Welcome to the final day of Innovative Learning Week.

This week we have been sharing the thoughts and experiences of Edinburgh online distance-learning graduates. I would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to all of the graduates who supported us with this initiative.

The final question that we asked them was a rather free ranging one:

What other insight or advice you would like to offer current ODL students?

Here’s what they said:

Recognise the opportunity you have:

See your course as a great opportunity!
Enjoy the course – my Edinburgh journey was very fulfilling and motivating
Online distance learning offers the best avenue to exploit personal abilities. Working with studies keeps one upright and alert.

Consider what to focus on and the opportunities that your choices will present:

Again, pick a topic that truly interests you. Look for a programme that builds a bit of a community, you will be alone most of the time and this can help.

Some practical tips:

Don’t shy away from getting clarity on the assignment questions
Take full advantage of the personal tutor you’ve been allocated, they are very friendly and very helpful when you have any academic queries.
If you’re struggling with the workload don’t be afraid to talk to your tutors about it.
Try to stay engaged with your ODL coursework throughout the week, even if it’s doing a little reading on your lunch break or commute.
Read and understand what constitutes plagiarism, a good number of my batch mates lost marks due to this.

It may not always be easy, but keep motivated and you will succeed:

Even if times are hard, try to motivate yourself, you are able to do it!
If you think you would need certain number of hours per week for a course, it is likely double that in reality. Make sure you adjust your schedules!
It is hard to balance full time work and study. Your social life will suffer but the end will appear in sight!
Commit time to work and studies according to the time you have available.
Utilize the opportunity you have at Edinburgh, keep up with the work, submit assignments on time, discuss with other students, consult your mentors and tutors and the rest will be history.

What advice could you offer to your fellow ODL students?

Post your Tweets at: – https://twitter.com/uofedcareers # EdODLcareers

I hope that you have enjoyed this careers event. Although we are now at the end of Innovative Learning Week, you can continue to ‘follow’ Career Connect – if you have not already signed up to do so by email, you will find our ‘follow’ tab at the top right hand side of the Career Connect home page.

Thanks to all who participated in this event.

Reflecting on your Values

February 18, 2016

Carol Macdonald

Welcome to Innovative Learning Week – day 4

Deciding on your preferred future career direction is often a challenging process. There will be a number of factors which will influence your conclusion, including what is important to you and what will give you satisfaction in your next role. My colleague Lizzie Mortimer suggests an exercise to help you to reflect on your personal values and to identify which are most significant for you.

When did you last take some time to reflect on your values?

Our values play an important part in career decision making. Identifying what is important to us at a given stage in our life will help us assess whether a current or future role is a good fit for us.

In the book ‘Build your own Rainbow’ Hopson and Scally set forth an exercise to help individuals consider what their values are – and rank them in to levels of importance.

Try it for yourself:

Label 5 columns: Very Important, Important, Quite Important, Of Some Importance, Not Important
Using the list of values below, arrange them in to appropriate columns for you
Add more values if you want to
N.B. Hopson and Scally suggest that if you have more than seven or eight in the Very Important column, you haven’t been discriminating enough.
You now have a tool you can use to analyse your current position or situation, and future possibilities
As an extended activity, rearrange the cards the way you would have five or ten years ago – what has changed?

List of values

VALUE or MOTIVATOR
A well-known organisation: you like being part of a well-known organisation.
Artistic: you enjoy work involving drawing, designing, making music, making models, etc.
Being Expert: you like being known as someone with special knowledge or skills.
Challenge: you enjoy being ‘stretched’ and given new problems to work on.
Communication: you enjoy being able to express ideas well in writing or in speech.
Community: you like to live in a place where you can get involved in the community.
Competition: you enjoy competing against other people or groups.
Contact with people: you enjoy having a lot of contact with people.
Creativity: thinking up new ideas and ways of doing things is important to you.
Excitement: it is important for you to have a lot of excitement in your work.
Fast pace: you enjoy working rapidly at a high pace.
Friendship: you would or do like close friendships with people at work.
Help society: you like to think that your work is producing something worthwhile for society.
Helping others: it is important to you to help other people, either individually or in groups, as part of your work.
Independence: you like being able to work in the way you want, without others telling you what to do.
Learning: it is important for you to learn new things.
Making decisions: it is important to you to have to make decisions about how things should be done, who should do it and when it should be done.
Money: earning a large amount of money is important to you.
Peace: you prefer to have few pressures or uncomfortable demands.
Persuading people: you enjoy persuading people to buy something or change their minds about something.
Physical challenge: you enjoy doing something that is physically demanding.
Place of work: it is important that you work in the right part of the country for you.
Precise work: you like working at things which involve great care and concentration.
Pressure: you like working to deadlines.
Promotion: you like to work where there is a good chance of promotion.
Recognition: you do like people to appreciate you for the work you do.
Risk: you like to take risks.
Routine: you like a work routine which is fairly predictable.
Security: it is important to know your work will always be there for you.
Status: you enjoy being in a position which leads other people to respect you.
Supervision: you enjoy being responsible for work done by others.
Time Freedom: you prefer to be able to choose your own times for doing things, not having rigid working hours.
Variety: you enjoy having lots of different things to do.
Work alone: you like to work on your own.
Work with others: you like to work in a team alongside others.

This material is drawn from Build Your Own Rainbow – a workbook for career and life management by Barrie Hopson and Mike Scally, published by Management Books 2000 Ltd.

ã Lifeskills International 1996

Leadership – what makes a good manager?

February 17, 2016

Carol Macdonald

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Welcome to Innovative Learning Week – day 3

Does your current role involve managing staff or leading project groups? If not at present, could this be the case in the future?

Leadership ability is an important issue for professionals in all employment sectors and something which many employers place near the top of their ‘wish list’ when recruiting staff.

We all have views on what makes a good leader, but how similar are these views? While some of you may have read extensively around this subject, or have undertaken management training, I suspect that many of you will base judgements on your own personal experience. We can all reflect on how the actions of our line managers and supervisors impact on our motivation, energy and confidence.

So, what in your opinion makes a good manager?

I hope that you will find it helpful to share your views on this on Twitter. But first, here are some thoughts and ideas from the ODL graduates who have been helping us with this week’s event. We asked them the following questions:

What in your opinion makes a good manager?

A good manager gets involved with your work, is able to discuss options and ideas with you, knows your strengths and weaknesses.
A good manager shows consistency in making the right decisions and when he/she goes wrong accepts to be corrected.
Supportive; good listener; fair; decisive.
A manager who gives leg room to staff, allows staff to exploit their abilities and potential.
I guess my PhD supervisors are managers of a sort, and they are both excellent. They are receptive to my ideas but lay out possible directions I can take if I get stuck.
A good manager listens, is understanding, remains calm in a crisis and acts decisively.
A great manager is always in control of the situation. Even in difficult times, he/ she never loses temper and is always able to motivate their employees.

What opportunities have you taken to develop your leadership skills?

Training and openness to new ideas.
Volunteering as well as on the job training.
I’m hopefully about to start a student environmental journal. So that!
Take the chance to lead when you can – group work with colleagues, leading a workshop or session in a conference, etc.
Taken several corporate leadership training opportunities while at work, and embracing working with and listening to role models and mentors.

You can take part in the linked Twitter discussion at: twitter.com/uofedcareers #EdODLcareers

Follow Career Connect to access tomorrow’s Innovative Learning Week blog post.

Studying while working can be challenging – what helps?

February 16, 2016

Carol Macdonald

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Welcome to Innovative Learning Week – day 2

Studying while you are working can be a challenging experience, and the situation will no doubt be very much the same for those of you who are not currently in paid employment but who are balancing study alongside other responsibilities and ongoing commitments.

The question we are addressing today is: What helps?

A number of Edinburgh ODL graduates gave us an insight into what helped them to succeed. A few themes became apparent from the comments received:

Having a genuine interest in the subject makes a real difference:

The key is to do something that really interests you. I have completed two ODL Masters programmes but previously had started another one. The latter was less interesting and was less relevant to me on a day to day basis. Additionally, do it at the right time of life; I started that when my son was a toddler – so all too much.
It helped that the subject was really something I wanted to explore and courses were fun!

It’s all about your motivation and drive, and how you approach your studies:

Good organization, a weekly schedule and discipline.
Self-discipline when it comes to allocating time to study.
Pure determination – nothing else helps!
Prioritization and Discipline.
I had a strong will to succeed at my degree.
Consulting my workmates, and scheduling my time between work and studies.
I did a little bit of coursework every day or every other day instead of leaving it all to my days off. It made the workload more manageable and kept me focused.

Explore alternative working arrangements:

Flexible work hours help – make use of this if you have the opportunity.

It’s been a few years since I completed my own distance learning course but finding somewhere to work was an initial concern; maybe some of you can relate to that. The solution for me was to spend regular evenings and quite a few Saturdays in the office. The peace and quiet was wonderful and having access to a good PC a bonus. I was fortunate that my employer was very supportive.

What has helped you?

Share your views on Twitter – twitter.com/uofedcareers # EdODLcareers

Check out our next Career Connect post tomorrow.

Distance learning degrees – what are the benefits?

February 15, 2016

Carol Macdonald

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Welcome to Innovative Learning Week!

We hope that you will enjoy reading about the experiences and reflections of a number of Edinburgh ODL graduates through our daily blog posts this week. We also hope that this will encourage you to get involved in this careers ‘event’ by sharing your own views through our daily Twitter discussions.

ODL students and graduates tend to be a fairly diverse group of people. You will each have your own particular motivation for embarking on a distance-learning degree. If you are already established in your chosen field, you may be focussed on developing particular knowledge and understanding or to specific skills that will help you to progress in a particular direction. Some of you however may be considering a complete career change, or aiming to secure your first graduate job. Others may perhaps be primarily driven by personal interest or your love of an academic challenge. Whatever has motivated you to study will impact on your hopes and expectations about how your degree may influence your future.

We thought that you would be interested in what Edinburgh graduates identified as some of the benefits from their ODL experience, so we asked the following questions:

How has your ODL degree influenced your career development?
Has it benefited you in any other ways?

Here’s what they said:

Career influences a general nature included:

I got a new perspective on things, and I also got more interested in academic work.
Greater career opportunities, possibility of a PhD.
It made me more literate in the science, politics, and economics of environmental issues and gave me an insight into environmental policy-making.
It led to me getting elevated at work.
It provided a useful credential, a focal point for thinking and discussing options.

Professional skills were developed and self-confidence increased:

Hard work, leadership, planning and the articulation of scientific issues.
Developed research and writing
Self confidence in academic/professional abilities
It has benefited me greatly in terms of my understanding of more advanced techniques relating to my work in disease diagnostics.
The information and knowledge I gathered during my time at an ODL student at the University of Edinburgh enabled me to critically assess common industry practices and to form my own opinion about things as well as to substantially defend it.

The opportunity to develop their professional network was valued:

It helped with a small but useful network of people, and provided a talking point when meeting new clients
Gained new contacts
I have made acquaintances both with the university staff and former class mates. These connections I believe will be helpful as I continue developing in my career

For some, it changed how they were viewed by colleagues:

Career development has included position and respect at my work place
Have greater proven expertise in the team; could juggle career and study

Potential future employers will be impressed:

I think participating in an online degree while working full or part time shows a lot of commitment and will give future employers the impression that one is disciplined and determined.

It has offered a valuable stepping stone for those embarking on a longer academic journey:

It gave me a foundation in environmental issues which helped me to decide the topic of my PhD.
It has taught me about the experience of being an online student and ways in which animal welfare can be taught.
Very positive influence, as I now have broader career options which involve lecturing and research both which I’m very interested in. I’m currently preparing to enrol for PhD studies.
Prior to my ODL course I only had an Advanced Diploma. It has helped me to gain acceptance onto a Wildlife Management degree.

As you progress through your degree course, you should start to recognise an increasing number of benefits from your own experience. The comments above may help you to reflect on this. Why not share your views with other ODL students on Twitter?

I look forward to reading your Tweets – twitter.com/uofedcareers # EdODLcareers

Follow Career Connect to access our next Innovative Learning Week blog post.

Innovative Learning Week – what’s going on?

February 8, 2016

Carol Macdonald

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The University of Edinburgh’s Innovative Learning Week – 15 to 19 February 2016 – is approaching soon.

As part of this week-long festival of creative learning, the Careers Service is offering something a little bit different for all online distance learning (ODL) students who are unable to participate in the programme of campus-based events. We hope that our week-long participative ‘event’ will be fun, informative and not require much of your time. It’s an opportunity for you to connect with each other and to hear from Edinburgh Alumni.

So, what’s happening?

Our careers event for ODL students will be delivered here on Career Connect, our careers blog for ODL students, and also through Twitter.

We will be sharing the experiences and reflections of ODL graduates throughout the week on Career Connect – sign up to follow Career Connect posts by email using our ‘follow’ tab today. You will find a series of posts throughout the week as listed below:

Monday: Distance learning degrees – what are the benefits?
Tuesday: Studying while working is challenging – what helps?
Wednesday: Leadership – what makes a good manager?
Thursday: Reflecting on your Values.
Friday: More advice from Edinburgh distance learning graduates.

We will also be facilitating daily career discussions on Twitter – twitter.com/uofedcareers #EdODLcareers Each morning we will post our discussion question and a link to the blog post of the day. How this event goes is up to you – we hope that there will be some lively discussion and that you will enjoy sharing your thoughts and ideas with each other.

We look forward to reading your tweets!