This year’s ‘Cardiff Award Above and Beyond Award’ winner Emilia Jansson shares how completing the Cardiff Award has made her feel more employable.
I’m the type of person that gets bored easily and therefore end up filling up all my spare time with various activities. I decided to join the Cardiff Award as I wanted to get recognition for all the hours I had spent on extra-curricular activities at university. The Award also allowed me to reflect on those activities and made me realise and articulate all the valuable skills that I had developed as a result. Completing the Award isn’t too difficult because it is all done online, which makes it easy to work on wherever you want at your own pace.
As part of the Cardiff Award you are required to log all your extra-curricular activities. The reflection was really helpful in allowing me to gain an overview of everything that I had managed to achieve throughout my time at university. To my surprise I’d actually done quite a bit when I realised I’d logged over 800 hours! I’m still not sure how I managed to do it all and attend university…
The Cardiff Award helps develop your self-awareness. As part of the Award you take a personality indicator test on Your Career Journey to help understand your personality traits and how you work in a group. The results were interesting and gave me new insight into myself. It also gave me an opportunity to set my own personal goals which was really beneficial to reflect on at the end of the Award.
Being part of the Cardiff Award was really helpful when I started applying for jobs. As a third year I am continuously applying for roles that all have their own recruitment processes. The Award helped me prepare for all the different types of exercises and challenges that I would face. For example, through the programme you’re able to get feedback for your CV, practise filling in application forms as well as developing your LinkedIn profile. For the final element of the Award you complete a recruitment experience. I chose to do the psychometric tests exercise as I felt like I needed more practise. However, there were also opportunities to attend mock assessment centres and create a business plan.
I completed the Award because I wanted to develop my skills and become more employable. However, I was delighted to hear that I had been nominated for the ‘Above and Beyond’ award at this year’s Student Support and Wellbeing Awards and even more excited when I won! Being recognised for all your hard work feels good and I recommend all students take the Award seriously and make the most out of it.
The Cardiff Award was really helpful in providing me with a structured way of understanding what employers want and gave me an opportunity to develop those skills. As a result of completing the Award I now feel much more employable.
Emilia Jansson
Journalism, Communications and Politics student
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