Your blog assignment brief for the Career Management Unit (CMU)

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Here’s everything you need to know about the blog assignment for your BSc Psychology 2nd year Career Management Unit.

Assignment Details, Deadlines and Weightings: You will write TWO, 500 word blog posts that are designed to help you to reflect on your experiences of thinking about your future career and digital confidence. We expect that you will need most of this 500 word allowance to enable you to meet the marking criteria. The overall weighting for the blogs will be 30% and this will be the mean of the grades for the 2 individual blog posts that you will write. You can start writing your blog posts at any time from the beginning of Semester 2 but the final deadline for both posts to be submitted to Bb and published is: Wednesday May 5th.

What should my blog posts be about?

Your blogs will be reflective. You must choose Option 1 below (this is compulsory) and then you have a free choice of any of the remaining titles. Please note the descriptions below are conceptual and you do not need to use the same language/terms of expression in your blogs. In fact, it would be much better if you generate your own title around these themes. In example 1 (below), for instance, I am using ‘career readiness’ in a very general sense — you could talk about ‘knowing what I want to do’, ‘figuring out my interests’, or ‘preparing for my career’.

1. Exploring your ‘career readiness’ (compulsory)

Tips: you have completed the career self-efficacy/digital capability questionnaire & perhaps looked again at your CV: How did these experiences make you feel and what have you learned about where you are as a result of these activities? Do you feel daunted by the propect of what to do beyong university or do you feel that you have identified a path towards which you are working?

You ca find a link to the questions from these two scales here: https://medium.com/building-digital-skills-for-the-future/first-blog-the-career-digital-confidence-scales-9f2651623700……and you should have received an email from Jaymie Marinelli with your scores and your cohort scores for comparison. If you don’t have this email, contact Jaymie at jaymie.marinelli@manchester.ac.uk

Then choose ONE option from options 2–5

2. Wht have you learnt on the completion of your assessment centre/confidence workshop/interview/presentation assignment.

Tips/suggestions: What have your experiences of preparing for and taking part in, one of these elements above taught you about your skill set and abilities? How do you know this? Given the knowledge gaps that you have identified during your preparation, to your feelings and reactions on the day, what do you now understand to be your strengths and areas for development? What do you feel are the best ways forward for you?

If you did the confidence workshop, you could write about what challenging goal did you set yourself and why? Why did you take the steps and actions that you did to move forward and how did your actions, including your peer coaching experiences, help? Based on your reactions to this experience, what have you learnt about yourself?

3. Reflecting on your own experiences during 2020/21 please discuss ways that psychology students can develop their digital skills and confidence during their second and final year?

Tips: How have you managed to develop your digital skills during this period? What obstacles did you encounter and how did you overcome these? What do you wish you had known at the start of the year that you now know? What advice can you now share with other psychology students?

4. What does confidence mean to you? What have been the most effective ways for you to build your confidence levels during 2020/21, both within and outside of University?

Tips: Confidence means different things to different people, but what does it mean for you? How was confidence holding you back? How did you manage to build it and what will you now be able to achieve that you could not earlier? How will you continue to build your confidence moving forward?

5. How have your confidence levels developed during your second year? How did you make use of the confidence sessions and peer coaching and how did your confidence levels change as a result?

Tips: What was your confidence like at the start of the year? Why did you opt to increase your skills in this area? In what ways was a lack of confidence holding you back and how did the sessions lead to changes in your confidence? What will you be able to do with your confidence that you could not do previously and how will you continue to build your confidence as you go forward in your career?

You can access the Marking Criteria for the blogs here: XXXXXXX

Who is the intended audience for my blogs?

Your blogs should be written to appeal to an audience of undergraduate students who are motivated to read and/or learn about what others like them think and do about their career preparations. You can decide whether to refer specifically to ‘Psychology’ as your discipline.

How do I submit?

Your blog writing and creation will be supported using online materials and through attendance at a session in Week 1 of Semester 2. The session will also be recorded so you can watch it back at a later date. You can also email doron.cohen@manchester.ac.uk for support. You must submit a PDF version of each of your blog posts to Blackboard and you can also choose not to publish your blog posts on Medium, although we strongly encourage you to consider publishing as this will help you to enhance your digital literacy skills. See below for how to create a pdf from your Medium blog so that you can submit it to Bb.

Here is the link in Medium that tells you how to print to a pdf creator in case you don’t know: https://medium.com/@billyhalim/how-to-save-a-web-page-as-a-pdf-11e83f976117

You will need to set up your Medium account to create your blog, but you can delete each story as soon as you have created your pdf if you do not want to punblish publicly.

Are there any guidelines for writing and creating my blog?

You will find a number of links to resources to support you in creating your blog here https://medium.com/building-digital-skills-for-the-future/support-for-your-assessment-d8e900fa0ea1

Reflective Learning

We want your blogs to be as reflecive as possible. You should demonstrate reflection by writing about both the process and outcome of your reflection. This means moving beyond the descriptive, and subjecting your experience to greater scrutiny.

Reflective writing is evidence of reflective thinking. In an academic context, reflective thinking involves:

1. Looking back at something (often an event, i.e. something that happened on placement).
2. Analysing the event (thinking in depth and from different perspectives, and trying to explain).
3. Thinking carefully about what the event means for you and your ongoing progress as a learner and a person exploring your possible future.

To help structure reflective thinking into a reflective writing piece for your blog, it might be useful to consider: What? So what? Now what?

1. What? means a description: a short summary of what happened in which you only focuss on the relevant aspects of the event.
2. So what? is an interpretation of what is interesting, relevant and important about the event. Is the event similar or different to other previous experiences (even outside of a workplace, e.g. in University, Society, home-life etc.)
3. Now what? is a consideration of the outcome of the event for yourself, for now and in your future. How has it changed your or made you think differently?

Reflective writing is characterised by ‘revealing’ through outlining the process of revelation, who you are and for this assignment, how who you are informs where you might ‘fit’ in the future.

Here are some references that will be useful if you want to learn more about reflective writing and thinking.

Boud, D. & Walker, D. (1985) Barriers to reflection on experience, in D. Boud, R.Keogh and D.Walker (Eds.) Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. Kogan Page, London.

Mezirow, J. (1991) Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco: