Life Design inspiration for setting
a Lifelong Employability Program
Our journey at University of Porto (Portugal), by Maria Cadilhe and Ana Rodrigues
At the time we participated in the first Virtual Life Design Studio, in June 2020, we were already developing an employability program for undergraduate and master students that aimed to develop their skills to design and redesign their professional lifelong career paths in an intentional, contextualized, and autonomous manner.
It was great to realize that it made perfect sense to incorporate the principles and methodologies of Life Design into our program!
WHAT WE DID?
Before we even realized it, we were using Design Thinking processes to develop our program: we started by listening to students and companies on the subject of employability, about their needs and concerns. This was our way of empathizing.
Considering the results of this auscultation, our area of expertise (work psychology) and our biggest takeaways from Life Design Studio, we build a learning roadmap (below) for our program.
It is important to note that it was designed to be implemented in a blended-learning format, and that the influence of Design your Life on the contents and methodologies used is very visible, although we have made adjustments in view of the cultural differences of our context.
Below, we detail the initiatives of our Learning Roadmap, to deepen the way we apply it:
Be Aware | 4-hours presential workshop, that kicks off the program implementation. We do it with a maximum of 50 students per workshop, so we divide them into several classes when we have more students enrolled. The purpose is to explore trends in the world that impact career paths (e.g., automation, ageing of the population, climate changes); to demystify preconceived ideas about life design; and to promote their bias to action and radical collaboration (with each other, as we mix them from different curricular years and courses). In general, it is a stage of accepting.
After the workshop, students are asked to individually fill in three different sheets (“Be Prepared”, “Be yourself” and “Be Wise”). They have micro-learnings with examples to help them do it by themselves.
Be Prepared | This sheet has two exercises: first they must start by recovering their past experiences in their work, academic, personal, family, and social lives. Then, they must reflect and write the names of the people that most impacted their journey until that moment. This is a very important stage once we believe it will inform their world and work view, and it is the first step for them to reflect about key dimensions of themselves before they start ideating or prototyping. This is a stage of emphasizing.
Be Yourself | This sheet starts with 3 exercises for students to “look inside”, with questions that seem very simple but are very hard to answer (what do I know?; what do I value?; what is limiting me?). They should think about these questions considering their past experiences, as they will inform them about the skills they developed and about their past “flow experiences”. Then, they have two more exercises they need to complete that are all about ideating: they must think about different geographies, different activity sectors, different companies and job functions they would like to know more about, or they would like to experiment. They should also think about people they would like to meet and to have in their career design network. This will inform their next step: to prepare their prototypes!
Be Wise | This sheet asks students to create a short-term (12-month) planning regarding what they would like to experiment and deepen. They must complete an action plan to make sure they complete their goals. This is a stage of preparing for prototyping.
Employability Toolkit | This toolkit is composed of 5 different modules with technical content regarding employability, namely: how to analyze the labor market; how to prepare a CV; how to write a Cover Letter; how to manage the digital footprint and network; and how to prepare for an interview. Students need to complete a series of exercises and explore different resources to complete this stage.
Career Sharing Podcast | We developed a Podcast that aims to be an example of prototyping conversations: it consists of short conversations with our University Alumni about their professional paths, their integration in the labor market and the job they are performing at the moment. We did the first set of interviews, but now students are conducting them by themselves (with our support preparing them).
Ongoing Initiatives | We wanted to make sure we took advantage of the resources available in the community, so we prepared a list of initiatives that are already developed in the University (e.g., Career Fairs) and in the city (e.g., local projects and workshops about careers and jobs), and we decided that the participation in those activities would be counted as time associated with our program. We want to stimulate their bias to action!
Get to Know Initiatives | In order for students to prototype experiences and get to know more about different contexts they can experiment, we organize visits to companies (from different activity sectors and with different cultures). Students are invited to prepare those moments by searching about the company they will visit and prepare in advance questions that clarify their curiosities.
MAIN SURPRISES AND CHALLENGES
We carried out our own prototype last semester, with 32 engineering students, and the results were very encouraging (from our monitoring and impact evaluation process, that considered a pre-test/post-test comparison):
The students seemed to feel, after finishing the program, more capable of designing an action plan to reach their goals; more aware of the skills they acquired in their past experiences and of the constraints that impact their academic and individual path; they also feel more capable to identify people who can help them get to know the job market;
We shared a list of actions with the students (e.g., talking to someone about their career path, visiting a company, etc.) and asked them which ones they had already done. The average percentage of doing the actions listed went from 59.62% in the pre-test to 80% by the end of the post-test, which seems to indicate promotion of the bias to action;
Statistically significant mean differences lead us to believe that students have become more prepared to act upon constraints that have an influence on their academic and professional path; more able to evaluate their progress according to personal criteria (and not by comparison with others); and more willing to support others in building their employability tools (e.g., CV or LinkedIn profile);
By agglomerating the items by dimensions of analysis it is possible to understand that there are positive effects on self-efficacy, self-awareness, and sense of collective influence.
We are now running a new edition with 250 students (also from engineering) this semester, considering again the monitoring and impact evaluation processes, to robust these results.
One of the big challenges is to maintain the quality of the program and student outreach with such a significantly larger group, but we believe we are managing to do this by dividing the students into classes of 50, by creating sharing forums on the University's distance learning platform (Moodle), and by using other strategies.
HOPES FOR THE FUTURE
We are running these first editions with engineering students (from the 2nd year of the bachelor's degree until the last year of the master's degree), but our goal is to reach all areas of study in the future.
We hope to have even more data and resources to share with you over time and are very pleased to be moving forward with this program that has such an impact on the lives of the students involved!