employability Support for Employers

Mentoring is essential for students to gain insight into different professions and know how to build networks, whilst gaining the hands on experience that employers are looking for. We have developed several programmes which can not only benefit our students, but employers too.

Some students are less likely than others to have made contacts in their desired profession before going to university. Our mentoring programme provides our students with an individual contact from the profession they’re interested in, whose experience they can benefit from.

Who can volunteer to mentor? 
Anyone from a second six pupil barrister or second year trainee.

Our programme is designed to provide the flexibility required by mentors with busy legal practices and businesses to maintain. Your organisation doesn’t need to be recruiting to take part.

How much time does mentoring take up?
Mentors get the satisfaction of helping individuals achieve their aspirations, through discussing strategies, helping with applications and imparting valuable knowledge based on personal experience of the profession.

At most of our campuses, mentoring programmes run from late autumn to May each year.

We ask mentors and mentees to make contact a minimum of four times within this time period. One meeting should be face-to-face, ideally at the mentor’s workplace, whilst other meetings can be via phone or email.

We run public legal education schemes where our students present talks on legal topics to members of the local community.

Please let us know if:

• You would like to volunteer as a supervisor at one of our clinics.
• If you run a pro bono scheme which could provide opportunities for our students to volunteer

We would be interested in talking to you to see how we can work together to provide much needed legal assistance to the public, while also providing invaluable experience to our students.

For more information on our pro bono programme, click here.

Speaker programme

Each of our campuses runs an annual speaker programme providing practitioners with the chance to talk to students about working life and their organisation.

We regularly invite employers to come and talk to our students about their organisations and run presentations and workshops. We can publicise your event and offer advice on content should you need it.

These events help our students to improve the quality of their applications as well as raising an employer's profile amongst our students.

Skills sessions

Skills sessiosn are opportunities for our students to find out how to succeed in their applications, interviews and at assessment centres, directly from employers and recruiters.

Networking evenings and career fairs

In addition to the national legal and careers fair in June each year, we run a series of local events on each campus. These events are designed to enable relevant practitioners to meet and share useful information with our students.

Contact us to find out abour events or speaking opportunities that are local to your organisation.

Student availability to work

Most full time and part time courses start in September and end in June. Our students are therefore available to take up vacation schemes or employment from late June until late August.

Full time students may even be able to take up part time employment opportunities when teaching is concentrated into particular days each week.

Part time and and online students may be free to undertake employment at any time.