Category: Education & Employability
May 31st, 2013 by matthias
I always enjoy visiting the ‘North’, where @martinedmonson and his Gradcore/Graduates Yorkshire outfit roams. The Gradcore conferences are always worth taking part in, as they are a brimming with critical thinking and debate on all things employability, graduate recruitment and employment. In order to stay true to my blog’s premise of sticking to one paragraph, I’m focusing on only one unconference track (look it up – learn something new today) that I ran with the ever excellent Vanessa Gough, legendary recruiter, from IBM. From the creative chaos that is an unconference (and the contributions of … wait … actual students), emerged a theme about what makes students employable – or better a number of characteristics: employable graduates are not clones, who have been coached to answer interview questions. ‘Employable’ is basically a meaningless term to students, and they don’t collectively buy it either. For them it’s really just another word for ‘professional’, describing a graduate’s outlook, conduct and mindset (introducing the term graduateness feels dirty, so I’ll abstain). The latter is not just achieved with clever module plans and learning outcomes, but by giving students the opportunity to engage and learn about how to be professional – based on their own effort. Yes, academic and professional support can help – but the responsibility sits with the learner. One participant (who trains professionals for the NHS) summed it up brilliantly: in a hospital, when a patient is admitted, a clock turns on immediately, which counts down to the date of the patients release – and the time is filled with opportunities and measures for them to get better (double meaning intended). The healing is done by the patient – and is influenced by their ability (and sometimes willingness) to engage with the opportunities to improve their situation. The clock ticks for students as well, and by the end of their stay (their degree), the students are now sent out into a challenging post-crisis environment. Employability professionals can’t force results – and they shouldn’t try. It’s also down to their universities not to make unrealistic promises (or set pointless targets), but to nurture, foster and challenge where appropriate, as in the end they are educators. Well embedded employability in (and outside) the curriculum helps, but only if it doesn’t become just an internal measure which makes the university feel good about their ‘employability figures’ (a misnomer at the best of times). It’s about true preparation for life after university – and getting there is certainly not always pretty, but challenging, sometimes even scary – but sometimes comes with beautiful results. To exemplify this, I’d like to use one of Vanessa’s stories. It was about a graduate who had taught herself sign language to support a hard of hearing regular customer in the restaurant she was working in, making their customer experience more enjoyable. Only when she told this story in an interview did she understand how much that said about her in terms of her true professionalism – and yes, that was what made her employable in the end. I must admit, for a moment, I had a tear in my eye.
Posted in Education & Employability, Talks Tagged with: employability, professionalism, students, unconference, work
May 14th, 2013 by matthias
We are doing a mental health awareness week at work this week. It has a special focus on physical activity and its positive effects on your mental health. As readers of my earlier posts will know, I am very much a proponent of non-competitive physical activity, and I am very aware of its impact on my well being. So, I did a stress test to assess my current stress level – and I was surprised to see that I’m only a 15 out of 40 – couldn’t find a proper explanation unpacking the score (so much for online tests), but basically I was pleased to know that my head wasn’t at danger of exploding just yet. But what a difference a day makes – I had a complicated day at work (in addition to running up to the annual www.placenet.org.uk conference, which I will chair – check #placenet13 on Twitter), and left feeling deflated. I timed out for letting steam off in jiu jitsu practice, but used another tried and tested coping mechanism – weeding my garden. So on the train this morning, I’ve retested – and let me put it this way: I’m not a 15 anymore. I consider myself fairly resilient – powered by my extensive patience (I’m not exaggerating – I’m just completing a four year lobbying effort), which is I think is the one key attribute I need working in academia. But I’m human after all, and in the spirit of mental health week, I’m sharing that I had to do some recovering, and still do. I’m glad to have a great team at work – and my focus is often to look out for how they feel, as it will strongly affect the way they work. Performance comes from having the capacity to perform – and if you don’t feel well, it won’t happen. You can only soldier on for that long, and I see it as a key management responsibility to enable people to perform, rather than trying to make them. What’s my lesson, besides recognising yet again that I don’t have super powers? It’s admitting it in public, and reminding ourselves that we’e all only human, and that we sometimes struggle – and that that’s alright. So there.
Posted in Education & Employability, Uncategorized Tagged with: management, mental health awareness week, patience, performance, stress
April 23rd, 2013 by matthias
Posted in Education & Employability, Reblogged
April 9th, 2013 by matthias
For the last few years, I’ve been teaching employability and social media skills to groups of Spanish graduates, who are on organised internships to introduce them to the UK workplace – and hopefully find work here. This has been a popular class, and the students are always exemplary in their engagement. It’s clear – they are here to find jobs. I normally happily do my part, give them the information they need, and hopefully instill in them the drive to become noticeable and exceptional candidates. Recently though, something else happened – it got a bit more personal than that. At the end of the class (taking it a whole 30 minutes over the usual 2h in the evening), the questions didn’t end – and it turned into a discussion how they see themselves: as migrants, trying to escape the misery of the Spanish youth unemployment crisis to better shores into another EU country, where conditions are more friendly – and where they will be allowed to contribute. This touched something in me – the gratitude to both the UK (for giving me a home more than 10 years ago), and to the EU which has given me the freedom to move and the right to abode here. As a proud EU citizen (yes, proud), I have done the same journey as they have – just 10 years earlier. As I always say to non-native English speakers seeking advice: “you won’t get your first job for your English, but for the other languages you speak”. For those who are worried about us migrants, taking away ‘British jobs from British people’ (or however the populist narrative goes), I raise that the UK has a recognised skills gap – people who speak foreign languages, and who have had genuine international experience. I see this in daily practice – we don’t take away, we fill a gap to the benefit of the UK economy. Even (or perhaps especially) a UK drifting away from the EU will need to fill this gap – it will probably get worse, seriously impacting the UK’s global competitiveness. UK universities struggle to reach a 20% international study and work engagement rate – while other European nations work on a 50% target. If you look at unemployment – it’s not graduates who struggle most, it’s the medium and lower skilled (which is why I support the CIPD’s Learning to Work policy initiative as an advisor), whose jobs have been restructured away, or casualised beyond affordability (for them). And as long as the UK lives with that skills gap – we will need migrants like my Spanish students – and like me in days of yore – to enrich the UK employment market, to do the jobs that can’t be done ‘in-house’. I work for an organisation that prides itself for its international outlook, for the multilingualism of its students – and rightly so. I admit that in the light of recent debates on the EU, I have been starting to feel slightly unwelcome on occasion – and just writing that I’m a proud EU citizen on a public blog feels weird (as it should go without saying). But I am, and so should my Spanish students be. They bring nothing but the best to this country, offering the flexibility and mobility so regularly bemoaned as lacking by UK employers. They are ultimately not here to take – they are here to give.
Posted in Commentary, Education & Employability
January 23rd, 2013 by matthias
I’ve been in a room in which a government representative told seasoned schools and council careers advisers that they were not skilled enough (‘only’ level 4, not level 6) and therefore failing as a profession. Needless to say there was no money for the allegedly required upskilling. I think she meant to say something different, but that’s how it came out. The reaction was predictable, the chair had to control an majority of the audience of about 60 people, who felt not only threatened of losing their jobs (as they had seen so many colleagues do), and worried about the young people they are responsible for – but also humiliated. The chair, poor soul – oh, that was me – was fortunately on pain medication (for a toothache), so he didn’t join in the rebellious mood, and was relaxed enough to bring order to the room. The main question raised in the ‘reforms’ to careers, advice and guidance in schools and councils has been if face-to-face advice was to be protected. A newly released report by the education select committee shows that it wasn’t Where I work, we pride ourselves for the highly individualised and impartial advice we give – and it is thanks to laudable professional organisations like AGCAS who protect this as a standard; but we’re working in higher education, which has seen its share of questionable ‘reform’ on the professional services side, but not something as damaging as what is happening to careers advice and guidance in schools. What am I learning from this? I think it’s a message of resilience, one about despairing in the face of problematic, badly evidenced decisions by the ‘powers that be’ – but to calmly and rightfully challenge, to get organised in professional associations [declaration of interest, I’m the chair of PlaceNet], and to take part in debate after debate, forum after forum; and to constructively, but persistently, wield the better argument. I’ve long learnt that a) I’m not always right, and b) this makes me the annoying kid in the last row – but that’s probably the best thing I have to contribute. That’s what I’m paid for – professional integrity and impartiality in the interest of our clients and stakeholders. And, dare I say: wider society. We’re not only here as service providers, but as guardians of our respective professions, as careers advisers, registrars, placement officers, and employability professionals. My ultimate lesson for today is not to despair, but pick up the pieces and start again – and to lead by example.
Posted in Commentary, Education & Employability, Talks
January 7th, 2013 by matthias
Thoughtful blog post by @fortiain, so I thought it’s worth sharing.
Posted in Education & Employability, Reblogged
December 10th, 2012 by matthias
I was recently asked to provide a few short comments on how I see job seekers using Twitter by security firm AVG. You can read the result here. It’s also worth checking out their digital diaries series on how technology affects children.
Posted in Education & Employability, Reblogged, Social Media
November 7th, 2012 by matthias
“I didn’t come to university to get a high-paid job. I came to get a job that I wanted to wake up and do.” This was only one of the impressive comments at the employability debate I moderated at the National Union of Students Zones conference in Manchester last week. True to the mission of this blog, I had to mull this one over for a bit. There was a lot to learn, and I may come back to other key parts later – but the main lesson was that ‘we’ as educators, academics, CEIAG or employability professionals, might sometimes overlook what the students are looking for in higher education; and it’s not only a degree and an employment outcome – it’s so much more. I have often written about my impression that education, with its quality regime and learning outcomes may have become a bit reductionist, but I wasn’t prepared to be told that putting employability at the core would be viewed just as critically. I liked the culture of the debate in that no tenet was safe from being questioned, and the exceptional variety of opposing viewpoints guaranteed a plethora of opinions and ideas to agree or disagree with. What I have learnt was that the expectations towards an academic education may still be more classically one of the Humboldtian idea of wider learning and personal growth and that the commoditization of HE that guides many of our professional lives within HE – how do we present ourselves, and our academic ‘products’ – may not resonate with a significant number of our clients/customers. In a sense, there’s a chance some of them may ‘call our bluff’ and tell us that they are not after an ’employment outcome’ or a market information based ‘choice’ after all. Part of me sympathizes with this – as my own academic curriculum as a student was lovingly ignoring the employment markets (our careers service was solely for us ‘no-hopers’ in the humanities and social sciences ‘who would never have a job’) the other part of me resigns itself to the fact that education has so clearly ’embraced the markets’ for the last decades, that it seems unlikely that we can – or should – return to a more classic model of academia. Personally, I always thought a middle way to be the natural path to take; but if we take our client base really seriously, should we not take their motivation to engage with academia more into account? To close, I’d like to draw the attention back to the quote at the beginning of this post – this certainly resonates with me. Deciding to work in academia certainly hasn’t made me rich – but it enriches my daily lives in ways which I personally wouldn’t have found anywhere else.
PS: I will emerge myself in probably a wholly different mindset and opinions today, when again in Manchestr, I will be at the Futuretrack conference on … graduate employability. Follow #futuretrackconf for live commentary.
Posted in Education & Employability, Talks
October 31st, 2012 by matthias
Last week I shared my musings whether employability is the core product of higher education, and my answer was in short ‘not just yet, but it might be soon’. I was challenged on that point by an academic at an Inside Government policy forum I was invited to speak at. The question that was brought forward was almost ‘how dare we not make it the core of our provision, if we’re charging ever higher fees?’. Fair enough – we made the promise, and have started taking money at point of delivery. This also chimed with a recent discussion I had with some outstanding graduates who had joined a major brewery’s trainee scheme whom I had met recently – their views were even more pronounced – they referred to higher education as basically a big scam; over years students were fed the line that if they sought a ‘proper’ degree from a ‘reputable’ institution (both had studied humanities degrees from well established institutions) , employment outcomes would be there for them. Their expectations reflected not their naivety, but the promises made – not only all the smoke and mirrors of destinations statistics and the careers based marketing talk to cajole them into a specific institution – but the expectation raised in a generation that had been told that the only path to success would only lead through higher education. They only did what ‘we’ told them; too bad with the economy tanking in the meantime. So while preparing for today’s panel debate with the National Union of Students in Manchester, I came to understand that I have to rephrase the question to ‘should employability be a core outcome of higher education?’ – and my answer is a clear yes. However the old school academic in me might argue that there are vocational and non-vocational degrees, the goalposts have shifted. Education is now a commodity (whether we like it or not), and the knowledge economy depends upon a supply of talented, educated and trained recruits. Academia produces a lot of the knowledge they need, but has to make sure it changes it pedagogical approaches so that students become employable. It’s just keeping up the promise we have been making for too long, so we can’t step away from it now. Note that I didn’t say ’employed’ – what HE institutions are currently measured on in DLHE and KIS is mostly employment and this is a highly volatile matter and very different outcome – see my views on that here. I personally dream of a university that allows students the academic freedom to explore their subjects as deeply as they wish (with minimal ‘outcomes based learning’ constraints), but makes available, and embeds employability into the curriculum. And I see some excellent work, especially within sandwich degrees – as recognised by the excellent Wilson review. Let’s see though what I learn this week from those that represent our actual clients – the students.
Posted in Education & Employability, Talks
October 22nd, 2012 by matthias
This is more a thought processs than something I’ve yet made my mind up about – it was raised by an excellent presentation at last week’s Westminster Forum Briefing on graduate employability which I had the privilege to be asked to be a speaker at. The first talk, by Nannette Ripmeester (follow @labourmobility) focused not only the biggest impediment on UK graduate mobility within – the lack of foreign language skills on the whole – but also raised the question if employability is the core product of higher education. She mentioned the limitations of curriculum development led by employers – pointing out to the differences in focus and communication between corporate and HE organisations – and raised the question which inspired this blog entry. So far my answer is – no, it is not. At least it didn’t use to be: Employability has become part of the product as part of the drive towards putting a price tag on higher education, helping to justify the investment by students and their parents into their tertiary education. The question is now how effectively HE institutions can make accurate claims about how they impact employment rates (which are a partial indicator, but not conclusive evidence of employability – I wonder what Karl Popper would have thought of DLHE destination statistics) and how this is based on other than brand recognition, ranking and social coding. So here’s my current take on what is a thought which I intend to develop over the next three weeks as I have two more conference appearances and will get a chance to talk to policy makers, HE professionals, employers and most importantly, students. Here goes: Graduate employability is not the core product of HE yet, although it may become it over the next few years. I think employment and salary statistics have become the main marketing tool (with the Key Information Sets exercise closing the loop), and in following the old adage of ‘you get what you measure’, this dilutes the earlier definition of higher education as a transformatory experience which combines acquiring knowledge with self-directed learning about an academic discipline, part of which can be applied in the world of work, part of which makes you a more rounded person who can look beyond the immediate problem at hand (which is a key skill to become an academic). This shift in marketing HE has undoubtedly changed expectations about the core product – but it seems that product development (the courses as they are being designed) may not have caught up with the claims made by institutional marketing. And to remain credible, and competitive with other English speaking markets (that includes the whole Bologna higher education marketplace – see my comment above about language skills) UK HE needs to focus on creating high quality relevant products.
Posted in Education & Employability, Talks