2. Students

Developing good team working skills is essential for every graduate job, and you should expect to be asked about your experience of working as part of a team at job interviews. It follows that you need to learn all you can about effective team work and practice the social and organisational skills required during your studies at Aston.

Students often find that group projects are challenging, with tensions around communication, commitment and contribution. But how do you learn to understand and deal with the issues that arise? One way is to use this award-winning video resource that explores the whole process over 10 short episodes, from first meeting to final evaluation. Five student actors bring the process to life, so you not only see key moments in their meetings but also their individual thoughts about how the project is going.

The aim of this resource is provoke thought and discussion; it does not provide the answers. By watching the video clips of the weekly meetings and the individual video diaries you will become aware of a whole range of issues and challenges that can face a student in a group situation. The audio commentaries, discussion and observation points, along with the additional resources are designed to provide additional information and aid further discussion or individual reflection.

Making group-work work – a useful PDF booklet with lots of advice about team roles and processes. Essential reading for all novice team members!

List of episodes – start here

Help for students – with links to relevant episodes

Group Work website – included links to many other useful resources

Technical note: the resource was created in 2009, but is just as relevant today as it was then, and uses Flash video, so you’ll have to watch this on a PC or laptop and enable Flash in your web browser. Sorry, it doesn’t work on mobile devices.