Week 11: Forum – How Do you Embed Employability, Enterprise and Professional Practice?

• How are you embedding student employability, enterprise and professional practice, in the various ways you are supporting your students' learning in HE?

• What else could you do to develop this further?

The students that I teach are all being prepared to work in the arts after university both in an independent and collaborative level through personal projects and group work.  Students are taught practical new hand and machine skills and are marked specifically on their journaling to allow them to look back on note taking, providing transferrable skills. Their ceramics modules teach students to be flexible, and the process of making with ceramics invites enterprising skills by inviting innovative and adaptable mindsets.

Students are exposed to various practicing visiting artists and people from industry, for example graduates 5 years on, established artists, curators, manufacturers, museum associates. This considers the broad and varied careers that the students could go into. Students are given the opportunity to vote and decide from a list who they would like to visit the course. This is beneficial to allow students to choose personally and gives them a direction to their learning. We specifically request that talks are themed around module topics, professional practice subjects, specific skills, or creative industries.

I feel that there could be more support in the future towards professional practice, specifically online presence for artists, as this is such an important part of the day to day running of a creative practice. Further to this, supplying further support with website building, photographing finished work, application writing and how to approach galleries or places of industry would be supportive additions.