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Wednesday 30 April 2014

Purpose of the Careers Service?

I've been giving some thought lately to the purpose of careers services. I'm not claiming this is exhaustive or can't be improved on, and clearly it's an over-simplification, but here's a first stab. Fundamentally I think it's about generating a 'push' from students and a 'pull' from employers. I'm really interested in comments from students, employers and other careers service professionals (or anyone else for that matter).


6 comments:

  1. Interesting Stu and would agree an accurate position for a traditional IAG-driven approach. However, IMHO, as soon as you apply the 'how (it is delivered)' angle it then becomes a lot greyer in terms of the purpose of the CS though. Ultimately it will come down to the University's approach to employability and where the CS sits with the other 'enabling' stakeholders inside and outside of the institution. I'd suggest the answer to this question will always start with how the University defines the role/purpose of the CS (and whether this is the appropriate description of the service/dept/unit/division etc).

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    1. Hi Paul. I managed to miss this comment somehow - sorry about that. Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I agree entirely that the university approach is vital context for the careers service approach but I think the purpose of the careers service should be defined by its 'customers' (not a term everyone is happy with, I know), i.e. students. That's probably a bit naive in terms of how things actually work in practice but I'm sure it should be student driven. In terms of greyness re how things are delivered - definitely, hence my comment about this being an over-simplification. Clearly I have much more thinking to do...

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  2. I feel that we should be clear that it is students who are our primary clients. Careers work should be about helping students to realise their potential and think about themselves and their place in the world and then giving the skills and support that is needed to make this possible. It isn't primarily about matching up students with employers. However employers and working people can be very useful in helping people to develop their career thinking.

    I think that I'd like to see a longer term perspective in your model (lifelong career development rather than first destination) and also a strong emphasis on the development of career management skills (alongside employability skills).

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    1. Thanks, Tris. Really helpful.

      I definitely agree that students are our primary clients/customers - they are the people who we are primarily providing the service for (and are paying the bills), hence the 'help students get to where they want to be when they graduate' being the purpose (as opposed to 'help recruiters fill posts'). In the strategy that this over-simplification came from I've given more detail about what this purpose might involve in practice - breaking down the explore, develop, compete into more detail. I also think these elements aren't exclusively linked to first destinations and could be seen as career managmeent as well as employability skills. Or do you define career managment more specifically?

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  3. Hi Stu. I really like some of the simplicity here, I think its a very powerful vision because of how elegant it is. I think my question would be about if you see the process as separate stages or how you support them all continuing together. I feel the danger of moving past explore too soon is that it can make students overly confident in a unwise decision or focusing in on one dream job when a number of options are better. I would see these as three ongoing aspects rather than a three stage process. I guess this particularly makes a difference around what you communicate to students as to what they should be doing and how you design careers work in to curriculum.

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    1. Hey Tom - that's really helpful. Perhaps I need to think of a way of making clear that the stages will happen in parallel rather than in series? Related to this I heard a phrase from someone yesterday saying that it's "about getting on not just about getting in", which I liked a lot. Simplicity is what I'm after - but as per intro in the post - it's probably an over simplification.

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