Graduateness

Are you prepared?

Unisa Counselling and Career Development encourages you to plan and enact your future today by thinking differently about how you will overcome challenges and find, create or use resources to create your own community of practice in order to think and act like the professional you want to be.

The Institute for the Future has identified a number of disruptors (drivers for change) that affect our work, such as needing to work past 65 to ensure resources; the rise of smart technology; the internet; and organisations functioning outside traditional organisational  boundaries, enabled by social technologies. As you are preparing yourself for opportunities, you need to keep in mind uncertainty is everywhere and changes do and will happen. You will be presented with opportunities as well as challenges.

Are you ready to:

• find and maintain employment continuously?
• learn a broad range of skills?
• believe in yourself and what you can contribute?
• reflect on what you are doing, as well as how you are doing it?

Graduateness

The University of South Africa (Unisa) defines graduateness as the following:

Unisa graduates have, as a result of their successful completion of their studies in an ODL context, unique qualities.

Unisa graduates
(i) are independent, resilient, responsible and caring citizens who are able to fulfil and serve in multiple roles in their immediate and future local, national and global communities
(ii) have a critical understanding of their location on the African continent with its histories, challenges and potential in relation to globally diverse contexts
(iii) are able to critically analyse and evaluate the credibility and usefulness of information and data from multiple sources in a globalised world with its ever increasing information and data flows and competing worldviews
(iv) know how to apply their discipline-specific knowledges competently, ethically and creatively to solve real-life problems
and
(v) are critically aware of their own learning and developmental needs and future potential.

• To what extent do you identify with these graduate qualities?
• What do you still need to pay attention to?

3 secrets of highly successful graduates

Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur and cofounder of LinkedIn. His book, The Startup of You, that he wrote with Ben Casnocha, contains views on how one could approach career choices in a fast-changing environment. He also published a presentation, 3 secrets of highly successful graduates where he summarises what sets successful graduates apart from their peers:

• Competition: you set yourself apart through your aspirations (where you want to be in future), your assets (what you have now in terms of skills and resources) and market realities (what people will pay you for).
• Networks: understand that people control resources, assets and opportunities. Think about how you could meet more people through the people you already know and hang out with people who you want to be (on- and offline).
• Risk: making mistakes is part of learning.
• Actions (intelligent risks) help you to think about where you want to go and how to get there.
• Understanding the needs of others: Ask others “How can I help” to identify needs of others.

How can you prepare yourself?

We see graduateness as starting with self-awareness as this plays a vital role in the success of a person: self-awareness builds self-confidence. We want you to make career decisions that contribute to your graduateness, and to this end we have developed a number of activities that you could implement as you are studying to support you in terms of preparing yourself for opportunities. Your enthusiasm for yourself and your career will determine how much you do. As a student, you will think about and reflect on your career and how you link your qualification with your career - what kind of opportunities you hope your qualification is preparing you for.

During your first year of study, focus on the following:

1. Your vision
2. Identifying career opportunities
3. Planning for opportunities
4. Self-confidence