What is next for careers services?

The response to the pandemic by careers services has been nothing short of heroic; they have reacted rapidly, innovated at pace and often taken a pivotal role in wider collegiate efforts to support students through the worst impacts of the crisis.

They now face the dual challenge of supporting finalists entering a tumultuous labour market and reimagining their provision for a new and uncertain world. I think we can quietly discard the change curve; we must accept that change is now constant, agile is king.

In a recent article I put forward some thoughts regarding the rapid evolution of employer engagement - In this follow-up article, I will outline seven key wider themes that we have seen emerging through our extensive work with careers services and through many detailed discussions with careers leaders across the UK.

The seven themes that I will outline are:

·       The hybrid conundrum

·       Netflix style provision

·       One-to-many experiential learning

·       Bringing enterprise into the fold

·       Realignment of resourcing models

·       Prioritising a sustainable legacy

·       To bid or not to bid?

The hybrid conundrum

The much-vaunted Covid accelerator effect has certainly manifested itself in the world of careers and graduate recruitment. The rapid digital transformation of careers services has delivered a number of positives, some harsh lessons and many questions remain.

It is hard to truly evaluate provision when the sceptre of the pandemic hangs over all and any metrics; for example, when considering student engagement how do you distinguish between any failures in provision or event design and the wider ills of digital fatigue and lockdown life.

As we move beyond the worst of the crisis there will be a need to develop and evolve a hybrid model and manage the often-conflicting expectations of students and employers.

As you would expect, focus groups from students conducted by many of our clients have reported that students are very keen to return to face to face interaction with employers. Many employers will be less keen to abandon their new-found efficiencies.

It could be that careers services could capitalise on a wave of engagement from students flooding back to face-to-face offerings and that those employers engaging back on campus at an early stage could gain a competitive advantage with their attraction campaigns.

Through various consultations with employers in recent months, it has been striking that digital engagement has been working much more effectively for some of the larger big brand employers whilst many SMEs and less well-known employers are struggling to find an audience in the digital realm.

Developing a hybrid model that delivers on the expectations of students, as well as different segments of the employer market, will be by no means an easy conundrum to crack.

Netflix style provision

One aspect of the digital transformation that is likely to remain is the increased importance of high-quality self-directed learning and recorded content that students can engage with when and where they want to.

If they want to binge on a boxset of skills sessions at two in the morning Game of Thrones style, then the option needs to be there; there shouldn’t perhaps be the same level of sex and violence, but the content will need to be engaging.

Many of the targeted development programmes we are running for universities, on themes as diverse as mindset, recruitability, commercial awareness and confidence development, will be run live to a targeted group of students but will also come with a separate set of recorded material that are specifically designed to work in this on-demand context and to be suitable for the wider student body. When commissioning work with external suppliers building in that sustainable legacy and ownership of content is crucial.

One-to-many experiential learning

In recent years, there has been a huge expansion in universities offering sandwich placement programmes and internship schemes; for a long time this has outstripped the latent employer demand. As this recent ISE data demonstrates, this has been further exacerbated by the pandemic:

We now need to redouble our efforts to build scalable experiential learning provision and employer-led project models to deliver experiences to students on mass that will both develop their commercial and work-based skills but also inform their career decision making.

Developing frameworks and toolkits that can support academic departments to efficiently embed employer engagement into the curriculum and, where possible, further prioritising careers service resource to support academic alignment activities will be crucial to scale this work-based learning provision.

Through our own work and through discussions with career professionals specialising in this area, it is clear that the appetite to engage with this type of activity is growing within many academic teams.

Bringing enterprise into the fold

Historically, enterprise has been positioned as a poor relation in many careers services, but thankfully this is changing rapidly. The evolution of this offering is being driven in part by the increased focus on start-up density metrics in the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF). The KEF is driving enterprise provision up the agenda in the same way the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) increased the visibility of institutional employability provision a few years ago.

Many institutions are now in receipt of quite significant pots from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) and increasingly it is falling to careers services to translate this funding into impactful initiatives. The world of enterprise education is fascinating and blending that provision successfully with the wider skill and career development agenda can lead to some incredible innovation and impact.

One of the programmes we are most proud of being involved with in recent years is this fantastic Innovation Community Lab project with Nottingham Trent University which combined enterprise education with graduate development, SME engagement and business growth.

Identifying initiatives that respond to multiple institutional agendas in one hit, like a strategic and high-stakes game of whack-a-mole, can help build the profile of your service beyond your existing network.

Realignment of resourcing models

Having been through a seismic shift in context, expectations and delivery modes, as well as pivoting employer facing services to respond to a tumultuous labour market, it is highly likely that the resourcing models that existed within a service prior to the pandemic will need adjusting to fit the new paradigm that careers services are entering.

Given the financial constraints facing the sector, it is unlikely that most services will be able to grow their headcount. However, we anticipate the following specialist roles will be prioritised in the coming years as services seek to adjust their resourcing models to fit this new paradigm.

• Investing in data and insight resource. We have seen a proliferation of new specialist roles in this area in recent years. This is vital to be able to turn the mountain of data into insights that can then be utilised to create pathways and targeted messaging for students and graduates
• The ability to be able to segment and personalise messaging, opportunity promotion and careers content is key to drive, and retain, student engagement but so is having the marketing and communications expertise to craft the messages and deliver these targeted campaigns successfully
• Building staff resource and competence to support curriculum development and deliver activity-led learning and projects with employer partners. This may come from the partial repositioning of teams aligned to more traditional placement delivery models
• Involving students as partners in the design, delivery and promotion of careers provision. There are now a host of hugely successful peer to peer models in operation, we expect this to continue to gather pace as the evidence base grows for their successful implementation in the UK context

Prioritising a sustainable legacy

As we slowly emerge out of crisis mode, we need to further move towards investing in provision that has the potential for long-term impact.

In the coming months, we will see many universities invest significant sums in graduate coaching packages to provide support to their graduates entering a challenging market; you can make a strong case for this investment in the current context. We believe, in the medium to long-term, that this support will be better provided through investment in the brilliant teams of professionals that exist within institutions who have extensive knowledge of their students, their regional labour market and existing relationships with local employer partners.

In our recent experience, the initiatives that are cutting through tend to be targeted at a specific target group of students or employers and heavily tailored to address an identified need within that cohort. Therefore, it is unlikely that one-off mass market interventions will deliver the required long-term impact or attract the same level of investment moving forward. There will always be a place for external support to deliver specific events and programmes, but it will continue to become even more crucial for such investments in provision to be heavily targeted and to come with a sustainable legacy.

Some of the investments in provision that we see as being likely to deliver long-term impact include:

• Working with your regional labour market to stimulate demand and grow employers’ capability to attract, recruit and retain graduates
• Strategic investment in technology to support scalable delivery, from AI driven CV technology, through to project delivery platforms, video interview software and assessment centre delivery tools
• Training your teams; both in careers and recruitment focussed content, such as how to run assessment centres, but also covering wider leadership development themes such as influencing and stakeholder management
• Investing time in external analysis; crucially, going beyond your comparator group and also seeking inspiration from beyond the careers sector
• Running targeted programmes and initiatives to support disadvantaged groups, where you work with external partners ensure that you retain ownership of content and can repurpose it beyond the duration of the project
• Prioritising strategy development to reimagine your provision; using this process to engage, educate and further build partnership with internal stakeholders

To bid or not to bid

Even for externally funded projects, for example through pots provided by the Office for Students and the European Social Fund, it is crucial for provision to be able to transition into, and add value to, your core career service offer both during and beyond the end of the funded programme.

This sustainable legacy needs to be planned for from the very outset, whilst considering whether in fact to bid for specific funding pots. A useful question to ask can be:

Is this something that you would be keen to pursue on a smaller scale if the external funding pots were not available?

If not, will this deliver a sustainable legacy or could it in fact create an unhelpful diversion from your core strategic aims?

I know some very shrewd careers leaders who have passed on certain funding pots having conducted that particular thought experiment.

There will be significant pots available in the next few years, particularly around the levelling up agenda and tackling youth unemployment, choosing strategically where to focus your efforts will be key.

There are no easy answers or silver bullet solutions. There is also no sign of respite or downtime to fully take stock and reflect, we must find ways to innovate and iterate as we go and be prepared to constantly question all of our existing assumptions.

Many of the leaders that I most admire in the sector are both exhausted by the day to day but invigorated by the future possibilities; you should be very proud of what you have professionally achieved to get to this point and hopefully you can be cautiously optimistic about what comes next.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts and reflections.

Mike Grey

[email protected]