Nov
‘Your Skills’ Sessions Success Stories!
In case you didn’t already know, ‘Your Skills’ is SUSU’s programme of training provided especially for our student volunteers. Although some of the training is aimed specifically at Sabbatical Officers, Union Councillors and Trustees, there is a wide selection of programmes that all students can attend if they feel they need to brush up on a particular skill or add something a little different to their CV. ‘Your Skills’ is run by volunteers at the University of Southampton who have identified the most frequently used skills in their own roles to help equip students with everything they need to excel in any role they pursue. Many of the sessions are also developed with the help of Career Destinations: the University’s own careers service.
‘How to Write Skills and Influence People’ and ‘Getting it Done’ are two very different sessions that have run in the past. The ‘How to Write Skills and Influence People’ (CV writing) session aimed to help participants confidently reflect on their skills and abilities developed through SUSU and wider University activities in order to evidence base these for internships and the wider job market. The ‘Getting it Done’ (time management) session aimed to enable attendees to feel confident in their own ability to manage their time and facilitate an understanding of what effective time management entails.
To show off the fantastic work of all the ‘Your Skills’ volunteers and to showcase the brilliant sessions they run, I have interviewed students who attended the ‘How to Write Skills and Influence People’ and the ‘Getting it Done’ session to find out how they benefited from the training and generate some general feedback about ‘Your Skills’.
- Why did you choose to attend this particular ‘Your Skills’ session?
“I’m applying for graduate roles so I thought I could really use some help with my CV and job applications”
“I thought it might be good to attend as time management is something I don’t always balance very well”
- What did the session involve?
“We had to identify the key transferable skills that employers want and think about examples in our university and work experience when we used those skills”
“The session involved identifying the pros of good time management, the things that get in the way of doing what we want, and the things that make it difficult to properly manage our time”
3. Would you recommend this particular training session to a friend? If so, why?
“Yes: CV-writing is something we all have to do, so it is a really useful session that anyone could benefit from attending”
“Yes I would. Although some of the things we identified did seem obvious, there were a few tips and extras that were useful.”
- How did you hear about Your Skills?
“I followed a link from Facebook which took me to the SUSU website”
“I saw it in an e-mail.”
- Are there any Your Skills sessions you would like to see organised? What specific skills are you looking for?
“Maybe a few extra committee training ones – sessions specific to effectively running a society committee”
- Would you recommend ‘Your Skills’ to a friend? If so, why?
“Yes. The guys that were running it were really friendly and really involved, like using examples about themselves and sharing their own experiences”
Tags: session, Southampton, SUSU, volunteers