Inspiring career choices

Graduate outcomes are becoming increasingly important, not just for our graduates, but also for universities with the introduction of the Proceed metric within the Office for Students’ B3 regulations and their significance in league tables. 

How can we help students make a successful transition from higher education into a career?

In its 2030 vision, the University of Portsmouth has a stated desire to give every student a life-changing experience. Helping students make a successful transition from higher education into a career that is right for them is certainly a life-changing contribution that we can make. However, the question is ‘how can we do that?’

Before we can answer that question I think we need to walk in our students’ shoes and understand the challenges they face when considering what career they want and how they can get there. The first challenge is that the world is complicated: there are lots of different careers and sectors to work in, so how do you start to generate career ideas and how do you narrow them down to the right fit for any individual? 

Second, thinking about what happens in a year, or in two or three years’ time, seems like a long way off when there are assessments, demands of work, and family and friends to care about in the present. Finally, for many students there simply isn’t an incentive to engage with planning their career in the present, whereas that assignment due in the next week or extra shift to help with the cost of living offer more immediate incentives. All this adds to a focus on careers tomorrow, next week, next month, and eventually the summer of the final year.

With these challenges in mind, we need to think about how we can embed careers within the curriculum, so they are a priority in the present and so students don’t have to juggle course and career development because they are the same. To do that effectively we need to focus on what barriers students face to attain a career.

Understanding career choices, experience and opportunities

The first is around making an informed choice about a career that is right for them which entails understanding oneself but also knowing what careers are out there. Second, helping them to gain experience and develop their ability to pass commonly used selection tasks within their chosen career. Third, helping them find as well as apply for suitable opportunities. Ideally, we would have interventions that target each one of the challenges that students have to overcome to attain a career that is right for them.

Two solutions I have been working on and using over the last few years within my teaching target the first challenge of helping students become aware of what is out there, and helping them to make an informed choice between alternative careers.

Career Corners

The first solution is Career Corners, which are essentially 5-10 minute overviews of a particular career that I deliver at the end of a lecture. Each Career’s Corner covers key information such as what the career involves, day-day responsibilities, pay now and in five years’ time, working conditions in that career, experience and qualification required and finally, employers or ways to find out about vacancies within the field. 

The beauty of this idea is that throughout a module or two students can suddenly be exposed to 10-20 different careers they could potentially go into following their degree. It tends to be evaluated well on module evaluations and is faster to create than reading technical academic articles/textbooks. All I need to do is look on Prospects at careers following on from my particular degree and select a number that offer good terms and conditions and which would be classified as a graduate-level job (use Cascotweb to check this). For examples, and for Career Corner slides, you can check out the resources I have uploaded to the OSF. 

Career Action Plans

The second solution is Career Action Plans, which are short assessments that encourage students to make an informed choice between three different careers. The assessment comes in four parts, although this is malleable. First students must complete a careers table which allows them to compare three different potential careers in terms of key considerations like their fit to them, starting pay and pay with experience, required qualifications and experience, working conditions, availability and location within the country. 

Section two then asks them to evaluate these different career options against criteria that matter to them i.e. one job might offer more money but might require more qualifications and that’s not something that is feasible for them at the moment, or another job might seem to only exist in a large city and they prefer to be more rural.

Section three requires them to complete a timetable over their remaining degree so they can show what steps they have taken in terms of gaining experience, how they plan to develop skills to pass selection tasks (i.e. applications, psychometrics, interviews etc), and crucially how they plan on applying. For example, which websites will they search for jobs or which universities will they apply to for postgraduate study. 

Section four is a reflection on any gaps in qualifications, work experience, and skills in passing selection tasks for their chosen career and then encourages them to explain their plan to address them building upon their work in section three. 

The real strength of this assessment is a) it encourages students to make informed choices between different careers and b) it gives us helpful insights into the types of careers that our students aspire to pursue. We can then use this information to tailor our employability support in terms of showcasing particular employers, advertising particular graduate schemes and building in more suitable volunteering and internship opportunities for our students. You can access a template of the Career Action Plan and accompanying guidance notes to help students complete the document on the OSF.

Initiative impacts

Career Corners and Career Action Plans can be invaluable aids to students in helping them choose a career that is right for them. You can’t apply for a career that you have never heard about, and you won’t be successful in applying to a career unless you have relevant experience and the ability to pass selection tasks. Both initiatives provide essential scaffolding to help students overcome these challenges and will hopefully help students make a successful transition into a career that is right for them.

What could be more of a life-changing experience than helping students acquire a career that they derive satisfaction from, and is the beginning of a productive and successful future?

Author: Dr Alex Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Sociology at the University of Portsmouth.