My experience of the Global Professional Award

The Global Professional Award (GPA) is an additional module that you can study alongside your degree to gain valuable professional skills, which you will be automatically enrolled onto as part of your course.

The outcome of the GPA is to equip students with employability and entrepreneurial skills as well as to teach you about wellbeing and mental health.

I started studying the GPA in my first year and every two weeks I had a 2 hour workshop; one portion of it was a lecture-type and, and the other was a group-based activity, followed by self-reflection tasks to complete in my own time.

Things we covered, learned about, and reflected on in my first year:

·         Giving constructive feedback

·         Celebrating differences

·         Finding our key strengths and weaknesses

·         Understanding our values in the context of both career and life

·         Behaviour cycle

·         Benefits of bullet journaling

·         Identifying our skill gaps and finding activities that would help develop them

·         Psychometric testing

·         Johari window

·         Resilience

My favourite experience was learning about the STAR method to describe a time when I have used a particular skill. After I had a workshop on finding our strengths and weaknesses, a reflection task with a list of skills was given to students.

This reflection task is called the Skills Audit and there are two great things about it.

1)      It is done every year so that you can monitor the progress of your interpersonal skills throughout your degree.

2)      The STAR method is a great technique to use to when answering interview questions, so practicing it is highly beneficial for future interview preparations.

There is a practical side of it!

Apart from workshops and reflection tasks, the GPA module requires students to have 15 hours of electives throughout the year. Electives are experiential or theme-based activities which help you develop your employability and entrepreneurial skills. Experiential electives are activities such as part-time jobs or volunteering, whereas theme-based activities include things like attending careers workshops, careers appointments or engaging with LinkedIn Learning courses.

I loved the electives part of the GPA because it allows you to be proactive and find something that you will enjoy, for example, I worked part-time for the University as a Social Media Representative and volunteered in Citizen Science projects on Zooniverse in the first year. In my second year I continued to do that but also started working as a Student Ambassador and joined the committee of my academic society as a President.

In the second year, there were 5 workshops in which we covered:

·         Reflective practice

·         Gibbs’ reflective cycle

·         Personal and professional development

·         Planning for assignments

·         Professional communities

·         Networking strategies

·         Managing your personal safety and wellbeing

·         Tailoring job applications

·         CART technique

·         Coping with rejections

·         Speculative applications

·         How to gain experience

·         Assessment centres

All of this is highly beneficial for second year students especially for those of us who are applying for placements and internships.

If this sparked your interest in GPA module and you have any questions, feel free to message me on Unibuddy - I’m always happy to help!