Self-management

What's it about?

At job interviews you won’t just be asked about your academic achievements and previous employment. Employers will also want to look at your key skills and personal qualities.

By demonstrating a systematic approach to assessing your skills and abilities, and setting realistic goals for your future development, you'll show potential employers that you have a confident and businesslike approach that would be an asset to their business.

What follows is a range of resources to help you record and monitor your progress. The objective is to ensure that you leave university with a complete record of all your skills, experience and achievements so that you’re ready to start impressing employers.

Different students work in different ways so use the resources you find most useful.

Self-assessment

Assessing your skills will help you to understand what you are good at, what you enjoy, and where you could gain from different experiences. You should assess both your employability skills as well as your practical and technical skills to:

• identify how your skills match different careers you are considering
• generate new job ideas
• identify what skills you need to develop to increase your employability
• give you ideas on how you could develop these skills
• think about what evidence you can provide to demonstrate your abilities.

Reflective practice

Reflective practice is a key tool in several professions and is also incorporated into many academic programmes to help you to reflect critically on your work, learn from experience and improve your performance. 

By keeping a Learning Log (or tools within studentfolio) and reviewing your progress, by reflecting on key events – or critical incidents – in a structured way to help you learn from all your experiences – whether inside or outside the university.

There are a series of characteristics that are associated with being a reflective learner. It can help you to:

• Become a more efficient and effective learner by understanding your own learning and being willing to change
• Analyse how you learn and evaluate the process taken
• Be critical, by probing and questioning yourself and others
• Share your thoughts and ideas with others to gain responses and further ideas.

Read more about maintaining a Learning Log (GTK03) (pdf 160kb)

This reflective approach is based on research into how adults learn, which suggests that people tend to follow a continuous ‘learning cycle’ which includes four different stages.

• You have an experience (you do it)
• You reflect upon it from your own standpoint (you review it)
• You try to evolve some general rules or link it to existing knowledge about the situation, perhaps through reading or discussion (you learn from it)
• You bring your newly acquired knowledge back to the next experience (you plan for next time)

This is a highly simplified description. If you’re interested in finding out more, read James Atherton's description of The Experiential Learning Cycle .

Although you might have a preference for a particular stage of the cycle (e.g. do you usually try things out experimentally or read the instructions first?) you benefit from extending your competence in each of the other areas. The more honestly you can look at your experiences and think about how you approach different situations, the more you’ll be able to improve and develop your understanding and abilities.

In other words, don’t miss any of the four stages out.

Career planning

You should be able to demonstrate that you can set realistic and achievable goals for yourself and your future career.

Start by considering where you see yourself being in the medium term:

Complete the Career Goals Quiz (GTK04, word 51kb) and think about where you want to be in five years' time.

Now use your responses to the quiz, together with the guidelines on SMART goals below, to develop your ideas further.

Devise your own series of Career, Academic and Personal Goals (GTK05, word 49kb).

Use the Academic Plan (GTK06, word 64kb) to break your academic goals down into manageable steps.

SMART goals

SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

SMART goals is a way of setting objectives that are achievable and effective and is used in a range of areas including project management, performance management and personal development.

Business skills

Business skills include being able to show awareness of:

• Work and organisational cultures
• Financial and commercial awareness
• Numeracy and budgeting skills
• Networking skills
• Report writing, submitting business case studies and proposals
• Corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

It's likely that some of these examples won't relate directly to your personal experiences. Try researching company websites and our enterprise pages to gather information on some of these topics to improve your awareness.

Core skills

Can you demonstrate the ability to maintain and develop skills such as literacy, numeracy and IT proficiency to a level required for your chosen career, or that will meet the expectations of the relevant professional bodies in your field?

Examples of literacy skills could include

• written course work assignments that require you to establish, critique and develop arguments
• writing for websites or blogs
• writing for print publications

Examples of numeracy skills could include

• cashing up at work
• managing a project budget
• ensuring the books are balanced
• devising, analysing and summarising numerical or statistical reports
• reporting figures from an organisation to an external body.

Examples of IT proficiency could include:

• using IT for your course work and assignments
• using spreadsheets to collect and analyse information
• having skills in specialist software packages
• doing research using the web
• using social media to achieve a work or study-related goal
• setting up a website or blog
• managing an online forum
• being aware of new hardware and software developments and keeping your skills up to date

Well-being

it's important to understand the need to manage your own health and well-being, and also that of staff when in a managerial position where you will have a duty of care to those you manage.

Well-being is about finding a balanced approach to life while you are at university. This means taking care of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

Student wellbeing includes:

• getting the right balance between your academic and social life: studying well and having fun.
• managing your financial health, and learning to how to plan your spending and budget effectively
• understanding the importance of eating well, being active and sleeping enough.
• feeling part of, and contributing to, a community. This involves developing relationships so you can reach out for help and support when you feel you need it and knowing who your support networks are.

You'll need to show awareness of the need to strike the same balance between your work and personal life when you embark on your career, post-university.

See the university's page on counselling and wellbeing for more information.

The money matters site has advice on money management, including an interactive budget planner.

Graduate Toolkit and personal tutoring

Use these and other Graduate Toolkit resources to help you review your overall progress and identify priorities for future development. If you do this just before each scheduled tutorial, you and your tutor will have a much clearer agenda for discussion.

Keeping a record of tutorial meetings (GTK07, word 47kb) will help you in preparing for meetings and recording outcomes.

Remind yourself about the personal tutoring process (GTK08, pdf 173kb)

What's next?

Now we'll look at ways you can evidence your communication skills.