Talking about quality Best practice career services Jonathan Black Director of the University of Oxford Careers Service Issue 10 September 2014

Introduction There is increasing focus from students, parents and employers on the employability of graduates leaving university. Everyone at a university has a role to play in developing these skills in students, and the careers service can be front and central in supporting academic colleagues and employers with modern, relevant and evidence-based services. The best services can lead with impartial and trusted advice, with skillsbased programmes that give students real employment experiences, that work alongside the academic programmes, and are tailored to the institutional culture. Careers services that are professional, engaged and up-to-date, enabling communication between the different cultures of academia and business, can provide an active and leading service for students and colleagues across their university. In the old leather-bound books detailing annual meetings of the Oxford University Careers Service going back over 100 years, we can read notices and letters from employers. In one such example, from 1917, there is a letter from the British Foreign Office, Diplomatic and Consular Services in which they were pleased to announce that 'it is no longer essential that candidates should possess a private income'. This is really quite extraordinary that less than 100 years ago, almost in living memory, to work for the British Government in the Foreign Office you had to have a private income. Although there is arguably some distance to go, society has progressed a long way since those days in terms of social mobility and access to the professions. Universities expend considerable energy, time and money on encouraging pupils from all backgrounds to apply to study a degree, and to make it possible financially for them to attend and do well in higher education. However, increasingly, the students, their parents and tutors, employers and the government, are now turning their attention to what comes after university. They want to know what careers lie open to students and what skills and experiences they will need, to stand the best chance of being offered a job in their chosen career path. Regardless of the quality of the underlying data, prospective students and their parents compare courses and universities using the Key Information Sets (KIS); 16 measures of performance that

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include overall destination (for example, work, further study, unemployed and looking for work) and average starting salary. Based on the annual Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey, the data are effectively five years out of date for any prospective student - but do give some directional information. Within those five years, many jobs and careers will change, appear or disappear - one has only to think what organisations, technologies and businesses have emerged in the last few years to realise that the pace of change is unlikely to slow down in the next five years. There is no doubt that the recent increase in the fee regime for UK students at UK universities has focused many students' minds on some kind of cost/benefit justification for going to university, however, such an assessment is difficult to complete without making extraordinary leaps of faith about future career and earning power, taking time out for families and all the other unknowns that life has yet to offer. While the £9,000 is the headline, and seems affordable, the real total cost for a student of taking the loan for three years of fees and minimum maintenance, and then starting on the average salary of £24,000 a year, is over £100,000. Students can prepare for their future careers after higher education, by developing 'transferable' skills and can acquire these from a wide array of sources, often directly but sometimes as a happy secondary effect. To be clear though, these skills cannot all be taught in the classroom to a passive audience; students will do better if they take an active part in seeking out opportunities for developing their skills and gaining experience. What, then, is the role for a university careers service in providing these opportunities? The attitude that 'they'll be alright with a degree from X University' is going fast, and there are now serious expectations, at least by students, that a university will prepare them for their career. What does this mean? It can be argued that universities are indeed preparing students with the broad life skills to cope with the changes that they will face over the fifty years of their career - how to think, how to absorb new ideas, how to take initiative and think for themselves. Employers' organisations opine from time to time that universities are not producing graduates fully formed for the workplace; however, universities should continue to resist being a glorified work experience scheme. Overall, it is imperative, if a careers service is to be useful and successful, for it to actively engage with senior colleagues across the university, including senior tutors, pro vice-chancellors, heads of department and colleagues in development, alumni, and admissions. The second word in the title is the key: it is a careers service, helping all of our stakeholders. Overall a careers service does best when it fits within the culture of the university, working with the academic programme and institutional ethos. I believe that 'spoon feeding' does not help students - university lies mid-way between the highly structured school environment and the relatively unstructured world of work. If careers services are to prepare students well, then they will encourage initiative, self-help, and equipping students to take responsibility for their own career. The underlying philosophy of the best careers service is to offer trusted and impartial advice and guidance to all stakeholders, based on the rich knowledge and real experience of the careers advisers. I believe that it is essential for careers advisers to have had real experience actually doing the job, be it teaching, banking, international development, medicine, engineering or whatever. Such experience cannot be learned and without it any advice can appear somewhat academic - how much stronger to be able to talk from experience, combined with the trainable careers counselling skills. The best careers services are evidence-led, based on regular surveys of all stakeholders including students, graduates, alumni, employers and academic colleagues and the feedback used to adjust services. Careers services do well to be open and transparent, for example, with websites fully open for use by schools, other higher education institutions around the world, employers and students, and excellent analysis tools for anyone to use in reviewing students' destination data, significantly beyond the KIS data available.

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Students want experiences - they say 'show me, don't tell me'. Careers services can do this with high-quality, innovative programmes that are marketed strongly to students in multiple ways, and for which take up is measured and used to adjust the programmes. Best practice programmes fit alongside academic work, providing that combination of building workplace confidence, raising employment opportunities and enhancing skills; careers services do best when they enable access to these experiential learning opportunities. A careers service can play a unique and important role during confidential and unrecorded one-to-one guidance discussions: the careers service is one place in a university where students can feel free to express their innermost thoughts about their situation, which they might find hard or not wish to do with academic tutors, friends, parents, supervisors or employers, or by visiting the counselling service. However, one-to-one is not always the best use of student or careers adviser time; a 'Career Lounge' is an open forum that is led by a careers adviser but relies on the several students attending to share and discuss experiences, questions and concerns. Not only can more students be helped in the same time as would have been spent on one-to-one, but also the results are often felt to be more effective by the participants. The careers service can also play a leading role in developing alumni relations for the university. Alumni cannot always give money to their alma mater, but they usually do want to help; the careers service can help them do that in a direct way that takes little time, is highly rewarding and builds a strong, long-term relationship. Alumni can help current students by speaking on panels, providing interview practice, giving information interviews, or even providing internships. For example, at Oxford we have built an internship programme offering over 500 placements, where half the providers are alumni who wanted to engage with current students. As a quid pro quo, best practice careers services provide support for life to alumni - not onerous in terms of resources or time, but very encouraging for alumni in knowing the support is there if they need it. For all its faults, the destination data when combined with admissions data, can reveal differences in career outcome (for example, as measured by salary or by graduate level job) driven by school background, social mobility, disability, gender, subject and so on. Initial analysis of seven universities has shown that gender is the only statistically significant indicator of getting a graduate level job, with a lower proportion of women getting such roles. This can lead to useful engagement with academic colleagues in the area of post-university destinations. We recently created and now run a four-day, holistic development programme for women undergraduates and master's students (a version of Springboard), which has been taken up by other universities, as one of the ways we can address any gender gaps in career outcome. In 1958, the Appointments Committee for Oxford University considered that there were three essential requirements for a management candidate: 'to have a good brain, to lead a full life while up, and to have contributed something to the University'. In some ways, we would still endorse this; however, we have changed (and will continue to innovate) the careers service here to provide specific careers skills training and experiences to help students achieve a full and rewarding life after Oxford.

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A response to Jonathan Black's paper by Doug Cole, Head of Employability and Enterprise at Northumbria University Jonathan's article raises a number of interesting issues, some of which I would have expected to see from an institution as prestigious as Oxford University and some that are certainly shared among institutions of all types across the sector. In his article Jonathan suggests that universities are now turning their attention increasingly to student jobs and what comes after university. Is this really a recent development? The first degree courses included subjects such as law, religion and medicine, all of which led into a specific vocation, 'employability' in its earliest form? The sharpened focus we may perceive today is more likely as a result of a number of factors: firstly due to the prominence of the plethora of league tables and the competitive environment that this has created, and secondly due to the increased competition graduates are facing in applying for jobs and relative difficulty they experience in securing that first job. This links well to the point raised around the emergence of 'data' intended to inform prospective student choice which is an important one. Over the last 15 years there has been a huge upsurge in the profile of data and league tables, intended to provide clarity for the public and help raise standards of provision. We have to ask the question, what has it actually achieved? As Jonathan states, by the time prospective students see the data in DLHE and KIS it is already out of date - that is far from being the only issue with this data, but this would lead into an entirely new debate. Moving the discussion on I would also like to pick up on one particular point that is raised a number of times in Jonathan's article, namely the use of the term 'skills' and the need for students to 'acquire' these. I am not convinced by the focus on skills, particularly if we step back and take a more holistic view in relation to 'employability', which as a term surprisingly doesn't feature within the article. The employability agenda provides common ground that can help draw careers services and the wider academic community even closer together. There isn't the space to go in to the ins and outs of what employability means here, but what is important to note is that it is not the same as employment and the measures and league tables that exist are measuring employment outcomes not employability. In a sentence, for me employment is about a job and employability is much more about the career and the kind of person you are, being able to transition from job to job or be successful in whatever profession you have chosen to pursue. Employability is complex and consists of a number of inter-related areas, one of which is skills, but it is about so much more than that; to focus on skills in isolation is a very narrow view. The government and many other organisations push the skills agenda as being key; however, if you asked employers to rank the 'skill set' or 'mind set' of their employees in order of priority, the evidence would suggest mind set is the clear winner. This, coupled with the challenge of knowing what skills will be needed by employers in five or 10 years' time, again makes the overt focus on this area at the expense of others problematic. Skills are a part of the discussion here but only one part and we need to consider these in combination with other areas too. This highlights the importance of broadening the discourse here; we need to consider carefully the language we use as this directs our actions and we must start to consider a range of areas such as attitude, behaviours, knowledge and skills in combination. We need to address all of these, not just a single aspect, or we will continue to develop young people who are lacking in critical areas which are so important for success in life. Some of these may not be so easily measured, for example 'softer skills and competencies', but this should not mean they are ignored. They are the building blocks for society as a whole, and quite frankly, these appear to be missing in how we educate children and young people today. Self-awareness, awareness of others, listening effectively, empathy, responsibility and being able to reflect properly are all essential for success going beyond a job and impacting on all aspects of our life. Human relationships are at the centre of everything we do and to neglect the areas that impact on these is hugely problematic. University careers services cannot tackle all of this alone and are only partly responsible for helping prepare students for their future careers. Unfortunately there are no careers services in the 4

country that I am aware of that are resourced to the level where they are able to support every single student. The finite human resource in careers services across the country highlights the importance of everyone within the university needing to take responsibility for helping to develop the students. To this end the Higher Education Academy published 'Defining and developing your approach to employability: A framework for higher education institutions' in 2013, which is a free, downloadable resource from their website and provides a clear, common sense approach in the form of a structured process that encourages the kind of reflection, dialogue and partnership work that is very much needed within the sector in relation to employability. For those cynical of the whole employability agenda, yes industry complains that graduates are often not 'work-ready' but the suggestion that we must resist this push to turn universities into 'glorified work-experience schemes' is not helpful. I don't believe industry wants this and fundamentally what academics want to see in a 'good student' is really not different to what an employer wants to see in a 'good employee' - they are just expressed in different terms, two different languages in effect! These are not two conflicting agendas and we need to dispel this myth as soon as possible. Employability is not just about a job or simply about a set of skills, it is about developing the individual much more broadly and this is not a threat to the 'academic integrity' of our higher education system. I very much welcome Jonathan's comments around alumni; they are a critical aspect of the whole area of work relating to employability. They have so much value beyond donations and bring a range of potential benefits to current students, and their career stories are really the only true 'measurement' of employability that exists, numbers alone will never fully capture this. In closing, the quote below sums up very well for me an aspirational view of what a university should be about: The university offers a full education, a complete education. It is not only a place where academic qualifications can be gained, it is a place where an individual can be educated in the widest sense of the word. The university community is a social unity, an existence within itself, a community of equals pursuing knowledge, teaching, learning and living together. It is in essence a preparation for life, a step towards the ultimate goal of turning out the balanced individual, the complete person. Written in 1968 by Tony O'Rourke, a former President at the University of Warwick, this highlights to me that it is time for us to revisit the past and learn lessons to better inform our future; anything a careers service can do to support this is a good thing!

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About this publication Talking about quality is a series of articles published by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) in which experts explore issues of key interest to the higher education sector. In publishing these papers we intend to provoke new ideas, stimulate debate and inform the development of higher education policy. The series will give a platform to experts in the UK and internationally. The articles published in this series deliberately do not offer a 'QAA perspective' on policy developments. However, we welcome the opportunity to engage with the ideas raised as we develop our own views on key issues. All views expressed are those of the authors and are therefore not necessarily representative of their institutions or affiliations.

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