Stage 1 - Before COIL
COIL experience is a fantastic opportunity to gain a variety of skills, that are not only useful for your academic journey, but for your employability after the completion of your studies. To gain the most of this opportunity, before you begin your COIL project, it is important to reflect on the skills you already have, and skills you need to improve or build on.
Pre-project Employability reflections
Our reflection tool has been designed to help students make the most of their COIL experience. We recommend completing the activity before your COIL project starts to help you to understand where you are, and after the project to reflect and identify new skills you have obtained. Understanding your experience and skills will help you to showcase them to your potential employers.
There are 3 tasks in the activity and each task has 3 actions for you to complete. Work through each section in order and try to complete at least 2 out of the 3 actions in each task:
Stage 2 - During COIL
During your COIL project, you will need to collaborate with fellow students from different countries and cultures, across time zones and via different online platforms. There are a variety of useful tools that you can use to help with these tasks. Learning to use these tools is a skill in its own right, so do not forget to add them to your skills list!
Online tools for students
Time and date
Ensure you can meet with colleagues and students from other time zones:
Online collaboration tools
There are various platforms that can be utilised for collaboration during your COIL project. These include project management and teamwork platforms for easier collaboration. You can use one or a combination of the resources, however, your project brief will specify which platform to use for more formal communication, presentations and meetings to allow for assessment by your tutors. We recommend:
Teamwork and project management
Many organisations use project management platforms for their projects, from large hi-tech firms to tiny start-ups. Using project management tools during your project may give an advantage during job interviews. We recommend:
Presentations
If your team are tasked with submitting a voiceover presentation where each slide is presented by a different team member - you may want to simply record an MS Teams or Zoom meeting where your team presents and submit the recording. You can also use the record function in PowerPoint and record each speaker separately. To clarify the best way to do it, please speak with your tutor.
Stage 3 - After COIL
Now you have completed your COIL project, it is time to reflect on how this experience can help you with your employability. We suggest starting with reflecting on the skills that you have gained and compare them to the list of skills you made at the beginning of the project. This will then give you an opportunity to showcase your shiny new skills to the potential employers.
Employability reflections
Please complete tasks 2 and 3:
Update your online profiles
Students and staff should update their online profiles to promote their involvement in their latest COIL project.
CV/Resume and Job Interview
Your university might already have comprehensive career development resources, which usually include CV builders and job interview practice. These will likely provide information on how to showcase your skills to potential employers. Additionally, we recommend this online tool:
We encourage showcasing your skills on LinkedIn. Add skills to the 'skills' and 'experience' sections of your profile, add your COIL project to the 'project' section on your profile or post an update to your LinkedIn feed or other social media channels using the hashtags #coil or #coiluarctic. Help us create a COIL community around the world!