Embark Award
The Embark Award is an online employability skills award where young people can identify and record the skills they have developed through the participation in extra curricular activities.
It is an initiative of UWE Bristol. Currently it is being used by Post-16 students attending state schools in the Bristol and Bath region
What it involves
It uses the STAR technique (describe the situation, task, activity and result) as a template to record these skills. In order to complete the award students need to produce 18 STAR activity records in total across 6 categories and 1 reflective statement. Only the ‘My courses and careers’ category is compulsory where they need to complete 6 STAR activity records. The remaining 12 STAR records can be spread across the other 5 categories.
Categories
- My enterprising projects ; My hobbies and interests ; My experiences of work
- My volunteering ; My courses and careers ; Our world
Bristol Young Student of the Year Awards
In order to celebrate 21 years in business I created The Bristol Young Student of the Year Awards, which was a competition for post 16 year old students attending state schools, colleges and academies in the Bristol region. It provided students with real business experience and the opportunity to develop a wide range of employability and communication skills in order to give them the confidence to achieve.
Young people are the region’s future. As representatives of the business community we wanted to help young students develop the employability skills they need in order to achieve. By providing the opportunity to work with real clients supported by business mentors and partake in a series of master classes the aim was to develop their confidence.
We receive no funding and therefore relied on sponsorship and volunteers in order to run the competition. Due to the success of the competition it has proved to be very time consuming. It also took ages to develop working relationships with schools, colleges and academies however UWE Bristol stepped in and asked me to develop an employability award which would be suitable for all post 16 students hence the birth of the Embark Employability Skills Award.