A number of us recently volunteered to assist the Employability Team by helping them prepare Students, who will soon graduate, for real job interviews that they have coming up.

This week I had the pleasure of helping one of our Employability Advisers to prepare Gregory (not his real name) for a graduate interview he has next week at a very large and well known engineering and aerospace company. This is a great opportunity to help somebody in a very practical way and to potentially directly influence his future.

Now I don’t know very much about Aerospace or Engineering but as anybody who knows me can attest I can wing it with the best of them and a quick bit of google-fu later and I felt ready. The process Gregory will be involved in next week involves delivering a presentation, joining in with a group exercise and finally having a competencies based interview. All competency based interviews are similar in format and question content and he’d even been advised by the employer to prepare his answers in the STAR format, all very familiar and definitely something I could help him with.

By allowing Gregory to practice his interview and presentation skills on us and giving him our feedback in a constructive way we have hopefully increased his chances of being successful. The Employability Advisers are certainly dedicated to our Students and it was a pleasure to meet and work with them.

For those of us who don’t get to interact with Students on a regular basis this is a great way to directly influence their experience and outcomes and I would recommend it to anybody else who would like to get involved in the future.