Leadership Lecture delivered on how to secure a top job

It doesn't matter what you teach your students if you don't teach them employability skills.

This was the opening line of Frances Trought, our guest speaker at the Leadership Lecture this month.

Frances is a well-respected speaker in the field of employability: she is the author of the book Brilliant Employability Skills, published by Pearson and adopted by a number of universities as a core text. She is also the Managing Director of I Brand Ltd.

As part of our Leadership Lecture series, Frances spent over an hour sharing her wealth of knowledge with a large group of students who left the session full of ideas on how to secure that top job or placement.

Coventry University London Campus prides itself on delivering programmes designed to prepare graduates for employment. Our aim is to deliver career-ready, highly-employable graduates and we could not agree more with Frances's opening line. We have an employability team dedicated to developing students’ employability skills to then assist them in finding a suitable placement. To date, many of our students have secured placements in a number of well-known companies including The Ritz Hotel, Jealous Sweets and British Oxygen Company (BOC) to name a few.

We took some notes during Frances’s talk and some of the key tips we’ve noted are:

• You have to be able to summarise what you want, what you do and why you do it well.
• Networking will help you find out which employability skills you need in a particular field.
• You need to think of what skills are necessary for the specific industry you want to go into.
• It's important to start thinking of your brand.
• Think about what is important to you in terms of a career.
• You need to think of where you are going: make a plan.

Coventry University London Campus offers a range of Business, Accounting, Finance and Law courses in the heart of the City of London. The University is ranked 33rd in the Guardian University Guide 2014 and employability is at the centre of what we offer.