To celebrate our targeted careers support for postgraduate students, including events on our Focus on Masters festival and new KEATS section, today’s blog is all about helping Masters students think about your employability and understand the value that your degree brings to you.
King’s postgraduates: a diverse & exciting cohort!
Are you one of the nearly 15,500 Masters students at King’s[1]? If so, you represent nearly one in three of our students. And if you’re part of KBS, IoPPN, the Law School or SSPP, there are more of you than your undergraduate peers. So there are lots of you, and you’re a very varied and interesting bunch!
We know from different national datasets that you start your courses for a variety of reasons, but professional development is one of the key ones. We also know PTES data (this is the survey that Masters students complete in the spring) shows that many of you are working at the same time as studying (in 2019 it was 22%, in 2018, closer to 50%[2]).
Thinking about your employability
So on the one hand, we know that many of you already know how to get work, are currently working, and have probably taken the decision to undertake a Masters course to help you with your next steps. What can King’s Careers & Employability possibly have to offer you?
The key thing, of course, is to help you to understand how you are different, now that you are a fully-fledged Masters student. How are you different from your undergraduate self? What do you have to offer that your undergraduate peers don’t? Basically, why have you invested in the effort (and expense) of doing a Masters course?
This is where your KASE comes in. KASE? Knowledge, Attributes, Skills and Experience. This is how we define your employability (read more from the Building Success guide). It helps to break down what you offer and how you can develop your employability further.
Tips to understanding employability from your degree:
- At King’s, many of our programmes will have their own KASE Framework, giving information to students about the value of their degree. Ask your programme team for the KASE Framework for your degree programme, or go back to your course handbook to find it. This will give you the top-level information about what you’re gaining from your degree. This is useful for you, as a starting point.
- You’ll want to personalise your programme KASE, of course, to make it more relevant just to you. Working through our ‘What Do I Offer?’ online learning course is one way to do that. The online course is developed to help you reflect on yourself, your values, interests and passions and help you find direction to develop yourself and your career journey. (duration under 1h)
You are already developing employability
It might be hard to actualise what exactly you have gained so far during your Masters, especially during such a different year due to Covid-19. Let’s take a moment to reflect.
Certainly your Knowledge will have changed and developed from the start of your Masters programme; probably your niche subject area knowledge is why you embarked on the course in the first place. Your Attributes, starting of course with resilience and persistence, will be massively enhanced this year. Your tech Skills, but importantly, your research Skills, will be a vastly new and important aspect of your employability; and your Experience, at home or on campus, of engaging with your world online, is something to think about as the world of work changes around us.
Our KASE develops all the time; we are constantly adding to it, defining what is new and important to us, figuring out what we need to learn and what we have learned. Being articulate in your KASE and how it’s now different, is vital if you’re to be able to use your Masters to help you build success. To learn more about how King’s Careers & Employability supports students, explore our web pages.
Need more support? Book an appointment with a careers consultant to understand your KASE better (initial appointments 20 minutes, referral 50 minutes). Or, work through our new resources for Masters students at your own pace, here on KEATS.
Part 2 of the blog series: Understanding the market for your Masters
Author: Kate Murray
Editor: Laura Patari
[1] Source: King’s Student Numbers data dashboard, accessed 28th Jan 2021
[2] Source: KCL PTES Survey results, Power BI dashboard, access 14th Feb 2021