Using professional online presences to enhance computing student employability

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1 Using professional online presences to enhance computing student employability Thomas Lancaster Birmingham City University School of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks Millennium Point, Birmingham B4 7XG Abstract The teaching of employability skills is now positioned as a key professional practice component of many Computing courses. However, students do not always consider the wide availability of information that exists about them on the Internet. Much of this information is not professional in nature. Having such undesirable online material can reduce the likelihood of job and Industrial Placement Year applications that students make being successful. Instead, students need to have a Professional Online Presence presenting positive information about them and making themselves appear to be desirable to employ. This paper outlines and reviews the delivery of Professional Practice 2 UG2, a module at Birmingham City University where the development and use of Professional Online Presences are taught and assessed. The success of students at creating Professional Online Presences is evaluated. Students are shown to benefit from this teaching, with an increase of 19% of students believing that they would be perceived professionally online by employers. Keywords Employability, professional online presences, industrial placement years, branding 1. Introduction/Background Many students arriving at university do not seem to realise how important it is that they are perceived professionally online. Particularly within the Computing field, students are expected to be able to develop websites and to have these available to show prospective employers. Applications for Industrial Placement Years, a key driver towards increased student employability, can be improved when students include a link to their own web site. Further, students need to consider their overall Professional Online Presence, that is the information that is returned about them when a prospective employer searches for them online. Professional Online Presences can include websites, e-portfolios and social media Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission The Higher Education Academy

2 sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. They are a key part of branding and marketing for any student looking to build up a professional career. Students need to be findable online and visible in a professional manner to be successful with job applications. Although the need for a Professional Online Presence is gaining traction within UK higher education and has been the subject of HEA workshops (Lancaster et al, 2012), it is not yet an integral part of many Computing degree courses. This paper presents the findings from one delivery of this material, as well as initial evaluative feedback from students that supports the need to formally include this material within teaching. 2. Delivering and Assessing Professional Online Presences The information presented in this paper is based around the teaching on the Professional Practice 2 UG2 at Birmingham City University during the 2011 to 2012 academic year. This is a 15 credit core module taken in the second year by students on the BSc Computer Science and BSc Business Information Technology courses. Delivery of Professional Practice 2 UG2 was over a full academic year. This comprised 24 contact weeks. An integrated delivery pattern was used, with weekly small group 90 minute sessions alternating between computer laboratories and seminar rooms, There was no separate lecture. The sessions were delivered five times per week with 72 students registered on the module. This included small cohorts of resit students and direct entry students, the latter mostly from overseas. Sessions were designed to be interactive and were supported with online activities and discussion forums through the university Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). All assessment for the module was coursework based. The module comprised of two delivery blocks. The first eight weeks concentrated on employability skills, with a particular focus on encouraging students to take a sandwich year placement. Students not electing to apply for placement could apply these skills when looking for graduate employment. The remainder of the module covered research and project skills needed by students to complete a high quality final year project. Figure 1 shows the range of subjects covered during the employability section of Professional Practice 2 UG2. Week Topic Week Topic 1 Online Professional Representation 5 Personal Development Planning 2 The Placement Selection Process 6 Assessment Centre Simulation 3 CV Writing And Application Forms 7 Time Management And Planning 4 Aptitude Tests 8 Interview Techniques Figure 1 Topics Covered During The Employability Section Of Professional Practice 2 UG2 Assessment of the employability skills section of the module was through the production of a Professional Online Presence. This needed to contain information about the student to support placement and job applications, a two year plan for personal development and a CV. Additionally, to encourage students to treat this as an assignment with real life utility,

3 rather than just an academic coursework, marks were awarded for creativity. Components were linked to the weekly classroom teaching and activities, so it would have been possible for students to produce an acceptable Professional Online Presence purely during classroom time, although many students chose to go far beyond this. Few restrictions were placed on the presentation of the Professional Online Presence. Students were free to use any online delivery service that they chose, so long as this could be presented for marking by providing a single URL. Ideally, this URL would then be ready to be placed on CVs and job application forms. Although the purpose of the assignment was to provide a Professional Online Presence in a format ready for potential employers to view, some students elected to keep their information private. That was acceptable, so long as the marker was granted appropriate access permissions. Most students chose to use the university s online Mahara service, intended to support e-portfolios. Students could also elect to use professional social networking services, such as LinkedIn, to create a professional Facebook view or to use their own preferred web service such as a blog. One intention of the assignment was to encourage students to create their professional online presence as a web site. Since students were not being assessed for their skills in developing websites from scratch, they were free to use templates, or to base their sites around Content Management Systems such as WordPress. Although several students started to create a web site, only a few elected to submit this as their final URL for assessment. In all, 70 students attempted the coursework. Figure 2 summarises the delivery services that were chosen by students and the distribution of marks obtained for each. Type Of Site Under 40% 41% to 50% 51% to 60% 61% to 70% 70% Or Higher Total Blog LinkedIn Mahara Website Total Figure 2 Number Of Students Obtaining Marks In Different Bands Grouped By Choice Of Delivery Service For Professional Online Presence Assignment The choices seem to demonstrate a preference by students to stick with university hosted services. 61 out of 70 (53.42%) of students chose to use Mahara, whereas only 7 out of 70 (10%) of students created their own website. Where students did use their own website, they generally obtained higher marks. The students using their own website obtained a mean mark of 74.29%, compared with a mean mark of 53.42% for students who used Mahara. This may be reflective of the general academic ambition of the students who created a web site.

4 The marks for the assignment did show a disappointing number of failures, with 11 out of 70 (15.71%) of students obtaining a mark of below 40% for the assignment. Anecdotal observation suggests this involved a high proportion of direct entry international students who seemed to find it difficult to engage with the employability curriculum. Further study is needed to see how this issue can be addressed. 3. Student Evaluation Of Professional Online Presences During the delivery of Professional Practice 2 UG2, students were twice anonymously surveyed in class using the university Moodle VLE to assess their views on Professional Online Presences and Industrial Placement Years in general. The first survey occurred at the start of the very first session, before the delivery of any of the employability material. The second survey occurred after the Professional Online Presence assignment was submitted, A number of questions used across both of the surveys were identical to enable the views of the students before and after the delivery of the material to be compared. The intention of the survey was multi-fold. As well as providing quantitative data for the purpose of improving the module and its delivery, the results were also discussed in class, used to start the students off in thinking about how they are perceived by employers online, used to initiate class discussions on Industrial Placement Years and to provide data for students to analyse during the academic research section of the module. 59 out of 72 students completed the pre teaching version of the survey. 39 out of 72 students completed the post teaching version. The lower completion is largely reflective of the attendance trends of the module and the optional nature of the survey. Some key results from the surveys are of interest related to Professional Online Presences. Figure 3 shows the percentage of students who stated that they had Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles and their own web site before and after the teaching block. Of particular note is the initial very low take up of use of LinkedIn, a key site for professional networking and obtaining placements, with just 4 out of 59 (6.78%) of students having a LinkedIn profile. This increased to 26 out of 39 (66.67%) of students by the end of the employability delivery, suggesting that even students who did not choose to submit their Professional Online Presence assignment in that format still now saw the value of creating professional profiles. Facebook LinkedIn Website Pre Teaching 71.19% 6.78% 15.25% Post Teaching 74.36% 66.67% 41.03% Figure 3 Percentage Of Students With Professional Online Presence Elements In addition, students considered that they would be viewed as more professional when other people, such as employers, searched for them on the Internet. Figure 4 shows the students self-rating of themselves against the statement how professional do you think other people would perceive you to be after searching for you on the Internet? before and

5 after the employability teaching block % of students considering themselves to be professional or very professional after the teaching, compared with 22.03% before. Figure 4 Percentage Of Students Who Considered That They Would Be Professionally Perceived Online 4. Recommendations for Educational Practitioners The initial in-class findings from this study support the need for students to have a Professional Online Presence. They also suggest that many Computing students engage well when this material is integrated within the wider push towards Industrial Placement Years and making students employable. There are outstanding questions. Key is, how can international students be more engaged with employability when their home country may have different career processes in place? Further, it would be useful to continue to monitor the production of Student Professional Online Presences with larger cohorts and over longer periods and to formally assess if the students embracing these are considered more desirable by employers. Educational practitioners do need to lead from the forefront here, by having their own Professional Online Presences which they can show to students. Resources for teaching these prepared by the Higher Education Academy are available (Lancaster et al, 2012). The work of the wider community is needed to promote Professional Online Presences within all Computing courses and to expand this into other STEM disciplines. References Lancaster, T., Ratcliffe, M., Sharma, M., Hollyhead, A., Moore, J., Sargunam, S., Kear, K., Chetwynd, F, Jackson, V., (2012), Enhancing The Employability Of Computing Students Through An Online Professional Presence Workshop, (November )