1. Building Veterinary Graduate Employability: VETSET2GO!
Susan Rhind, Liz Mossop, Kirsty Hughes, Kate Cobb, Martin Cake

2. Overview The veterinary education/ profession context
Vetset2Go Project overview
Sub-Project Focus – client expectations
Draft Employability Framework
Next Steps

3. Confident, resilient, healthy and well-supported
Brief Context: Veterinary Education/ Veterinary Profession
Confident, resilient, healthy and well-supported

5. Project Overview
‘VetSet2Go is a collaborative project to define the capabilities most important for employability and success in the veterinary profession, and create assessment tools and resources to build these capabilities’

6. Employability: Definition for this project
“A set of personal and professional capabilities that enable a veterinarian to gain employment, and develop a professional pathway that achieves satisfaction and success”.

7. Why Employability?
Competence-focussed frameworks have rightly become the backbone of veterinary education
Default overarching objective is just that – competence at graduation.
Threshold graduate competencies do not necessarily predict the future success and satisfaction of a veterinarian in their chosen career path.
Employability provides a broader focus, by stretching the endpoint, scope and scale of educational outcomes into and beyond the crucial transition to practice period

9. BEME systematic review
Conclusions: This review has highlighted the comparatively weak body of evidence supporting the importance of professional competencies for veterinary graduate success, with the exception of communication skills. However we stress this is more indicative of the scarcity of high-quality veterinary-based education research in the field, than of the true priority of these competencies.

11. Phase 1: client focus groups and interviews
Client relationships
Professionalism
Communication skills
Decision making and problem solving
Commitment to animal welfare
Commitment to quality and the profession
14 in total (8 focus groups, 6 individual interviews)
Small animal, equine and farm animal clients - Edinburgh and Nottingham
Thematic analysis by an independent consultant (Work Psychology Group)
Framework of 6 capabilities and associated behavioural descriptors

12. Phase 2: online validation questionnaire

13. Phase 2: online validation questionnaire
Each behaviour or characteristic rated on a 5 point Likert scale
Clients asked how important this behaviour or characteristic was to their satisfaction as a veterinary client.
Open from – to veterinary clients in UK, Australia, USA, Canada and New Zealand. [social media and on-line forums, ‘Farmers Weekly’, ‘Horse and Hound’]
1275 completed surveys were received.

14. Most important capabilities
Clients were asked to indicate which of the six veterinary skill areas are most important
Clients most frequently selected:
Client relationships
Commitment to animal welfare
Commitment to quality and the profession
Farm and equine owners selected:
Decision making and problem solving
Small animal owners were consistent with the overall rating

16. Resilience Sub-project (Adelaide/ Washington State)
Preliminary results indicate that the factors contributing to resilience in early-career veterinarians are less well studied than those contributing to mental ill-health, but some factors identified so far include
self-compassion,
mindfulness,
social support.

18. Draft Employability Framework

19. Now on to Phase 2!
Phase 2 will validate a multisource assessment approach that embeds and scaffolds these employability capabilities within formative feedback and assessment, particularly in work­‐integrated learning (WiL). The VetSet2Go assessment tools and resources will be made available via the website.

20. Innovation and Development Grant