AGR Development Awards 2013

Last week at the AGR Graduate Development Conference we didn't win the Preparation for work by Higher Education (single initiative) Award but we were were highly commended. Our submission was based on the 'no prep, no entry' work that we implemented for our Festival of Careers back in November. Here's a short exert from the press release.

Shortlisted for the AGR’s annual Development Awards alongside graduate employers like BskyB, National Grid, Accenture and IBM, the University was ‘highly commended’ for its pioneering ‘no prep, no entry’ approach and the support it delivered to almost 4,000 students in a five week period.

Systems thinking needs time

(Click for source)

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with systems thinking. I love the potential that it has to help us redesign our services around the needs of our students but I'm hating the amount of time it's taking. 'Hate' is too strong a word but it does take a lot of time and that is something I don't have at the moment. Having said that, I'm convinced that it can help us do things better, I just need to stick with it and calve out some more time. Related to this I had some advice from Systems-Thinking-Pete the other week and he said I could blog it, so here goes.

You should try to dedicate time to study the system

The more time you devote to study the quicker we get there. Because it’s about a different way of thinking you won’t get to the same place if you rely on other people to uncover and present back to you. Also consider who else you might want to co-opt to get involved (it’s always better to have staff closest to the work who understand how things really operate involved in the team).

Be clear about when you’re studying and when you’re operational

This is best served by you blocking out time rather than having meetings to review progress. Also ties in with the first item about dedicating time to study.

Don’t mix the two i.e. tamper whilst you’re studying

I understand the urge to improve based on what you find whilst you’re studying and I’m not saying that you mustn’t do this. However until you’ve been through the journey you may not know what is right to fix and what is knee jerk reaction. It is also harder to study a moving system, blurs the distinction between when you’re studying the system and when you’re operational and impedes what we want to get out of the systems thinking exercise (because systems thinking helps to develop a completely different and opposing way of thinking to a traditional approach and there’s no middle ground).

Be clear about the system you’re studying and purpose of that system

Studying the Career Development Service as a whole with a purpose of ‘help me get the graduate job or further study that I want’ is fine. Excluding the Curriculum aspect to this to focus on the responsive side of what you do for the time being I think is fine and doesn’t change the purpose of the system. In fact it will give you clues as to how well the Curriculum programme is working.

Make the learning that you are getting from this visible

Whilst we may want to re-jig some of we’re capturing making what we’re discovering visible on your wall is a positive development. If you want to tidy or re-jig any materials (or need to use your whiteboard again) then that’s fine but do keep the original content just in case…

In terms of structuring the content you might want to think about:

• System description - ‘provision of responsive Careers Service offerings’
• Customers - Current student
• Purpose - ‘help me get the graduate job or further study that I want’
• Scope - describe anything we’re not looking at

The above stuff should be fairly static whilst the following will evolve:

• Demand Analysis - type and frequency of demand (by category), value/failure, resolution etc
• What Matters and Measures - description and data
• Flow (as and when) - we’ll worry about this later
• Current Operating Principles i.e. in the current system it is ok (or not ok) to…..
• Anecdotal Evidence - things people might have said etc
• Issues/things to look at - anything that crops up or things that occur to us that we should look at
• Learning – focus on the things that have surprised you

Good advice. Now all I need to do is do it...

Making a success of the HEAR conference

On Wednesday I was at the joint AGCAS/CRA conference on Making a success of the HEAR. In case you don't know, this is what HEAR is:

The Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) provides a single comprehensive record of a learner’s achievement, as recommended by the Measuring and Recording Student Achievement Steering Group in the Beyond the Honours Degree – the Burgess Group Final Report (October 2007).

And this is what the HEAR s supposed to do:

The HEAR enables institutions to provide a detailed picture of student achievement throughout a students’ time at university, including academic work, extra-curricular activities, prizes and employability awards, voluntary work and offices held in student union clubs and societies that have been verified by the institution. 

The event was pitched to:

• Review the implementation of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) in UK HE.
• Consider how the HEAR, and the processes that underpin it, can contribute to the development of student employability.
• Receive an up-to-date account of employer engagement with the HEAR led by AGR.
• Have the opportunity to consider how careers services may take a leading role in this development.

Zara has already blogged about it as a 2-parter (part 1 and part 2 definitely worth reading for more detail) so all I want to do is note down a few quick observations using the event objectives.

Review the implementation of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) in UK HE.

The project has been running for a long time (10 years) and implementation is, so far, patchy. Whilst the case study instituions have clearly done some good work, I was surprised that they weren't further along than they are. At least there is now a website (hear.ac.uk/) and when you put HEAR into Google it appears near the top (it's been difficult to find up to now).

Consider how the HEAR, and the processes that underpin it, can contribute to the development of student employability.

The focus by most early adopters seems to have been on the process of recording details of programme contents, results gained and the overall classification (sections 4.1 and 4.2) - a process governed by the Registry function of institutions. Deena Ingham from the University of Bedfordshire gave an excellent workshop on how the University of Bedfordshire is engaging with the HEAR, in particular the work she has done on breaking down the academic jargon so that employers (and students) can better appreciate what courses are about - starting with the course titles, then 'graduate impact statements', then module titles, then assessment methods. I need to mull this over more to get my head around how it fits with the identifying employability in the curriculum stuff that I started a while ago.

The more obvious area of focus regarding student employability has been section 6.1, which is the bit where all the other stuff gets recorded - student achievements, additional awards, volunteering etc. - verified by the institution. It's that last bit, "verified by the institution" that's difficult. I don't think anyone has got a really good process or system for doing this yet, at least not at scale. and it certainly needs more work.

Receive an up-to-date account of employer engagement with the HEAR led by AGR.

This was the best bit for me. Jane Clark (seconded from Barclays to the AGR to work on this) gave an update on her excellent work on engaging employers with the HEAR. I was particularly pleased to see it connected to the potential social mobility benefits. AGR has produced some useful publications for employers (HEAR the whole story: your Higher Education Achievement Report toolkit and Don't miss out on the best: your guide to social mobility in recruitment. Unfortunately these don't seem to be on the AGR website yet so here's a photo of a useful page (Top ten reasons why you [employers] should support the HEAR and Key misconceptions and why they're wrong.

Have the opportunity to consider how careers services may take a leading role in this development.

Perhaps I shouldn't say this but this was the most disappointing bit for me. Marc Lintern did an excellent job of presenting back the results of the AGCAS Heads of Careers Services survey but the responses were somewhat lukewarm. Clearly there are obstables to overcome in terms of employer uptake, but careers services and universities really need to get behind this if it's going to work, and if it helps with social mobility that's got to be a good thing.