Changemaker team win national award for second year running

The University of Northampton’s commitment to student employability has been recognised with an award for the second year running from a leading career development platform provider.

The University’s Changemaker team won the national award for ‘Overall Winner for Developing Employability 2018’ from Abintegro.

Changemaker is a University of Northampton initiative that helps students develop socially entrepreneurial projects – for instance setting up a charity – or supporting them, University staff or members of the community to go out into the world and do ‘good things’ for people or the environment.

By doing so, they develop a broad range of skills and attributes that help them to stand out from the job market crowd.

This award recognises the work put into the development, strategy and promotion for the Changemaker Hub Portal, the platform where students can access career guidance and employability support.

The award was given following Abintegro’s analysis of 1.5 million employability activities from 212,000 students across 86 qualifying institutions throughout 2017.

These activities included completing a Skills Self-Assessment or viewing online resources about interviews, communication or networking skills.

Another element of the Changemaker Hubs award win is that, rather than use a standard employability platform, the portal has been customised so that the majority of its pages fit with the University’s employability offering and branding, with content that is kept fresh and up to date.

Mark Blaber, Employability and Enterprise Manager, said: “This is fantastic recognition of all the hard work we are doing here at the Changemaker Hub in equipping our students with the skills, experience and knowledge they need to become highly employable graduates and to be the best they can be.

“Many thanks to all of the team for making this happen and to our students for their many successes.”

Tony Heard, Managing Director at Abintegro, added: “On behalf of the Abintegro team, we are delighted to acknowledge the outstanding efforts of the careers team at University of Northampton with this award and thank them for partnering with Abintegro to develop and measure the employability of students.”

Find out more about Changemaker at University of Northampton.