Developing a Strategic Commitment to Achieve High Levels of Employability

Here are my slides from the Inside Government event on Enhancing UK Graduate Employability. I've been ask to present a case study on Developing a Strategic Commitment to Achieve High Levels of Employability.

The Great Gatsby

In April 2014 the Gatsby Foundation published a report called Good Career Guidance (thanks to Tristram Hooley, who was involved in the research, for giving me the heads up). The blurb on the website says:

We commissioned Sir John Holman to research what pragmatic actions could be taken to improve career guidance in secondary schools. Sir John developed eight benchmarks that identify different dimensions of good career guidance, and made ten recommendations for improving the career guidance system.

So clearly the focus is secondary schools but there's a lot in it that's of relevance to HEIs too. The guts of the report are the 8 benchmarks for providing good careers guidance, which are as follows:

1. A stable careers programme
2. Learning from career and labour market information
3. Addressing the needs of each pupil
4. Linking curriculum learning to careers
5. Encounters with employers and employees
6. Experiences of workplaces
7. Encounters with further and higher education
8. Personal guidance

All of which are relevant to HE. 

It's a well researched and well written report. I'd be interested to know your thoughts, especially if you are using in (or intend to use it) in a HE context. 

A message from a graduate

I've not blogged for far too long so I thought I'd throw up a lazy post of something someone just pointed out to me. 'A Message from a Graduate' video on YouTube from Matthew Rennie who got a first class hours in Civil Engineering at Newcastle University and is wanting to get into creative agencies.

Good on you Matt. Hope you get snapped up!

A few more careers tweeters

Further to I’m looking for more careers tweeters, after attending the AGCAS Heads of Service Conference last week I've found a few more. Coming from a background in learning development and learning technology I'm increasingly finding that I need more careers people in my professional network (it could be just me but there seem to be far fewer careers people on twitter?). So I'm making lists. I have two:

• Heads of Careers (HE)
• Careers & employability

Who have I missed?

I'm looking for more careers tweeters

January 2011 was the first time I attended the AGCAS Heads of Service conference. I was very new to careers stuff then (still am!) and it was a really useful chance to meet people. I'm looking forward to the conference this January, not least because I'm attending an additional day on 4 January for deputies and new heads. Our soon-to-be Director of Careers, Bob Athwal (you'll need to scroll down a bit) will also be there so it will be a good opportunity to spend some time with him too. What I'd also really like is to find some other careers tweeters. My network is mostly made up of learning development and e-learning people (which I love!), but I need to find some good careers tweeters too. Last year on the conference there were only 4 of us tweeting (to my knowledge) but only 2 of us are still current (on careers stuff at least. So, does anyone know any more? They don't have to be heads of service, or even in HE, just people who say useful stuff about careers and employability on twitter.

(Couldn't leave that hot water post at the top of the list for long).

Director of Careers post at Leicester

Keep meaning to mention this... our Director of Careers role is now advertised. If you're brilliant - please apply. More details here. Please RT, re-post etc. Closing date is 12 September.

Careers website updates nearly done

I blogged a few weeks ago about the progress on our front pages revamp for www.le.ac.uk/careers and I'm pleased to say that we've now completed the main structural changes. Matt and I have been working on it off and on for a few weeks (Matt mostly on, me mostly off) with help from Vic and #Stephaniewhosnotontwitter. We've still got work to do but the main front page is now active...

...as are new pages for each of the three main audiences:

• students and alumni
• employers
• staff

I think it's both cleaner and clearer but your comments will be much more useful than mine...

If these aren't employability skills I'll eat my hat

By pesbo

In a meeting a few months back I recalled a particular section of the University of Leicester's previous Learning and Teaching Strategy (2006-2009). In the section on 'Aims of undergraduate programmes' it said the following:

Each undergraduate degree programme should enable development, in a discipline context, of a range of personal or transferable skills, including:

• problem solving
• communication skills (written and oral)
• basic numeracy
• team working
• IT skills
• information handling skills
• emerging learning technologies skills
• lifelong learning skills
• employability skills

Which is all very well - but what's 'employability skills' doing at the bottom there? a) as an afterthought and b) as if it doesn't encompass all the items above it in the list? I think things have moved on since then but I think it's an interesting insight into how people sometimes perceive employability - as only to do with CVs and applications and interviews and not with the skills employers are looking for to do the job in the first place, like these.

Any thoughts?

Being the one with their foot in the door

Richard put a copy of PwC's employability guide on my desk earlier in the week, it's titled Being the one with their foot in the door. I was interested in it because I'm trying to think about how to identify employability in the curriculum and wondering whether competencies will help. In the introduction to the guide the Chairman of PwC says:

[...] this Employability Guide [...] explains the different competencies you need to join us. You might have developed many of them through your studies. Others could have come from part-time work or summer travel. Or from somewhere else altogether. What’s important is that you can recognise the skills we’re looking for, and then come up with a good example (or two) to show you’ve got them.

Later on their Head of Strategy and Talent says:

Academic study gets your foot in the door; employability skills push it open to a far wider range of opportunities. They make your potential contribution to our business unique. Consider these skills and experiences your personal business card.

What's really useful is that not only do they list the competencies they are looking for in any potential recruits, they also suggest where they might have been developed. So here are PwC's 10 Competencies and useful prompts to help potential recruits think about where they can find the evidence for these and identify any gaps.

Competency	Prompts
Coach and develop yourself and others	Have you pushed yourself to achieve things that go above and beyond? Have you ever changed the way you did something after getting feedback? Have you taken the time to feedback to others? Have you had work experience or done voluntary work? Have you developed new skills outside of your degree?
Communicate with impact and empathy	Have you made something simple for others to follow? Have you used your powers of persuasion to get funding or agreement for a proposal? Have you presented on your course or to a club or society? Have you ever spoken in front of an audience? Have you written speeches, manifestos or business cases? Can you think of a time when you made a point of taking on board different opinions?
Be curious: learn, share and innovate	Have you used your initiative to achieve a goal? Have you made time to learn something new outside of your course? Do you go to events that are all about knowledge sharing or learning? Have you shared what you know with other people on your course? Have you ever come up with a new and better way of doing something? Have you been to employer presentations or skills sessions to explore your future career?
Lead and reinforce team success	Have you been adaptable in order to work better with others? Have you taken part in a voluntary project that relied on everyone pulling together? Do you belong to a sports team, club or society? Have you led a group? Can you think when you worked in a team to achieve a common goal? Do you know what qualities you can bring to a team?
Build and maintain relationships	Have you got to know your careers advisor or course tutor? Have you networked with people from other courses or universities? Did you get to know a customer really well? Have you built good relationships with others? Do you go to a club or society regularly, rather than once a year? Have you made (and maintained) useful contacts on a work experience placement?
Show you have courage and integrity	Can you think of a time when you worked well under pressure? Ever undertaken a mundane task with real enthusiasm? Do you always turn up on time? Do you put 100% into every application form? Have you handled conflicts or differences of opinion well? Have you kept your cool when dealing with a difficult customer?
Manage projects and money	Have you juggled different priorities to meet a deadline? Have you handled lots of different pieces of course work at the same time? Have you adapted positively to a new process at work? Have you ever put a backup plan into action? Have you looked after an organisation’s finances?
Be open minded, practical and quick to adapt	Have you taken on board suggestions from others? Have you picked up a shift at work at short notice? Have you been happy to stay late to get things done? Have you adapted to changes at work? Have you put yourself in a situation you’re not used to? Have you tried new things that are outside your comfort zone?
Build and use commercial and technical know-how	Have you looked into the kind of professional qualifications you might do with us? Have you thought about who your dream client would be or what it would be like to be a CEO? Have you gone the extra mile to understand how a company or industry operates? Do you take an interest in business and current affairs? Are you curious about what makes a business tick? Do you understand how your degree could make a difference to our business?
Caring about client service	Have you come up with ways to do things differently? Have you thought about how you can make a club or society better? Do you take a real interest in your parttime job, how the company works and who its competitors are? Have you looked into how PwC operates as a business? Do you work hard to make things better? Have you ever gone out of your way to do something positive for others?

Table text (c) 2010 PricewaterhouseCoopers LPP

Of course not every graduate wants to work for a professional services company (thankfully) but many of the competencies do seem to be transferable. I'm wondering if a synthesis of these and the SHL competencies would be a useful framework to help us identify and develop employability in the curriculum. And I think the questions to prompt students to think about where they can find the evidence will be useful for students, departments and us as a careers service to help us to think more broadly and more strategically about what interventions are required.

What do you think?

We need a new front page (again)

Back in July last year I blogged about our new front page for Student Development. At the time Alan made this comment...

I understand the problem, but it's a bit busy for my liking - too much text to scan, too many distractions. [...] If it were me, I'd go for less, but allow people to drill down easily. Sorry, I know you worked hard on this [...]

I think Alan was right (you can see the current page here) but I didn't want to change it again so soon after coming up with the redesign (not least because it was a big improvement on the previous version and that was the main thing at that point). My response at the time was that I'd let it run for a while and then revisit it - well now we have chance to revisit it, not least because of the renaming thing. I've had a look at a number of other similar services at other institutions including Manchester, Warwick, Lancaster and Durham, and as you will see if you click on the links they all use a similar structure at the top level, i.e. students, employers and staff - which I think is spot on. So that was what I discussed with Matt a couple of weeks ago and this is what he's come up with, which I think is great (he's blogged about it here)!

This is only a first draft though and I'd be really interested in your comments. We can use portlets on the left or right hand side to include contact details and news items but the main part of the screen is what you see above. The 'What's hot' bit we can update on a frequent basis (not sure about the name but you get the idea). The 'Follow us' links can link to the individual accounts or pages with multiple accounts listed (for instance - I might set up a Twitter account solely for jobs and internships advertising in addition to our current one). We also need to think about what we do with the next level down: Students and Alumni can link to a page which is broken up into succeed in your studies, gain experience and develop your career; the Employer section can link to our Employer Liaison pages (we'll be revamping these shortly); and the staff section can link to what is currently a very embryonic staff folder (I'll need to develop this pretty quickly). I'd also appreciate suggestions of what I could replace the nasty banner image with (see below - I've never liked it but changing it hasn't been a priority up to this point), maybe something a bit like the Environment Team's (not the fridge magnet idea but the separate images idea).

One concern I have is that, other than the 'What's hot' box, we've used the whole of the centre of the page for static items. Is that ok or should we put a dynamic news feed in? It looks quite fresh now but it could quickly feel dated if it remains relatively static.

I should also probably run all this by my colleagues in Marketing to check they're happy (note to self).

All suggestions gratefully received :)

Subtitle

Further to the change of name thing I think we're going to go for

I'm sure you'll all sleep more soundly in your beds knowing that. Thanks for the comments to the original post, especially from Vic and Zara. Now all I need to do is think about how and where to roll out the change, especially do I rename our Twitter account and what about the Facebook page (can't rename that and currently >2,100 likes)?

We've been renamed

Last week Student Development was renamed the Careers Service. Well, it hasn't actually happened yet (and that's the reason for this post) but it does have to happen ASAP. I can't go into the details here of how it came about but I would like to reflect a bit on the best way of pitching the new name to students, staff and employers.

I wasn't particularly wedded to the name Student Development, but one of the reasons that I've not liked the name Careers Service is that it's a fairly narrow and traditional term and we aren't really either of those things. Student Development at the University of Leicester comprises a wide range of services that we have summarised under three key themes, helping students to:

• succeed in their studies
• gain experience
• develop a career

The name Careers Service implies that what we do is only really associated with the last of these three themes - things that spring to mind for most people are probably support with CVs, applications and interviews. All important things but they represent only a fraction of what we do.

So the question is, given that the name has been decided, how do we communicate it effectively?There are two reactions I'm trying to avoid:

1. Where's Student Development gone?
2. I didn't know the Careers Service offered support with that!

To address possible reaction 1) we need to be careful about how we publicise the renaming. For employers this won't really be an issue because they probably refer to us as the Careers Service anyway, for students and staff it's more tricky as the name Student Development is one that is now familiar to them. To address possible reaction 2) I'm thinking that a subtitle might help, something like...

Careers Service
Learning development | Placements and internships | Career development

All comments gratefully received. I've partly blogged this to try and re-gain a sense of perspective on the issue. I'm hoping you can help.

Who gets the best jobs

I've just been sent a link to a programme that was on BBC 2 last night - Who Gets the Best Jobs? (Broadcast on BBC Two, 9:00 PM Wed, 2 Feb 2011 available until 1:09AM Wed, 16 Feb 2011). I was aware of Alan Milburn's Unleashing Aspiration report but this programme makes it much more of a prominent issue (and only last week was Andrew Neil's programme Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain).

Here's the blurb on the programme from the iPlayer.

Britain is a less equal society than at any time since World War One. In Who Gets the Best Jobs, Richard Bilton investigates access to the professions - and finds that the best jobs are being snapped up by an increasingly small gene pool of privileged, well-connected families.

Getting a good degree matters more than ever - and those from low income families can no longer easily work their way up from the bottom without the qualifications, contacts and social skills that their more fortunate counterparts make full use of.

One of the University of Leicester's stated values is having an inclusive and accessible culture, specifically

Our commitment to an inclusive and accessible culture not only opens the doors to the very best, no matter their background, it even shapes the very way we look at and discover the world around us.

Leicester is the most inclusive of Britain's top-20 leading universities with the greatest proportions of students from under-represented groups.

So whilst the programme is more than a little depressing, our task is to think about how our inclusive and accessible culture can contribute to fairer access and who gets the best jobs. Not least given this comment by Dr Lee Elliott Major (presumably he uses the middle name so not to be confused with Lee Majors) from The Sutton Trust (confirming what we already knew):

We know that many of the big companies or big recruiters have increasingly small lists of universities from whom they pick ... there are some signs that in the current recession that recruiters are actually shortening their lists. So for this particular generation coming out of university now it's an even bigger issue.

So, what to do. Any suggestions?

AGCAS Heads of Service conference

I've just got back from the AGCAS Heads of Service conference at Conference Aston. This was my first time at the conference and I was there in my acting up capacity. As is usually the case with conferences, the best part was meeting people - especially to share ideas and compare experiences. I felt particularly welcomed by the East Midlands Heads of Service (we were trying to think of an appropriate collective noun for ourselves but didn't). Also, it was good to find people on Twitter, especially in meeting Michael Clarke from London for the first time (he was the other person at the conference tweeting!), Stephen McAuliffe (he looks very  smart on his Twitter pic) from Nottingham, and Jon Christie from Falmouth.

The common themes of the conference were around demonstrating impact of activity, strategic positioning of careers within institutions (especially post Browne), and doing more with less. The institutions that seem to be making most headway are those where both opportunities to influence strategy are grasped and senior management are supportive.

Being relatively new to things careers I found the conference very helpful and colleagues very supportive. Whether I go next year depends on what happens to my acting up...

And, what post conference blog would be complete without a wordle of the tweet hashtag #agcas11 (thanks twitter archive and Wordle).

Employability KPIs

Not CC (obvs)

Yesterday I attended a university committee at which my director presented our draft key performance indicators for employability. There were seven KPIs proposed as follows:

1. Destination statistics
2. Opportunities for career planning
3. Support for the development of employability within courses
4. Opportunities and support for work experience and placements
5. Opportunities for developing employability outside the curriculum
6. Engagement with employers
7. External recognition and validation

The committee, however, recommended that we have just two: do our graduates get a graduate job and how much are they paid? Whilst I understand that the Browne Review places considerable pressure on universities to show potential students what return they will get for their investment (and rightly so), I can't help thinking that we're confusing institution-level KPIs with service-level KPIs.

I'd be interested in your comments, especially if you're from a careers service who's also wrestling with meaningful KPIs.

Careers after biological sciences

Here's a brilliant new video from Chris Willmott in Biological Sciecnes on studying medicine after biological sciences. Chris has developed a raft of resources including videos and presentations for bioscience students. He gets alumni to come and present to students on different careers. Areas covered so far are:

• Clinical Trials
• Conservation
• Cosmetics
• Forensics
• Formulation technologist
• Healthcare Science
• Journalism
• Manufacturing Scientist
• Medicine
• Microbiology
• Pharmaceutical Industry
• Recruitment
• Teaching

More info can be found at http://biosciencecareers.wordpress.com/ I've also linked it to the blog roll.