What is SAGE?
SAGE stands for Student Achievement & Graduate Employability. It is a system of graduate development that focuses on three main areas – Intellectual Skills Personal Effectiveness and Career Development. A stand-alone Personal Development Planning session helps guide students to take control of their own development and use the programme to best advantage.
Each of the three areas is led by a member of Hartpury staff with expertise. Within each area there are a variety of subjects and each of these is delivered by individuals with specialist knowledge and genuine interest in the subject. We draw from the full variety of cross-departmental Hartpury staff as well as external industry professionals. There are 9 core sessions evenly distributed across each area of personal development that all students involved in the pilot are expected to take. There are an additional 12 sessions which are available and can be tailored to the individual student’s needs.
Sessions are repeated throughout that academic year to give students control of when and how they take their sessions and attendance is carefully monitored. They are scheduled to meet the demands of the course and prepare the students for what will be required in advance. For example several sessions on academic writing are run as an assignment deadline approaches and coaching for presenting in public is available before a presentation assessment.
What do we hope to achieve with SAGE?
SAGE aims to improve three main student focused areas:
- Academic performance
- Graduate employability
- Student’s self-ratings of their skills and confidence levels
The three areas of development within the programme are targeted to each of these three aims. We hope this will produce fully rounded graduate candidates with strengths in academic personal and career focused skills.
In addition SAGE hopes to improve staff satisfaction in delivering graduate development material. We hope to achieve this by having staff identify topics they want to lead as they have expertise and personal conviction in the importance of the subject. Thus they repeat a small number of specialised topics to a large range of students rather than delivering all topics needed to a small number of students.
We believe that session leaders who deliver with authenticity and conviction will improve student engagement and help students become aware of how these subjects relate to their own success. In addition the menu system which mixes compulsory sessions with those tailored to individual needs allows students a certain amount of control in how they chose to develop themselves. Further the repetition of sessions throughout the year allows student to control how and when they attend. For example some students chose to take a session every one to two weeks while others attend three or four session during study week.
