, or expand or utilise these for interview examples.

You can find more information around how to prepare for interviews and create these stories via our Careers ServiceLink opens in a new window.

If you’d like to practise answering questions or talk with a member of the Careers Team about interviews, you can book a mock interview through the Careers Service's Guidance appointmentsLink opens in a new window. WBS students can access similar support via CareersPlus.

The Warwick Award requires you to reflect on and articulate how you’ve gained the Core Skills to gain Core Skills Points (CSP); an ability that is something employers ask through recruitment processes and staff professional development. Even if you do not achieve an Award, engaging in the Warwick Award programme at any level will provide you tangible evidence of skills development you can confidently share with employers.

Regardless of whether or not you have achieved an Award, every reflection you write is part of your portfolio of skills development evidence. Many reflections will even have requested that you share evidence within a structured framework (CARE/CAR/STARE), which are used in recruitment to help structure succinct responses.

You can access your reflections any time, even after you graduate and draw on these to support you when preparing for applications or interviews.