York Strengths Online

York Strengths Online takes you through a series of interactive and reflective exercises to better understand yourself and your strengths. Created to support and complement our award-winning Development Sessions, and with contributions from world leading professionals, you'll be introduced to a range of tools and identify actions that will help you in your career preparations. 

"This is an easy interactive online platform to enable you to learn your own strengths.”

Gail, Social Policy and Social Work
York Strengths Online is suitable if you're new to York Strengths, but also a great opportunity to revisit your strengths assessment, or access the wider content and resources.

The content is York Strengths Online is updated each year - it's a tool that can support you throughout your time at the University, and will remain available for you to revisit at any point. 

"York Strengths is an advantage that York students get over any other university, and it's not an advantage you would want to give up. Using fun and easy to complete tasks (that can be done between Netflix shows) to create a map of your strengths is one way to use the lockdown effectively. Knowing your strengths makes it easier to target jobs and companies that will value you."

Lucy, York Law School
Read our guest blog from a past participant on how York Strengths helped her.

Can do. Love to. 
When we understand our strengths - the things we are good at and we love to do - we feel more confident and resilient, can make better choices about what activities we choose to pursue and are likely to perform better as a result. 

Thousands of University of York students have benefited from discovering their strengths in recent years, using the insight from the York Strengths programme to support their academic studies, access a range of relevant experiences, and help them secure placements, graduate work or further study.

5 reasons to take part
It's a great way to begin to discover your strengths, and discover tools to help you on your journey to a fulfilling career.
You can complete it in around 2-4 hours (a little longer if you complete all the optional strengths assessment activities) - do it in one sitting, or save and come back to it at your leisure.
Gain an understanding of how employers value and look for strengths in the students and graduates they recruit.
Learn how you can apply and develop your strengths while you're a student to support your academic studies, enhance your personal and professional development and identify the type of work that you'll thrive in.
Thousands of students who have participated have gone on to enjoy greater career confidence, and move towards a successful and rewarding graduate career.

• The required elements of the course can normally be completed in around two to four hours.  
• You may choose to take more time to explore the course. If you take part in the assessment exercises for each York Strengths this may extend the time. There are are range of optional activities and these will obviously extend the time. 
• You can do it in one sitting with regular breaks, or you may wish to do it over several sittings to allow time for reflection.

The York Strengths Development Sessions provide an enhanced opportunity for undergraduate first year students to explore their strengths in a group setting and with feedback from a trained observer in a safe environment. This will give a broader understanding of their strengths that will support them in their university journey.

If you are attending a Development Session you'll find it helpful to access York Strengths Online for an introduction to the programme, and an initial consideration of your strengths. To get the most from the session you should aim to complete all sections up to and including an initial exploration of the ‘Strengths Discovery’ section before attending. This should normally take no more than 60 minutes. Please bring a copy of your completed York Strengths Grid with you to the Development Session.

For all other students York Strengths Online provides access to the programme, including high quality discovery exercises and a range of additional resources to help you carry out a self assessment of your strengths, and plan your next steps. It's a great stand alone resource which all students can participate in. 

You can complete York Strengths by attending a Development Session (undergraduate first years) OR completing York Strengths Online. 

If you are not attending a Development Session, it's really important that you submit your results in the final section of the course, to verify that you have completed York Strengths Online.

During the course you'll:

• assess yourself against each York Strength and map your strengths using the York Strengths Grid
• provide an example of when you've used one of your strengths
• identify a goal and three related actions.

When your results are verified, your completion of the course will be recorded. You will receive confirmation by email and a participation certificate.

Completing York Strengths is also the first step to gaining the York Award!

We've worked really hard to make York Strengths Online as accessible as possible.

• The course should work with most text or screen readers
• We have provided transcripts, closed captions, descriptions of visual content and alternative accessible activities wherever possible
• We have made every attempt to ensure that all the activities are accessible for everyone. If you are having any issues accessing the content or require support to take part, please contact york-strengths@york.ac.uk and we'll do our very best to help. We'd also welcome any suggestions about how we can improve the accessibility of the content

All information generated as a result of your use of York Strengths Online will be managed in accordance with the University's Data Protection Policy.

You will be asked to complete two forms as part of this course. The first is to register that you have joined the course. The second is to submit your results and confirm completion of York Strengths Online. Both these forms ask for your student ID or email address.

The information on these forms will be used to:

• identify those individuals who have registered for and/or completed York Strengths Online. The data may be shared with your academic department
• produce aggregate anonymised statistics to allow the University to better understand student needs and to create and tailor University service provision accordingly

No data on the positioning of the York Strengths or identified actions that can be linked to an individual will be shared outside of the Careers and Placements team. We may share this information back with you in the future to support your development. In the event that you do not wish to share this data there will be an option on the relevant form to indicate that.

Yes! You can access York Strengths Online at any point to revisit the content, explore further, revisit your strengths assessment and/or review our action plan.