Geographical skills audit

Set up Time: 5 minutes (longer to source your own job adverts)
Activity time: 15 minutes (10 minutes activity, 5 minutes feed back)

Aims of activity
To provide students with a clear understanding that those who study Geography develop not just general employability skills but also very specific Geographical skills that are in demand by employers- this means that geographers stand out from the crowd and are very employable.  

Key messages
Those who study Geography develop not just general employability skills but also very specific Geographical skills that are in demand by employers. Geographers enter a range of career sectors and are one of the most employable graduate groups.   

Instructions
During a careers session, highlight to students that employers look for unique skills and that Geography has a series of very specific skills that set them apart from those who don’t study it.

Using geography-related job descriptions (examples provided), get students to pick out the skills requested by employers that are unique for studying geography. Add these skills to the skills table provided.

Materials Required
Skills table (both complete and incomplete provided)
Job adverts (examples provided) – you could even ask students to source their own job adverts as homework and bring to the lesson.

Adaptations
Adaptation 1:  Give students extra support, a bit more of a helping hand and have some of the table completed for them.

Adaptation 2: Give students the chance to think of their own skills adding them to the long list.

Adaptation 3: Focus on one specific sector of careers or area of geography – are there skills that are related directly to this sector? GIS is a good one to use here.

Things to consider
Some students may find the idea of identifying specific geographical skills a challenge, and so the best way to rectify this is to give students a separate task looking through job descriptions and highlighting the skills they require, and then being able to transfer them over.