How Do We Work? Understanding the Impact of Professional Services on Student Outcomes
With the higher education sector in flux and facing unprecedented financial pressures, demonstrating the value of every resource has never been more central to providing an excellent student experience.
When it comes to the delivery of professional services, the picture is even more complex. Student-facing services such as careers or welfare may directly influence student life, but performance metrics and outcomes can be intangible or difficult to measure. Meanwhile, teams with less direct engagement with students, such as finance and quality assurance, surely have an impact on experience, but identifying a causal link between action and outcome can be challenging.
Despite this difficult in quantifying impact, professional support services are central to the overall quality of an institution’s offering. In this article, we explore how teams can understand and articulate their unique value proposition. By translating service delivery work into tangible metrics that resonate with decision-makers, teams can secure the resources necessary to elevate student success and solidify their role as indispensable partners within the context of the university.
Reflective Practice: Reviewing Service Delivery
Review is a crucial step on the road to understanding and measuring the impact of service delivery. While this may seem obvious, it’s often easier said than done. Review processes can be confused by a number of issues, including a lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, lack of alignment with wider institutional goals and failure to implement review recommendations.
Professionals looking to review their services should consider the following questions:
How does your approach to review and evaluation align with strategic priorities, both within the service and across the wider university?
Is your review designed with enhancement of the student experience at the heart?
Who has responsibility for overseeing the review process and how does this sit within your team and the wider institution?
Can this oversight support alignment with strategic goals, dissemination of findings and implementation of recommendations?
Is your review process clearly defined and systematic?
How are the processes and ultimate findings of reviews shared and acted on?
How can you incorporate student feedback into our review processes?
How can you ensure that student representatives have the necessary understanding, training and support to contribute effectively to reviews?
By reflecting on these areas, service leaders can design systematic review processes centred on a common goal, with clearly defined responsibilities. Importantly, the results of review processes must be shared and inform action planning. As a result, teams will be able to identify the areas in which they provide the greatest value and support both internally and across the wider institution, whilst also making room for improvement.
Professional Services, United
Professional services within universities are not a monolith; each provides a unique service that may even be tailored to the specific institutional context. Some have direct contact with students on a day-to-day basis, while others focus on the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that underpins the student experience.
As a result, it can be hard to put together a united front. In fact, many services suffer from the dreaded curse of siloed working, with teams insulated from one another and missing out on opportunities to maximise impact through collaboration – and the same is true when it comes to measuring the impact of service delivery on student experience. After all, the student experience is comprised of a constellation of different aspects, from teaching and learning to support services. So, how can we measure it based on one facet alone?
At Manchester Metropolitan University, professional services were brought together as an integrated service in 2018. Some key benefits of this approach include:
Development of a shared sense of identity and purpose across different teams, which helps services to align with an overall university mission
Working together to better understand how different teams work, and thereby learning to communicate value effectively across the institution
Increased recognition of the work that professional services do to support student experience, including through the development of new awards
A similar project is ongoing at the University of Warwick. Identifying the significant ‘intrapreneurial’ value of their professional service practitioners, university leaders have set up the Professional Services Network. The aim, here, is to give practitioners greater opportunity to innovate and share their expertise in the area of student experience. Likewise, UCL are delivering ‘Ways of Working’ – a framework for professional service practitioners across the institution that clearly articulates the behaviours that support staff development and progression.
Examples such as these illustrate how professional services working together can not only bring opportunities to identify blind spots, share best practice and learn from one another; collaborative work can also increase visibility across the institution. As a result, senior leaders can understand the value of services and their impact on student outcomes. In turn, this can become part of the way services are narrated to students, making them more visible and user focused.
Linking Teaching Excellence with Service Delivery
There’s no denying that teaching and learning is a crucial aspect of the student experience. After all, it’s what makes academic colleagues’ impact on student outcomes relatively easier to quantify than that of professional service practitioners.
However, to assume that service delivery is out of the range of this area of student experience would be erroneous. There are teams that have an obvious influence on teaching and learning, such as library and IT services. Yet, as integrating employability into the curriculum and providing accessible learning opportunities become ever more central, it’s clear that the impact of other professional services on the learning experience is increasingly significant.
To really understand and showcase the impact professional services has in this area, however, collaboration with academic colleagues and departments is essential. But what does this look like in practice?
There are some brilliant examples from Scotland, where the stipulation to deliver Institution-Led Reviews has resulted in some creative approaches to bringing together academic and professional colleagues in review processes. For example, the University of Aberdeen leads an Internal Teaching Review Process, which connects staff from services such as Registry, Careers, Student Experience and Student Support to review the quality of their interactions with academic Schools and students.
Similarly, the University of Strathclyde makes data available to both professional and academic staff, which is then used to inform reviews and decision-making. This has resulted in the development of their Learner Experience Framework and a Surveys and Metrics Working Group, which features input from academic departments and professional services alike.
While these examples illustrate how academics and professionals can come together in review processes, this is not the only route to collaboration and enhanced impact on student outcomes. As a 2014 report by Advance HE found, this collaboration is most effective in improving the student experience when they are supported at a strategic level. For further guidance, take a look at their toolkit, which includes a number of examples of successful partnerships at institutions across the UK.
By working together with academic colleagues, practitioners can build initiatives and interventions that support a well-rounded and enhanced student experience, whilst also developing greater understanding of the value professional services brings to that.
Towards a Better Student Experience
Fundamentally, the suggestions in this article explore how professional service teams can think and plan strategically around how to deliver an enhanced student experience. In doing so, the value proposition of these services becomes clear and there is the opportunity to gain greater visibility within the institutional context.
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