Business Research and Professional Practice

Assignment 2: Employability Portfolio – Weight: 30%
Submission: to Turnitin on Blackboard
Deadline for submission: Monday 8th December 2014 by 1pm (13:00)

Aim: The aim of this assignment is to prepare you for the graduate labour market by helping you to determine what you aspire to do, what you currently do best, how you want to present yourself to potential employers and what are your plans to achieve your aims. Your experience of putting together this employment portfolio is a valuable process that you may use throughout your career to evaluate your professional development. The portfolio is a reflection of your organizational skills and attention to detail.

Part one (20%)

Provide a self-assessment of your employability skills. What employability skills have you acquired so far? To what extent have you developed them? (high-level, medium level, low level?) Do not feel that a low score in any skill area is an admission of ‘failure’: you may have no intention to use that skill or you may plan to improve it in the future. The word limit is a maximum of 300 words.

In answering this Part, we recommend you to create a Table with 2 columns. While your employability skills can be listed on the first column, the corresponding self-assessments can be reported in the second column.

Part two (20%)

Explain for each skill selected in Part one the circumstances (e.g. work, academic study extra-curriculum activities, personal circumstances, etc. …) that have led you to gain it. The word limit is a maximum of 300 words.

In answering this Part, we recommend you to create a Table with 2 columns. While your employability skills can be listed on the first column, the narrative about how you acquired them can be reported in the second column.

Part three (15%)

Create a skill based CV (maximum of 2 A4 pages)

Part four (20%)

Find a graduate job vacancy that you would like to apply for just before or after successfully completing university. Please attach this vacancy to your portfolio. You are required to critically evaluate the skills and experiences this employer is looking for and compare these to your current skills and experiences. The word limit for this skill evaluation is a maximum of 300 words.

Part five (25%)

Clearly illustrate what actions you are planning to take during what remains of your undergraduate years in order to fill up the gap between the skills and experiences required for the job selected in Part four and the ones you currently possess.

A useful tool to use is to identify SMART Goals:

S    Specific:  target a specific area for improvement.
M    Measurable: quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress
A    Attainable: state what results can realistically be achieved, given     available resources
R    Relevant: state why it is important to obtain these results in the context of your career aspirations
T    Time-related: specify when the results can be achieved.

The word limit is a maximum of 400 words.

Assignment 2: Marking Criteria                       (100 Marks in total)

Part one (20 Marks in total)
•    Relevance of the employability skills included                 (10 Marks)
•    Description of the employability skills included                (10 Marks)

Part two (20 Marks in total)
•    Relevance of the circumstances given                   (5 Marks)
•    Description of these circumstances                   (8 Marks)
•    Link between self-assessment of employability skills
in Part one and the circumstances provided               (7 Marks)

Part three (15 Marks in total)
•    Presentation                                   (5 Marks)
•    Fit for purpose (content)                           (10 Marks)

Part four (20 Marks in total)
•    Identification of the skills and experiences the employer
is looking for                                   (5 Marks)
•    Critical analysis of these skills and experiences against
the skills and experience you already possess               (15 Marks)

Part five (25 Marks in total)
•    Relevance and description of the SMART Goals identified     (15 Marks)
•    Clear action plan to achieve these Goals                  (10 Marks)

Deadline
Deadlines are the last available time to submit work; you are encouraged to submit earlier
The deadline for this coursework is by Monday 8th December 2014 by 1pm (13:00)

ONLY an electronic copy submitted by the deadline via Blackboard for Turnitin is acceptable. Therefore please ensure that you prepare your work for this form of submission. You are asked to submit a single file.

Absence, late submission of coursework & Mitigating Circumstances
If you submit any element of your CW late but within 24 hours or one working day of the specified deadline, 10% of the overall marks available for that element of assessment (i.e. 10 marks for a 100 mark piece of work) will be deducted, as a penalty for late submission, except for work which obtains a mark in the range 40 – 49%, in which case the mark will be capped at the pass mark (40%).

If you submit your CW more than 24 hours or more than one working day after the specified deadline you will be given a mark of zero for the work in question.
If illness or some unforeseen circumstances unavoidably and significantly affect your performance in assessment (e.g. missing a coursework deadline or failing due to unrepresentative performance), you can submit an application for Mitigating Circumstances (MCs) to be taken into consideration.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a particular form of cheating. Plagiarism must be avoided at all costs and students who break the rules, however innocently, will be penalised.  It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand correct referencing practices. As a University level student, you are expected to use appropriate references and keep carefully detailed notes of all your sources of material, including any material downloaded from the www.
Plagiarism is defined as submission for assessment of material (written, visual or oral) originally produced by another person or persons, without acknowledgement, in such a way that the work could be assumed to be your own. Plagiarism may involve the unattributed use of another person’s work, ideas, opinions, theory, facts, statistics, graphs, models, paintings, performance, computer code, drawings, quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words, or paraphrases of another person’s spoken or written words.
Plagiarism covers both direct copying and copying or paraphrasing with only minor adjustments:
•    a direct quotation from a text must be indicated by the use of quotation marks (or an indented paragraph in italics for a substantive section) and the source of the quote (title, author, page number and date of publication) provided;
•    a paraphrased summary must be indicated by attribution of the author, date and source of the material including page numbers for the section(s) which have been summarised.

NB An essay or report cannot consist merely of summaries of other people’s ideas and texts. You must demonstrate your own critical engagement with, and evaluation of, the material you are presenting or discussing.

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