Student mentoring to enhance graduates’ employability potential

Abstract

This paper considers whether the adoption of a subject-specific, classroom-based, voluntary extra-curricular student mentoring scheme could provide an effective mechanism and andragogic approach to enhance higher education students’ employability potential pre-graduation.Over the three-year pilot, 26 more advanced (second to fourth year) undergraduate students actively mentored nearly 400 first year undergraduate students during workshops delivered annually within forensic and policing focused courses. In total, 17 mentors anonymously completed online, post-scheme surveys. Survey data was quantitatively analysed to evaluate the scheme, establish which skills and attributes mentors had developed and investigate whether mentors could appropriately identify example skills within professional terminology used during employer recruitment. In addition, this paper reflects on the implementation of remote student mentoring during the COVID-19 pandemic and its adoption within a blended learning framework.The results from this research strongly support mentoring as an effective mechanism to develop undergraduate employability skills, significantly developing mentors’ self-confidence and self-efficacy in their interpersonal and communication skills. Although mentors were aware of university graduate attributes and thought they could evidence these with appropriate examples, in practice this was not necessarily the case. As a result, a framework is proposed to enable mentors to identify their skills and how they may align with competencies sought by relevant forensic and policing employers. However, other andragogic practices may need to be implemented to maximise the potential for successful graduate employment.