Enterprise and entrepreneurship in careers services

Past/Present/Future: where are we now, and where do we want to get to?

Ahead of her session at the AGCAS Annual Conference 2023, Helen Hook (Enterprise & Entrepreneurship task group chair and Enterprise Educator, University of Birmingham) looks at the evolving role of careers services and staff providing enterprise and entrepreneurship support to students, drawing on insights gained through a new GTI-funded research project that will be published later this year.

Background to the project

In 2018, the AGCAS Enterprise & Entrepreneurship task group met together to map out our key priorities and objectives. During our discussions, it became clear that we need to spend time learning what AGCAS members really want – rather than what we think they might want!

To help with this, we designed a survey to learn:

• How enterprise and entrepreneurship is embedded into UK higher education institutions
• How careers services engage with enterprise and entrepreneurship
• How confident careers and employability staff are when providing student-facing, enterprise and entrepreneurship support

The results from this survey told us that everyone was agreed on the importance of enterprise and entrepreneurship – careers services were engaged and saw the relevance – but almost half of respondents said they were lacking in confidence to provide the necessary support.

As a group, we agreed that instead of working in isolation, we should strengthen our offer through collaboration with Enterprise Educators UK to explore opportunities for collaboration and co-creation of support mechanisms for our AGCAS community.??

Where are we now?

Fast forward five years and the world has changed significantly, following the UK’s departure from the EU and the global Covid-19 pandemic.

We therefore felt it was important to repeat the survey to learn about the changes that have happened in universities since 2019, and whether these have had an impact on the sector’s ability to support enterprise and entrepreneurship.

This will provide us with a crucial understanding of how the Enterprise & Entrepreneurship task group can support AGCAS members.

We will be sharing our preliminary findings at the AGCAS Annual Conference on 21 June at Keele University and the full report will be published for the start of the new academic year.?

“GTI supported this research because we saw from our own Skills data (via the Skills module in targetconnect) that only 11% of students feel they have strong levels of confidence in skills related to Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. Cibyl data tells us that 11% of UK university students are currently running their own business. We have seen this figure rise in recent years. Both data sets indicate a strong need to foster and support entrepreneurial skills and activity, so we were especially keen to support this AGCAS research. We were able to share Cibyl data with the AGCAS team to feed into and provide context for the rest of this research. Early findings (and comparisons to 2018) are striking, and we look forward to the session in Keele to discover more.” Mark Mitchell, GTI

Where do we want to get to?

Our task group has ambitions to:

1. Design a menu of ongoing, professional development training for AGCAS members in collaboration with Enterprise Educators UK
2. Explore how we can introduce a module on enterprise and entrepreneurship into accredited careers guidance qualifications
3. Create a resource for AGCAS members on best practice?

Can you help us?

• Join us at the AGCAS conference to hear how the landscape has changed since 2019 and have an opportunity to speak with AGCAS members on what you feel should be taken into consideration when designing Enterprise & Entrepreneurship training for Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) staff.?
• We will also be collating case studies from careers services, sharing best practice on how they embed/deliver enterprise and entrepreneurship to their students. This will feature in a future AGCAS report.

Thanks so much for reading, we hope to see you at the conference session next month, and if you have any questions at all about our work, please email me at [email protected]

View the Annual Conference programme:

#enterprise #entrepreneurship #careers