Report on Workshop 1 – 12th November 2008
Midlands Philosophy Research Training Network
Birmingham, Birmingham City, Keele, Staffordshire, Warwick
Event 1: Employability workshop for advanced PhD students
University of Birmingham, Wednesday 12 November 2008
REPORT ON FEEDBACK
Attendance: 6 PhD students (Staffs: 3, Warwick: 2, BCU: 1)
Quantitative questionnaire scores (averages, marked out of 5):
Sessions:
Writing your CV: 4.8
Preparing for job interviews: 4.7
Presenting your job talk: 4.5
Overall:
Content of the workshop: 4.7
Presentation of the workshop: 4.8
Overall satisfaction: 4.8
Everyone said they were ‘very likely’ to change some aspect of how they approach their PhD/professional development activities as a result of the workshop.
Some comments from participants:
- “Practical and useful advice. The presenter was very honest and engaging.”
- “The information about how to sell myself in my CV was particularly informative.”
- “I have learned to appreciate the varying aspects of preparing for employment in philosophy.”
Suggestions for improvement/additions from participants:
- “Maybe CV analysis on the day (though the presenter offered to check our CVs if we emailed them to her).”
- “More examples of good CVs.”
- “Perhaps some examples of jobs that have been on offer and analysis of what they are looking for.”
Comments from workshop presenter:
I’m really glad everyone got something out of this. It’s a shame attendance wasn’t higher, in that there must be a lot of other PhD students who also would have learned something from it. That also meant we had to cancel the ‘mock job talk’ session, as we only had one volunteer. On the other hand having a small (and enthusiastic!) group probably made the day go better.
The suggestions are all good. (There wouldn’t really be time to actually look properly at people’s CVs on the day, but it was a bit of an afterthought to tell people they could email me their CVs, and I’ll remember to do this again in future.) I had to be selective about material due to time constraints, so perhaps the moral is that we should have more workshops on the employability theme than we were envisaging, so that we can cover more territory. (E.g. we could start with more general information about the job market, looking at adverts, etc., before moving on to the specific advice about CVs and so on.)
I could probably find someone with an entry-level job to let me distribute their CV so that people have a concrete example of a successful one.
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