The future of graduate employability: looking forward to 2012
The recent higher education white paper reinforces governmental concern for employability. How will this affect the provision of undergraduate degrees? Will some disciplines where employment rates are low become extinct?
I think the sector is going through a phase where it is asking itself big questions like, "what is higher education for?", and often answers to these are shaped by instrumentalist concerns, such as all university courses should contribute to the economy.
In some ways, this is fairly recent idea, but it has now become so mainstream as to be almost ubiquitous. This strikes me as being a pity. Not only does it challenge the idea of the university, even economically, it doesn't make sense.
We need the artistic skills of the arts and humanities to innovate and produce future technology. Think for example of the iPad: technology meets art and design. The only reason why early Apple computers offered different fonts was because Steve Jobs, prior to being thrown out of university, had been on a calligraphy course. To be employable, you need a range of skills and attitudes. Creative thinking is one of them.
I think one of the reasons we get so muddled about this is because words like "employability" are so easily confused with "employment". People tend to think the two words are interchangeable, when in fact, this isn't always the case. Employability is a highly dynamic concept. It denotes a progression and a certain amount of self-sufficiency.
Being in employment, on the other hand, is static; it's about being paid to do a certain job. For understandable reasons, the graduate job market is preoccupied by the rhetoric of "getting a job", but getting a job is only part of employability.
A few years ago, I did some presentations to managers at Lehman Brothers. When they went out of business I kept in contact with several of their senior investment bankers. What struck me was how quickly these people were back in employment – in some cases they had been offered jobs within hours of being made redundant.
Forget all the rhetoric about transferable skills. To me, that's employability: the ability to find employment at the same grade, in the same line of work, whenever and wherever you need it.
Decent higher education should produce employable graduates, regardless of subject of study or academic discipline. Employers know this, which is why when recruiting so few of them specify academic disciplines. What they want is bright, enthusiastic, motivated and sparky graduates – people who can get things done without causing mass walkouts or criminal lawsuits.
One senior banker told me recently: "You know, banking today isn't technical – you don't need a calculator. What you need is to be good with people, good at seeing things from other points of view."
Should employability be embedded in the undergraduate curriculum, and is certification a good thing?
At Liverpool, we think of employability as residing in three dimensions: curricular; co-curricular; and extracurricular. As such, different academic subjects can approach employability according to the constructs and conventions of their own curricula. For some, this might be employability modules; for others, visits to employer premises, or visiting speakers.
What matters is that students on enrolment are clear about what their employability entitlement is, how their degree subject will approach employability. Alongside this, it's essential that students have access to co-curricular employability opportunities, things they can do as part of their studies without necessarily receiving academic credit. For example, learning to give presentations or work in teams.
Finally, students need lots of opportunities for developing employability skills through extracurricular options. These can be offered by the careers service, the student union, or even arranged by the student herself.
What we are working towards in Liverpool is to embed an expectation that students should be constantly developing a certain set of employability skills all gained within the space of the three dimensions discussed earlier.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that graduates are employable?
My view is that responsibility is shared or owned by students and universities. It's a joint effort, a joint commitment. Universities offer fabulous opportunities for students to develop their skills and experience; all they have to do is join in. As Woody Allen said: "Anything can happen when you turn up for work." The same goes for higher education.
Since the credit crunch, parents are becoming increasingly active in terms of taking responsibility for their son or daughter's employability. I've come across lots of stories of parents "trading" internships between themselves, organising work placements, turning up to job interviews, even liaising with employers in a bid to renegotiate their child's starting salary.
In articles I've written, I refer to such parents as "helicopter parents". These are parents who actively take on some (or a lot) of their offspring's responsibility so as to provide them with what they think is the best possible life chances in adulthood.
At university level we increasingly see them on their own at careers fairs for students. What I find fascinating is how comfortable Generation Y students are with this level of parental involvement. Other generations might have found the idea of parents getting involved in the career process horrifying; Generation Y seems to welcome it. In fact, some of them seem to be in the process of outsourcing the career search process to their folks.
From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to speculate about why this is happening, and why now. Primarily, these are baby-boomer parents, who have to some extent decoded the job market. They've figured out how employment markets work, how educational capital can be maximised through contacts and strategic alliances. Armed with this knowledge, they are in poll position to take it upon themselves to fast-track their offspring through the early qualifying rounds of the job market.
Of course this is often and largely a middle-class phenomenon, and as such raises questions of social mobility and equality. After all, what happens if your parents don't know people who can offer you internships? As competition for graduate credentials intensifies, the phenomenon seems to be on the rise.
There is currently fierce public debate about students becoming "consumers" of HE. Do you think their behaviour will really change?
I suspect that ultimately, students will always be students. Some things never change, even with an economic downturn. Throughout the last century, the UK higher education system underwent lots of changes, but, on the whole, students' attitudes to life have remained consistent.
The same students want to have fun, they want to enjoy themselves, they want to make the most of higher education. They're full of enthusiasm, full of excitement, and determined to have a good time. This of course is why it's so rewarding to work with them.
Every September I give a talk to first year students and every year they tell me how fantastic it is to be at university and how much they are looking forward to the whole experience. Even with the hike in tuition fees, I still expect student attitude and behaviours to remain the same.
That said, I think, or hope, that students will be more tuned in to what they're being offered. After all, going to university represents a significant long-term investment.
Do you think that graduate recruitment is going to change?
Yes, definitely. I think it will change for a number of reasons. First, since the recession, employers have had far less money to spend on recruitment, and across all sectors, budgets have been cut. But counter-balancing this is a greater savviness among recruiters for harnessing new tactics such as using social media and better targeted recruitment strategies to make better, more proactive use of careers services.
I also think we're beginning to see signs of organisations recruiting via internships – a development which has huge implications for both universities and students.
The impact of social media is only just becoming understood. In the future, employers, careers services and graduates will all use social media as an integral part of the recruitment process. The Facebook revolution could not possibly escape our sector – we will see social networking sites being increasingly used in graduate recruitment alongside more traditional methods.
You have recently done some work on unpaid internships. What did you find and what is your message to employers?
Actually this is part of the work I do with the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS). We have a very clear-cut position on internships: we do not support unpaid internships, and I believe many of the careers services are now following this line.
Can you tell us more about the work AGCAS has done on the impact of university careers services?
I am currently leading a group of heads of careers services looking at impact measurements – a very big and interesting issue. Traditionally, when trying to assess the impact of careers services, heads have looked to destination data.
The problem is, this is rarely a reliable measure (after all, job markets can go up or down). Our group has been trying to look at other measures: for example different levels of audits; different ways of working with management; different ways of working with students and so on.
We have now developed a series of indicators to help careers services measure impact. It is absolutely fascinating work, and raises very interesting issues about what it is that we do. From a management point of view is raises a number of questions. Why do you invest in resources? What has the highest rate of return? Who is the key stake holder of careers services?
This group has enabled us to rethink impact, and we have come up with some really interesting, challenging ideas. We have so far road-tested the new impact measures in Warwick, and we are giving a full presentation at the AGCAS biennial this autumn. We have developed a series of exercises to actually help practitioners measure the impact of their career services. For example, we think about the impact of group sessions. How do you cost a talk on CVs to a group of 50 students? How cost effective and meaningful are they?
These are the things we have been thinking about, and we have come up with different ways of measuring and evaluating them. There is a resource already up on the AGCAS website, but people will be able to find out more about it in our next biennial.
What are your priorities at AGCAS next year?
Higher education and careers services are both going through immense change at the moment, so I think our priority now is to help careers services respond to changes that are taking place at their universities. Our priorities are to lobby government as effectively as possible and to represent our members effectively while remaining at the cutting edge of careers information, advice and guidance We will keep developing and providing the best careers advice and information support to our members, and we will remain in effective communication with our partners, such as Prospects and AGR, to achieve all this.
Paul Redmond tweets at twitter.com/PaulAtLiverpool. This is an excerpt from the Higher Education Careers Services Unit's autumn edition of Graduate Market Trends. The full article can be viewed at hecsu.ac.uk.
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