The Evolution of Careers Advisers as HE Professionals: Insights from the University of the West of England (UWE)
Historic Relationship
Over the last 20 years I have witnessed a steady levelling of the playing field between those working in Higher Education Careers, and academics that deliver employability in the curriculum. At one point the relationship was quite transactional, with careers seen as a support service to our academic colleagues, but one can see the emergence of a change in this dynamic.
This shift means embedding employability is not just seen through the lens of supplementary content with programmes, but in the evolving skillsets of both academic and careers staff being joined up in the design, development and delivery of programmes. Whereas once there may have been a power imbalance between colleagues, now there can be genuine partnerships and opportunities for co ownership of this shared and institutionally critical agenda.
Professional Identity
Careers Practitioners in Higher Education have had to consider their own professional identity within this new landscape. The art of guidance, always a mainstay of their objective, observable and critical practice, has needed to evolve to be considered through the scope of the curriculum and aligned with learning and teaching practice. True one-to-one guidance in its purest sense, a vital part of the practitioners armoury, in large universities, has become reserved for those most in need.
The delivery of one-to-many interventions in and of itself is not a new feature of the career adviser identity. As part of most established careers qualifications such as the CDI MA Career Development run at UWE, or the AGCAS accredited Diploma in Careers Education, Information and Guidance in HE run by the University of Warwick, the ability to engage, deliver and contribute to the learning experience of students would be a feature of tailored modules. Whether more simplistic session objectives or more established learning outcomes, thought and structure would have been given to the pedagogical approaches and learning needs of students. Early delivery alongside the curriculum was often to introduce the service and issues around the application process and a key focus was signposting the one to one service as the next step. We have had to accept pragmatically this cannot be the key outcome, and the skills and craftmanship of a HE Careers Adviser requires the guidance and learning to be more interwoven in the one to many delivery; this has meant that the employability content required much more synergy and understanding of the overall course and practitioners becoming subject specialists.
Theoretical Positioning
Arguably these changes had been recognised in career theory over the last few decades. Bill Law’s Career Learning Theory in particular unearthed a model, albeit one that may have originally evolved from those looking at an individual’s one-to-one practice, that can and should sustain a one-to-many approach.
In some ways the evolution of this theory I think allows career practitioners to very much see learning and teaching as their new delivery landscape. Self-Reflection, Opportunity Awareness, Decision Making and Transition Planning became the watchwords. In UWE, this has morphed into a very distinct set of career management skills that can underpin our curricular design and development, as well as delivery and work been done to build on the simple starting point below that emerged from the Higher Education Academy around 2013.
Practitioner identity remains of importance in this arena, the idea of ‘self concept’ (including self-esteem) is crucial to career professionals as it will feature in the conversations they may have with students. Issues of self-worth, skills and utility permeate the mind of career advisers who will want to have a clear sense of purpose and pride in their own work. For many years their unique selling point was the guidance encounter, honed and trained in a professional environment, drawing on a range of psychological and sociological measures to provide quality and constructive, objective, impartial advice to the recipient.
Pragmatic Repositioning
Reframing the centre point of a careers professional’s work certainly has necessitated significant CPD within the HE environment. Alongside individual mindset, enhancement of skillset and identity has become a feature as careers advisers may be seen to have moved into a ‘third space’ within Higher Education.
For the past decade, I would say careers services have become more aligned with the academic practice enhancements, whether that be centres for learning and teaching excellence, or academic skills collectives. This would have started within a train the trainer sphere, accompanying the work of Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) in projects such as Future Directions (in Wales) that very much bringing employability and enterprise as a shared agenda.
The growing proximity of academic and employability agendas has meant that careers professionals have often led on strands of work or being party to frameworks and good practice that have emerged within the curriculum. A current focus at UWE is for senior consultants to be involved with a design team that looks at the whole programme when a degree course is being revalidated; this chimes with previous work I have witnessed where the careers voice is looking at the curriculum as a whole to ensure employability is weaved throughout. Actively involved in the creation of a challenge-based curriculum, or partnering at the outset of programmatic by design initiatives examples where I have seen the careers voice as a critical and considered partner.
When consultants are actively involved in the creation of a challenge-based curriculum and collaborate with colleagues on the design of initiatives, the careers voice is strengthened and considered a critical partner.
In tandem with this has been seasoned advisers’ own evolution through engagement with accreditation such as the PG Certificate Learning and Teaching in HE or the established HEA Fellowship programme. The emergence of a shared and new identity with HE careers professionals as experts in the academic world has taken their route much more into the design and development of curriculum as well as delivery.
Levels of Embeddedness
At one point, careers and enterprise workshops were very much a bolt on element in work with academics, and to some extent this would have fuelled the transactional nature I referenced at the start of this article. There was quite a traditional package of resource to include career options and application techniques.
Vocational or semi vocational courses (such as Business/Accountancy) would be some of the earlier adopters of this as they found these discussions would enhance their established content. In other parts of the university these discussions may have been framed as more pastoral support alongside a programme to support any tutorial or transition support as students reached the end of their University journey.
Regular reflections on impact and engagement with this work began to consider that embedded activity, linked to assessment and subject matter, is where the deepest learning occurs and is required throughout the student lifecycle. This is not just a realisation by Careers Services; indeed, at UWE, colleagues in our Library Team who we worked with on this concept referenced the work of Wingate, who has recognised the same intrinsic benefits of embedding, owning or co-owning in the context of academic literacy.
In Careers and Enterprise we are actually beginning to measure and capture that level to create a data set that will clearly show via a matrix where content is extra, aligned or embedded within the curriculum. This comes at a time where our own UWE 2030 Strategy talks about every course being designed to maximise the employability of our students, a perfect point of consolidation. Our own Careers and Enterprise Strategy has the embedding of career management skills as one of its three key priorities.
Added Institutional Value
This broad direction of travel can give students and academics a model for efficient implementation and value to their future career thinking and decision making.
An additional benefit of this is that the institution can achieve a number of its bigger goals and metrics, in particular graduate outcomes. Some early research has shown that students who are clearly career confident or focused in how they report against career registration (an internal but sector-tested survey on individual career preparedness) in their final year are more likely to be in a positive graduate outcome eighteen months after they leave University. Our own small scale tracking at UWE with Accounting and Finance students supports this but more work is clearly needed.
I would also be interested in exploring this link further in relation to other metrics such as continuation or completion, hypothesising that a student with clear career plans or goals is more likely to see the full value of their studies. This may also be borne out in a correlation at the graduate outcomes stage with a link between students having a good degree outcome and a positive graduate outcome.
21st Century Careers Practitioners in HE: The Beating Heart of the Institution
Showing the all-round employability benefits of a programme can of course be of value in Higher Education recruitment as it offers students an insight into the long-term impact of their choice of institution. Understanding the value these of metrics on employability messaging and explaining not just the extracurricular support but programme intentions to build in employability is an increasingly fundamental feature of open days and prospectuses.
Whilst I am not suggesting there is further metamorphism needed for careers staff to become outright marketeers, their position and influence on the curriculum and move into the Learning and Teaching domain certainly now puts them at the heart of a thriving Higher Education ecosystem. And one where employability in the curriculum has meant a convergence of skillsets and practice is for the greater institutional good.
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