Global Professional Award

Global Professional Award – Institutional Roll-out

 

In the academic year 19/20. A successful pilot of the Global Professional Award (GPA) was undertaken in the School of Applied Science. This Award will be rolled out to all first year undergraduates in 20/21.

The aim of the GPA is to ensure students leave the University with enhanced employability and enterprise skills, emotional fitness, awareness of their global operating environment and increased social capital.

While the avenue of embedding these skills into the academic curricula was explored, it is difficult to achieve this in our current UG structures. Some courses have begun to consider this approach, and this can easily be accommodated within the GPA structure. For the main body of our students embedding in the curricula is not currently achievable.

The implementation of this GPA has synergy with both the institutional strategy and the teaching and learning strategy, and has the potential to deliver the following benefits which equally align to TEF:

• Enhanced NSS scores
• Enhanced employability and highly skilled graduate level employment
• Innovative practice in the sector enhancing reputation potentially leading to winning sector awards
• Places employability, enterprise and wellbeing in hands of those best equipped to deliver generic understandings
• Opportunities to work with colleagues across Schools and Services to align the curriculum into GPA
• Marketing opportunity with future students and potential employers
• Impact on KPI’s in new Strategy Map
• Inspiring: speaks to retention, differential attainment, TEF Gold, engagement
• Enterprise: speaks to employer/business engagement
• International: speaks to ISB integration measures
• Innovative: speaks to increased growth/efficiency as reduce costs per transaction (move from 1:1 support to 1 to many)

The roll out of this award will have no impact on the workload of academics. The GPA sessions will be delivered by a central team. We will of course welcome and encourage volunteers who would like to take part in the facilitation of training sessions or observing any face to face sessions planned.

The GPA Team will be delivering awareness session in all schools shortly where you will get a better understanding of the objectives, delivery mechanism and required student commitment to the award and be able to ask any questions or raise any concerns.