As a PGT student at King’s myself, I often noticed the lack of specific career resources for me. It was quite difficult navigating my way away from Undergraduates and Postgraduate Research students, and finding something substantial for my level of education.
This is why I wanted to work towards ensuring PGT students felt included, differentiated, and attended to within the Careers department. With the current job market, employability is a key issue - many students choose to study a master's to appear more employable, so it was important to make sure that these needs were catered for within the King’s Careers department.
The first step of achieving this manifesto aim was to meet with the King’s Careers department and put forward a rationale. After a few meetings, I designed a survey particularly targeted towards PGT students and their expectations and requirements of the careers department. This survey helped to garner feedback and ideas from master’s students to enhance the existing service provided by the department.
The survey was open for about a month and received around 500 responses. The survey was pushed out on various PGT channels, Instagram stories/posts, and the Officer’s Update to ensure maximum engagement and responses.
The careers department at King’s welcomed all the feedback the survey provided and has promised to include more PGT intensive resources comprising of:
- a Keats page specific for Masters students
- a dedicated PGT week “Focus on Masters” in the career fairs with faculty-focused drop-ins
- and more use of blogs/social media to direct and address PGT students specifically.
I think these 3 implementations are significant changes that have been made and I’m sure will be wildly appreciated by the PGT student body who now have a clear and direct way to connect with employers, and have tailor-made fairs for them. It would be interesting to revisit student opinion in a year or so to gauge whether the changes have actually proven to be beneficial and if you have any other suggestions, email me at [email protected]!