Employability and the UseMyAbility Online Tool: Raising Sports Students’ Awareness to Inform the Development of Their Skills and Attributes

Abstract

The collaborative project UseMyAbility (UMA) sought to reduce discrimination and enhance disabled graduates’ employability through equipping them with the skills to match employability skills and attributes. An outcome from the project, completed in 2011, was a web-based tool which gave students advice on how to improve their employability. Subsequently, an online self-audit questionnaire was developed, which allowed students to record and map their employability skills and attributes. This paper reports on two projects that used this UMA online questionnaire with undergraduate sports students at a UK University. The first group were students undertaking a second-year Physical Education (PE) module and the second were students undertaking internships in a variety of sporting contexts. Drawing on data gained from questionnaires and student and mentor interviews, the two projects sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the UMA questionnaire for the students in these two contexts. It aimed to enhance students’ employability profiles, enable them to benchmark and track their development, provide practical help in preparing job applications, tackle interview questions and develop evidence-based curricula vitae. It is hoped that through identifying ways of adapting the use of the questionnaire to these contexts, learning from participant data from the completion of the questionnaires, and gaining a better understanding of students’ and mentors’ perceptions of its use, that insights may be gained that will aid the wider adoption of the online tool.