Careers services can't be defined by a single metric

The image above represents what careers service leaders are experiencing in Higher Education right now, with the constant potential one of the chairs may be swiped from beneath...

The most effective careers service leaders are able to act as a catalyst to bring key initiatives to fruition, remove blockages and, in better times, secure the required resources.

But even the best and most experienced careers service leaders can’t control the external environment and are at the mercy of the various shocks to the economic and educational context we have seen recently and will continue to battle.

The latest Graduate Outcomes survey being a case in point. The previous round saw many universities secure significant leaps in performance. This will be based on a vast array of factors - notably some really innovative work across the sector to support graduate transitions - but the impact of pent up recruitment demand and the comparatively buoyant labour market that this last set of graduates landed into, coming out of Covid lockdowns, can't be underestimated.

Therefore, it is logical many would see a drop relative to the less favourable labour market conditions in this cycle. Of course the labour market is just one factor, a reduction in regional development funding to catalyse opportunities within SMEs is another. Alternatively, it might be that massive increase in the psychology course cohort size is now showing up in your Graduate Outcomes for the first year...

There is a natural inclination to obsess about year on year comparisons as a measure of careers service performance. Senior leaders often have data dashboards with fairly linear progress forecast towards a strategic KPI of hitting a significantly improved GOS outcome in the medium to long-term. In a good year, a favourable labour market can outperform this upward curve but it can be equally deflating when the economy doesn't play ball and outcomes drop back slightly.

In the same way, a university's student recruitment team can be innovative and effective but inevitably the prevailing market conditions will still massively impact the numbers they are able to attract and convert. If we are honest, a single year's Graduate Outcomes metric is often a more reliable measure of labour market conditions than careers service performance.

It seems a distant forgotten world when we were being confidently told that the Graduate Outcomes response rate would only marginally reduce once the survey was delivered centrally. In the old DLHE Survey, every university was required to hit 80%. With the survey now being administered externally to the institution, many universities are receiving around half that percentage of responses now, some even less. Therefore the metric which senior leaders in institutions are most focussed on, is inherently now less valid and reliable.

I have been regaled with multiple stories of particularly keen academic departments taking it into their own hands to do a big push on their graduates responding to the survey. Well intentioned of course, but if that department happens to be one of your lower performing areas for Graduate Outcomes, significant over representation of these graduate's in the survey can be the difference between a good institutional outcome and a marginal drop on the previous year.

You could argue there is no such thing as a good result for a careers service from Graduate Outcomes. Those careers services with limited resource and provision can lose any form of burning platform to drive improvements when GOS goes the institutions way (see also TEF Gold).

The flip-side is of course those that have slightly disappointing outcomes, they are at the mercy of knee jerk reactions from senior leaders who sometimes believe they have a simple solution to a wicked problem having only sporadically engaged in the employability agenda.

Layer this with many services holding large numbers of vacancies or having to take hugely difficult decisions regarding cost savings; it is an incredibly challenging environment in which to be a careers service leader.

I was heartened to read a brilliant piece by David Blunkett in The Times making the case for more rational policy to support the university sector. He also took aim at another single metric that is often used in the media to bash universities but fails to account for the huge amount of contextual nuance at play, these were his thoughts on LEO (Longitudinal Earning Outcomes):

‘Students who take the view that they don’t want to move to London or the southeast to work for mega-institutions — financial, accountancy or legal, for example — help to regenerate and develop local economies instead. They are discounted, however, by the absurd longitudinal studies that judge the success of higher education by how much graduates earn in their early working life. A more ridiculous measure could not have been invented.'

Creating their own set of nuanced lead indicators and KPIs is crucial to the modern day careers service in this tumultuous context. Lots of careers service teams are taking a lead role on the universities strategic work around their APP (Access and Participation Plan), putting in carefully targeted interventions to close identified progression gaps. Many services are also becoming much more nuanced in their use of Careers Registration data to inform activity, others are providing intensive packages of support where B3 risks emerge.

Beyond the obvious careers metrics, many services are adding value to a host of wider agendas such as student belonging, inclusivity, cost of living interventions and curriculum enhancement.

All careers service leaders can do is control the controllable. They are constantly analysing how they can drive more impact, deliver at scale and provide targeted support to those students that need it most.

Sometimes a talented leader can pull a rabbit out of a hat and do more with less, but much of a careers services work is nuanced intensive work - be that with students, academic departments or employer partners - at some point less will inevitably mean less.

The success of a careers service is influenced by a tangled web of external and internal factors beyond their control, it can't defined by any single metric. Not ever, but particularly not now.

I would be interested in your thoughts and reflections.