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Employability and skills
It is important while you're at Kent that you not only get a good degree in Economics but that you also get yourself ready for life after University. Our degrees provide you not only with economics training but also with many transferable skills.
Across the University there are a lot of opportunities to develop new skills and gain experience that will strengthen your CV and benefit you when you're looking for jobs, for instance:
- Paid work via the Kent Union Jobshop
- Volunteering
- Organising or taking part in a student society
- Becoming a student representative for your course
- Becoming a student ambassador
- Learning another language
- IT skills
- Enterprise and business skills
Employability
The University's employability web pages provide links to sites for advice and opportunities to gain transferable skills.
The Careers Service website provides an exceptionally comprehensive service covering career choices, CV writing and interview skills.
There are pages on 'I want work in... Economics' and 'What can I do with a degree in Economics?'. There are also pages on related career areas.
Skills
Most employers are looking for skills such as good communication, initiative and proactiveness, team working, time management, planning and organisation, analysing information and problem solving. While you are studying you should be aware of what skills you are gaining. If you have a chosen career in mind, how do these skills apply? Are there any other skills you need?
Your degree in Economics provides you with a range of transferable skills that include:
- communicating well in speech and writing
- numeracy
- thinking through and presenting logical arguments
- problem solving
- making decisions
- using IT well
- working with others
- time management
- managing and improving your own learning and performance
The Student Learning Advisory Service provides skills workshops and materials, with some particularly targeted at postgraduates.
The Graduate School runs the Global Skills Award for transferable skills training for MSc students.
Personal development planning
Personal development planning is a way of recording, monitoring and reflecting on what you learn while you are at Kent. There is background information on the UELT website or you can go directly to the PDP pages.
MyFolio is Kent's online ePortfolio and PDP tool. You can use MyFolio to create journals for reflection and pages for presentation and assessment. You can choose the parts of your profile and pages to be viewed by other MyFolio users, and even make your pages visible on the internet. Any pages you create can be exported as HTML, so you can use MyFolio to create an online CV which you can share with employers.
For more information please visit MyFolio.