Meeting the Challenges Faced by a University Careers Service: An Insider’s Perspective
Ahead of my keynote address at October’s Graduate Employability Conference 2023, I’ve reflected on some of the current challenges facing careers practitioners and leaders. I don’t contend that the challenges presented here are universal and that they exist in isolation, nor that they are easy to solve. Many should be faced in the context of how the sector is regulated, which is outside the control of any institutional careers service. It is within that setting that careers teams need to do what is right for their students and graduates alongside managing the pressure of regulatory requirements.
Going for gold
In late September, institutions across England will have their latest Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) rating published for all to see, with many aspiring for a top-level gold rating. Achieving a bronze doesn’t mean you’re suddenly third-rate, indeed bronze is defined as “outcomes are typically high quality, and there are some very high-quality features”. What ratings can do, as seen in previous TEF rounds, is stir institutions into (re)action. Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) data is used to form any TEF rating, and so a badge without lustre may cause university leadership to feel that significant changes are needed in their careers and employability provision. This can be great leverage for leaders keen to make changes, but it can also bring increased scrutiny and pressure. An institutional, AGCAS or sector mentor can make the difference here, helping careers leaders navigate their institutional politics.
Going global
It costs a lot of money to run a university and many institutions are feeling the financial squeeze in the current economic climate. One attempt to offset the static home student income is to recruit more international students, who often pay a significant premium for the same provision as UK students. While this strategy is not open to all, the student demographic on many campuses is becoming increasingly international, which is having an impact on career teams. Where I work at the University of Liverpool, the percentage of all interactions with international students doubled in the year 2022/23. Across the UK, teams are adding specialist international-focused roles, but most are attempting to offer more for international cohorts with the same level of resource.
Threading employability throughout your curriculum is one way to combat this at scale, but it’s difficult to add the nuance for international students and manage expectations while delivering other key messages. In my experience, international students are career motivated earlier in their university lifecycle than home students. They also arrive on campus earlier than home counterparts and may be looking to engage pre-arrival. This early window is the sweet spot for careers teams. Package content and events for international cohorts at a time when other students are more engaged elsewhere, and deliberately weight your resource to manage expectations and to meet the demand.
Show me the (value of) money
As with universities, careers teams are increasingly being challenged to do more with less. Allocating resource where it really adds value can be difficult to assess due to how outcomes are measured by the regulator. By the time your GOS results come back verified, it is nearly two years since those students graduated, and potentially five or six years since they began their studies. Identifying any causal link between those results and the students who did or didn’t engage with your careers team during that time is very difficult, and a possible red herring in evidencing the value you’ve created.
Accept the lag of your GOS results and go on a data journey to arrive at a point where you can demonstrate your value and impact on a more regular basis. In my previous role in the Liverpool careers team, the management team were led to adopt an Adaptive Planning approach with the premise “In the short term, you will be a bit wrong. In the long term, without reflection, you will be catastrophically wrong”. This led us to take our GOS results and plug the c.50% response rate gap with other available data, e.g. graduate LinkedIn profiles. Though not perfect, this gave a richer view of graduate outcomes that we could use to assess what students did or didn’t do that secured them graduate level work. The result was an eight-point scorecard of temporally local metrics that could be updated, monitored and reported on far more regularly than lagging GOS data, demonstrating ongoing impact. The central hypothesis was that if local metrics improve in the way we think they need to, so will graduate outcomes. This year Liverpool has recorded its highest ever GOS performance.
Going to the dark side
Whilst not easy, this strategic approach to graduate outcomes monitoring is preferable in the long term to adopting the dark arts of GOS management. On one hand, the GOS is a very successful sociological survey, with a 50%+ response rate across thousands in the overall sample. However, it does have limitations, not least in the lack of data for international students but also its blunt interpretations of what constitutes a graduate job. It’s also not immune from what I’ve heard one VC call ‘being gamed’.
It’s not quite the Wild West of the DLHE days, where numerous loopholes could be explored to league table effect, but the current survey can cause perverse actions from institutions to gather the responses needed. With such pressure to perform well in outcomes rankings, there can be pressure to allocate resource to activities that ‘game’ the survey. This is risky though. While you may want to maximise your responses, you need that ongoing robust approach in the background, keeping the fallible GOS at a remove when it comes to demonstrating impact.
Going to see a friend
I’m old enough to remember when the use of peer-to-peer initiatives in the delivery of careers provision was considered by some as reductive and low-quality. The University of Liverpool careers team has not offered guidance appointments to students since 2018, and graduate outcomes performance is currently the best it has ever been. I’m not naïve enough to completely causally link the two, but effective peer-to-peer systems can succeed and complement your wider work.
Using peers in careers work (and the wider student experience) is growing, and Emma Norman from Exeter and Wonkhe’s Jim Dickinson summarise the advantages well. There are excellent examples of this across the sector, with Gloucester, Hertfordshire, Kingston and Leeds just some of the organisations who have taken this area of practice and run with it. The student-led Career Studio at Liverpool is moving to a bigger home in 2023/24, taking its original peer-to-peer concept and evolving this as part of a campus gateway to promote local and global opportunities to students and graduates. Peer set-ups are cheaper for organisations battling tight budgets, but this is not the main benefit. I’ve seen great innovations come out of including students in strategic decision making in careers teams.
Going green
We are seeing increasing student interest in sustainability and green careers. High-profile campaigns have called for institutions to ban who they see as anti-sustainable companies from campus events. With impartiality a core principle of careers work, this can cause tensions. Irrespective of your ethical viewpoint, sustainability is now a central theme within graduate recruitment. A specific sustainability role is still quite rare at graduate level, but students and graduates are considering the green credentials of organisations when deciding who to apply for. Careers teams are playing a key role in guiding employers in this area; the latest issue of AGCAS Phoenix highlights best practice.
Going into the matrix
There’s a lot of noise around AI and its impact on HE and graduate recruitment. While it can feel overwhelming, this technology will change how we live our personal and work lives. I have a friend who uses generative AI to create their weekly meal plans, and another who seeks advice from ChatGPT on their fantasy football team selection (to decent effect). I’ve found it useful for summarising extensive free text comments, and in framing high level strategy considerations, providing a baseline for me to develop. Recent Cibyl research has uncovered how students are using AI in their studies and job applications, and colleagues at the University of Northampton are doing excellent things with AI in interactions with students. There is reasonable fear around the capabilities of this tech, but we need to see it as a tool to support students. If students are using AI in their self-directed career planning and applications, then careers teams need to support them to use it ethically and well.
Going in the right direction
There are still glaring outcomes gaps between students in the UK, and we can’t ever stop trying to address this. Whilst there are wider socio-economic factors at play, it is incumbent on every careers team to do what they can to close these gaps. Careers leaders must be at the table when English institutions are updating their Access and Participation Plans (APP) to ensure a holistic view. The APP throws up contradictions – perhaps the students you need a greater number of from an access point of view are statistically the students likely to perform less well in graduate outcomes metrics. This tells you where to focus your resource, rather than trying to be all things to all students. If you want to move the needle then you must direct resource to make a difference for these students, accepting that the more socio-economically affluent will get less support.
Careers teams must also meet a significant internal challenge regarding equality. A recent AGCAS member survey showed that the demographic breakdown of careers teams in the UK is broadly representative of the population as a whole. That is not enough, we need to be representative of the students we support. Where institutions have very diverse student populations, this should also be seen in careers teams. When my AGCAS Presidential term ends in December 2024 I’d like to be judged on the equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) developments that we’ve made. I’ll by no means have solved what is a deep-rooted and extensive issue, but I’m aiming to avoid performative actions and instead enable systemic changes to how we function as an organisation and how we support our members to do the same. The careers sector is incredibly exciting to work in and it should be open to everyone.
There are many challenges currently facing careers teams, but great practice is taking place across the sector. AGCAS is at the heart of championing and developing this excellent work from careers practitioners all over the UK and can point you in the direction of those who can help you find your own local solutions.
About the author
Paul Gratrick is a Head of Operations for Student Experience and Enhancement at the University of Liverpool, working with academic and professional service staff to enhance and add value to the student experience as a whole, including the careers and employability provision for students and graduates. He is the current AGCAS President, and also an independent member of the OfS Quality and Assessment Committee.
