The Bath Award is designed to:
- Help you showcase to employers the key skills you have acquired during your time at university
- Recognise the efforts of students who are carrying out student leader, volunteer, and employment roles
- Empower you to take action and develop employability skills that will support your success in these roles
Who can complete the Bath Award
All students currently studying at the university are eligible to register and take part in the award. You can be an undergrad or postgrad student, be studying on campus or remotely, and be a full- or part-time student. It doesn't matter which course you're studying, the award is open to everyone.
How the award works
The award is based on the Capabilities Framework. This is 13 capabilities that we know employers value in their graduates:
- Adaptability
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Creativity and innovation
- Critical thinking
- Data literacy
- Digital and AI literacy
- Drive and initiative
- Leadership
- Professionalism
- Resilience
- Social and cultural awareness
- Sustainability
In this pilot year of the award, we have chosen six of these capabilities to focus on and when you register for the award, you'll need to choose four of the following six capabilities:
- Adaptability
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Leadership
- Professionalism
- Resilience
When you have chosen your four capabilities, to earn the award you will need to show how you have developed your skills in these four areas. You will do this through completing activities and achieving personal development goals.
How to earn the award
To receive the award for 2025-26, you must:
- Complete the registration form between 22 September 2025 and 1 November 2025. If you don't complete the registration form between these dates, you won't be able to enter the Award this year
- Log 50 hours of extra-curricular activity
- Complete three pieces of professional development for each of your chosen capabilities
Logging activities
To be able to complete your award submission, you must have logged 50 hours of extra-curricular activity.
The Bath Award has been designed to recognise the effort of students who are completing roles and developing their employability alongside their studies. This means that activities you have completed in the past can count towards your award submission, acknowledging your past sustained effort.
All that we ask is that the activity has been completed while you have been a student at the university (you cannot use anything that was done before you became an enrolled student at Bath), and that it fits in one of these three criteria:
- Student Leadership (this includes acting as an Academic Rep)
- Volunteering (this can be at any organisation, in any capacity)
- Paid employment (this could be an internship, part-time employment, or working on campus as a Student Ambassador or other casual paid role)
You can 'mix and match' your hours. They do not all have to be in the same role, and they can be from any year of study. So you could, for example, log:
- First year - Micro Internship (35 hours)
- Second year - Academic Rep (10 hours)
- Final year - Student Ambassador (20 hours)
Your total activity logged will be 65 hours and this part of the award will be complete for you.
Professional development goals
Alongside your employability activities, we also want to make sure that you're constantly developing and building skills, so you must also complete some professional development to earn the Bath Award. This cannot be retrospective and you must have completed a minimum of 12 pieces of professional development in the time between registering for the award and completing your submission.
The Bath Award acknowledges three different types of professional development, and you must do one of each for all four of the capabilities you're working on for the award: 1. Bath Award endorsed workshop 2. Online article or self-access resource 3. Alternative online training (with a certificate)
The Bath Award page in Unihub will tell you more about these three types of professional development, and how to log your time spent on them.
Completing your submission
You can only complete your award submission when you have logged 50 hours of activity and completed 12 professional development goals. When you have entered all of your activities and professional development into the Bath Award page in Unihub, the submission form will be available to you to complete.
Submissions can be done in writing (maximum 500 words) or via a video (maximum 5 minutes long). Whether you choose to complete your submission in writing or via video, you will need to tell us:
- How successfully you have met the goals you set when you registered for the award
- How you have developed your skills in your four chosen capabilities
- What you will do in future to further develop these capabilities
Every submission will be reviewed by a member of staff to ensure quality control and consistency across all submissions.
The deadline for submissions is 1 May 2026. All submissions will be considered after the submission deadline, regardless of the date they were received.
Certification
Everyone who completes a successful submission will receive a certificate signed by both a senior leader at the university and the SU. All submissions will be reviewed after the closing date of 1 May 2026, and certificates will be issued later in the summer of 2026; unfortunately, we will not be able to issue any certificates prior to this.
Key dates
2025-26 is a pilot year for the award, which means there are set dates for registration and submission. Going forwards, the aim is that the award will run on a rolling basis, and you will be able to register for, and submit to, the award at any point in the academic year. However, in the pilot year we need to evaluate participation, and have time at the end of the year to evaluate the pilot and make changes in advance of the next academic year.
Key dates for 2025-26 are:
Registration window: 22 September - 1 November 2025. (You will not be able to register for the Award outside this window.)
Submission deadline: 1 May 2026. (All submissions will be reviewed after this date, irrespective of when they were received.)
Certificates provided: Summer 2026. (We will not be able to provide certificates earlier than this.)
How staff can be involved
If you're a member of staff, there are several ways you can be involved in the Bath Award:
Submit your workshop for Bath Award endorsement
If you are running workshops or other activities for students, you can submit them for Bath Award endorsement. This means that students attending your activity will be able to count it as a professional development goal. To be eligible for endorsement, your workshop must:
- Be open to all students at the university (including those learning remotely, so you must provide an online option)
- Run at least twice in the academic year 2025-26
- Be delivered by a member of university staff (it cannot be run by students or an external person)
- Last for at least 30 minutes
- Include active learning (it cannot be a lecture where students are not required to participate)
- Be available to book through Unihub (either in MyFuture or MySkills)
Only members of the Bath Award team can assign a Bath Award endorsement to an activity. To request endorsement for your activity, please email us at thebathaward@bath.ac.uk.
Review award submissions
We invite all members of staff to volunteer to review award submissions. To ensure quality and consistency, all submissions will be read by a member of staff. We will publish guidelines and criteria for successful submissions, and you are welcome to take part no matter what role you have. We are compiling a panel of staff from all backgrounds, departments, and job families so if you'd like to be involved we'd love to hear from you.
You can volunteer as much or as little time as you can, and we will allocate you the number of submissions that fit with your commitment. To let us know you'd be interested in working with us as an award reviewer, please email us at thebathaward@bath.ac.uk.
Share information about the award with your students
If you're not in a position to review submissions or offer activities at the moment, please make sure you share information about the award with your students at every opportunity. We want to make sure as many students as possible are aware of it, and can take part if they choose too. We have standard slides that you can use to share information in presentations, or you can simple link to this page to them started. We would also be happy to come and talk to your students directly, if that would be helpful. Please email us at thebathaward@bath.ac.uk with details of how you'd like to share the information with your students, and we can support with resources.