ACHIEVEMENTS
Nazrana Parker (centre), Co-ordinator of UWC Careers Service, was the joint winner for the SAGEA Best Employer Representative Award in 2019.
WINNING WITH PASSION AND PURPOSE Student Development and Support (SDS) has reached a number of milestones in achieving its key objectives and at the same time enhancing progress for the University of the Western Cape (UWC). With our support for students covering the breadth of university life, it is ultimately students who benefit most from our achievements.
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HROUGH VARIOUS STUDENT DEVELOPMENT AND SUPPORT DEPARTMENTS, our
achievements are the result of the effort and skill of our staff members who deliver services with commitment, courage and passion. We work as a collective to ensure co-curricular activities and learning experiences complement student’s academic pursuits. Our co-curricular programmes and interventions have been developed as part of our five-year strategic plan, which is linked to the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) Institutional Operating Plan (IOP) strategic framework.
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Our Journey: 2016-2020
Our co-curricular programmes are aimed at enabling students to realise their full potential. Students need to become self-aware beyond the classroom and ready for life after graduation. We try to ensure that students are empowered to use their education and skills to have a positive impact in society. To this end, the Office for Student Development (OSD) has been focused on ensuring students can access information and tools to assist them plan a career path. In 2017, OSD launched UWC Career Xplora, the Career Service Management
tool by Symplicity. Through this tool, students and recruiters have access to online career services, enabling the move towards a paperless system, which greatly enhanced efficiency and quality. Just two years after its launch, in November 2019, the UWC Career Xplora portal won the award for the Best Work Readiness Initiative at the South African Graduate Employers Association (SAGEA) Awards, a national employer benchmark survey among leading recruiters. This award is bestowed upon a university careers service unit that has developed an innovative work readiness initiative to effectively prepare students for the job search and world of work. While this was an external marker of our success, by June 2020 the fact that more than 12 000 of our
