Personal Blogs

Whilst wearing my student hat I went to a careers event that took place on 12 June 2025 for students who were studying arts and humanities modules. I attended because I was curious; I wanted to know what would be covered in sessions like these.

What follows is a set of rough notes I made during the session. The aim of the session was to explore and to find ways to identify what skills employers look for, to learn more about career options for students studying arts and humanities qualifications, and to share resources.

Activities

The session began with an activity, where we were asked a question: what skills do you think employers want from you? This was linked to some research by an organisation called the Bright Network. In their most recent survey (at the time of writing) the top three ‘skills’ identified were: ‘interest in the business’, resilience, commercial awareness.

The next activity we were asked to create what is called a ‘skills calling card’. The idea was that we choose an image, list our top 3 employability skills, and rate them out of 100. In other words, imagine creating your own card for a game of ‘skills top trumps’.

This led to some questions, namely, how might you demonstrate or evidence your top skills by way of examples? This being, of course, being linked to how you pitch yourself within a job applications, CVs and interviews.

Careers

The activities led to the question: what can you do an arts and humanities qualification? There was a discussion about job roles and employers. I was stuck by a particular statistic, that 85% of jobs are open to students who have any degree, which was attributed to an organisation called the institute of student employers.

We were directed to some useful resources: Prospects, which as a section about ‘what you can do with your degree, and the OU jobs platform, opportunity hub. I like Prospects. It is through Prospects that I gained an opportunity for doctoral study, which eventually took me to the OU.

We were encouraged to carry out some further activities in our own time. One was to look through job adverts to identify what skills employers are looking for, what examples can you draw upon to evidence the skills that you might have. Another activity was to look at career paths of OU Alumni through LinkedIn.

Resources

We were introduced to a number of useful resources:

• A badged open course, about having a freelance career in the creative arts (OpenLearn)
• The FutureYou pages presents a summary of ten core employability skills and attributes.

It is interesting that these attributes have been only related to Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences modules. They can, of course, also be applied to modules from other faculties.

A reminder was given that all students have access to the Careers and Employability Service, which can be found through the Help Centre. The services provides advice for about writing of your CV and preparing for an interview. You can also book in an appointment with a professional career advisor.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the presenter and the facilitator, and the careers team who devised this session up.

Over the last couple of weeks I've started to study A111 Discovering the arts and humanities, which is a foundation module for degrees in the arts and humanities. Other than having a couple of English GCSEs, I've never formally studied the arts and humanities. 

One of the recommendations is to begin what is called a learning journal. There are many different ways to keep one: long form notes that you keep in an A4 file, or a Word document. I've decided to go one step further and share parts of my learning journal on a blog, and make my posts visible by the A111 tag. I plan to post one of these a month.

I got my books in early September, and having a busy day job, I got stuck in before the official module start date. Here's what I've been up to.

12 Sep 20

I started reading about Cleopatra and quickly realised that I don’t know anything. I didn’t know about Caesar was assassinated, and that there were connections to Greece, Rome and Egypt. I was introduced to the point about different perspectives. I read the FAQ on the module website. A thought is: get a regular study pattern in the morning, and try to get ahead!

26 Sep 20

Getting ahead of myself, I started reading the chapter about Mary (the mother of Jesus). I didn’t know that the story of the nativity comes from different gospels (Luke and another one) and that there were these other texts that were not included into the bible. I learnt about the origins of the word ‘polemic’ and also didn’t know that there were so many references to Mary in the Quran. All this stuff is new to me.

30 Sep 20

Finished reading section 4 of Mary, which was about how Mary is worshipped and can appear in apparitions. After reading the section, I realised that the different chapters of this first book relate to different disciplines. It’s really obvious now that I’ve noticed it. 

After finishing section 4, I went back to the website, and noticed that there were further module materials to go through that I hadn’t seen before.

I enjoyed the videos ‘Cleopatra in Hollywood’ and ‘Cleopatra on TV’. I had a quick look through the skills section about using sources (I must return back to this), and spent a bit of time working through the section on notes. 

A note to self: I need to figure out a way to start to make notes whilst I read stuff. I need to listen to the In Our Time clip from BBC Radio 4 that is linked to from the module materials. I learn better by listening than by reading.

Next blog takes me to the start of October.