Health promotion as a model for engagement with careers

I'm sure people must have thought about this before (which is partly why I'm blogging about it) but I've been thinking in the last couple of days about the parallels between health promotion activity and engaging students with careers. The reason it came up is that a colleague mentioned the idea of a careers 'health check', which I think is a good idea, but my question is: why would students choose to engage with it?

GP practices often run 'well woman' or 'well man' clinics, but my guess is that the people who often go to these things probably aren't the ones who need it most, in fact they may be partly populated by the worried well.

Everyone in the higher education careers world knows that student engagement is a key issue and that doing it well is difficult, so can health promotion models help us to think about student engagement with careers?

Here are some quick observations re the parallels.

In both instances:

• the challenge is to get people to do something that's good for them in the long run but might not have any immediate benefit in the short term
• the process of doing something about it isn't easy, in fact it's hard work
• people don't have to do it (so you only have carrots, not sticks)
• nagging doesn't work (and according to the article linked below - neither does uncritical use of goal setting)

In throwing a few thoughts around about this in the last couple of days with Tristram Hooley on twitter, he pointed me in the direction of Jim Bright. Jim suggested searching for 'time discounting', which looks like a potentially useful avenue to pursue. Jim also directed me to a blog post of his on 'Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting'

So, has anyone given this any thought? Is there research out there already? What are health promotion models and can we adopt them?

As usual, just thinking out loud. Any comments or ideas much appreciated.

Is anyone with Google Apps using Google Plus?

I'm probably more excited than I should be that Bristol are using Google Apps for Education. Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Drive are going to be all very useful to use more in a work context. What I've been wondering about in the last few days though is whether there is scope to make more of Google Plus. I've had a Google Plus account for a while (plus.google.com/+StuartJohnson) but other than for sharing photos with my family (the instant upload is brilliant, if not a little unnerving) I've not made much use of it - all my networks are on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; Google Plus just arrived too late for me (and was one network to many for regular use).

I like this summary of social media by Doug Ray. Clearly it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's pretty accurate.

So I don't under-estimate the difficulties involved in encouraging people to switch social media platforms (I haven't done). But with everyone in the institution having a Google account it seems like there's an opportunity.

So, a couple of questions:

1. Which other HEIs are using Google Apps for Education?
2. Are any using Google+ well?

Progress review slides from Employability Summit no. 4

Below are my slides from our fourth Employability Summit (you can see the agenda here and some of the previous presentations here).

I need a good sort out

Over the years I've used a whole bunch of web tools for different things. The tools I use most in both a work and a non-work context are:

• Remember the milk (my to do list, which I've blogged about here, and use for a modified Getting things done system)
• Evernote (for notes - especially from meetings - and things to keep for reference, in particular photos of hand-written notes)
• Diigo (for bookmarking)
• Google Drive (for creating and collaborating on Google Docs and storing other documents)
• Dropbox (for storing and sharing documents)

One of the keys to their usefulness is that all work well on mobile, tablet and desktop and sync seamlessly across these platforms (apart from Diigo - the apps for which aren't great and I find it only works really well on a desktop - so I email to Diigo and tag later). I use GoodReader on my iPad to view documents offline (it syncs with Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Exchange) and is particularly good for annotating PDFs.

But before I leave for Bristol I need to do a good tidy up of all these different tools. How I use them has evolved, and the tools themselves have evolved as well, so which one I use for what has become a bit blurred in places. I especially need to sort out my tags and notebooks in Evernote and decide if I need to use Dropbox at all or whether I can just use Google Drive.

Does anyone have any tips?

Leaving Leicester for Bristol

So, my big news (which I announced a while ago and so most people already know) is that I'm going to be the Director of the Careers Service at the University of Bristol. It's a very exciting move for me, but after 8 happy years at Leicester it's going to be a bit of a wrench to leave. We have made great progress at Leicester in careers over the past 3 years and it will be good to take that experience to a different setting and a new challenge. The University of Bristol has a fantastic reputation and everyone keeps telling me what a great city it is. What's not to like?!

I start on 27 January and looking forward to my family joining me as soon as possible...