Employability Through the Student Lifecycle: Encouraging Early Career Planning
The first few weeks of university can be overwhelming for new students. With so much change and new information to take on board, career planning is unlikely to be high on the priority list. Yet research shows that students who undertake early career planning are more likely to be employed after graduation, and significantly more likely to be in a graduate-level role. Final-year students with no work experience are considerably less likely to be employed after graduation. Students want careers to be threaded throughout their course, so how do we encourage early engagement with careers education, and sustain this throughout the student lifecycle?
Identifying starting points
The first step is to understand students’ starting points. Are they coming to university straight from further education? Or for a career change? Have they started thinking about their future? To best engage students, we need to understand their career planning stage and employability experience. We can then tailor our offering to best support students at every phase of their university employability journey.
A key tool is the Careers Registration (CR) methodology, initially introduced by the University of Leeds in 2012. CR involves collecting information directly from students on their level of career readiness and the extent to which they have engaged in employability-enhancing activities. The information is captured through enrolment or re-enrolment questionnaires, giving us CR data on virtually every student within an institution in each year they study.
Implementing a simple methodology
The core CR questions focus on:
Career readiness: a subjective self-evaluation in which students choose from a pre-defined set of statements the one that best represents their level of preparedness for obtaining a career on graduation.
Employability-enhancing experiences: a behavioural measure of engagement which involves the student choosing all applicable options from a pre-defined list of activities that they may have undertaken in the previous year.
Data is grouped into four phases of career readiness for analysis purposes: ‘Decide’, ‘Plan’, ‘Compete’ and ‘Sorted’, or similar names decided by each institution. These phases are often presented as cyclical rather than linear when shared with students to help them plan their employability journey. As this data is collected through student record systems, we can then build a picture of career readiness for different programmes, student groups and cohorts and begin to tailor the careers and employability offering to student needs.
Designing your approach
It is best to use appropriate and meaningful categories to structure your responses for analysis so that you can also use them in communication with students and stakeholders. Review the selection and wording of statements carefully to ensure that you have a valid set of distinct options which cover the likely positions of your student demographic. Consider including an option to capture students who are studying for personal interest rather than career development. Services across the country have incorporated CR into core activities and the data and framework is often used as a basepoint for designing careers education activities.
Tailoring careers support
SOAS, University of London have developed a module on CR. Change your world: discover your career aims to increase student self-efficacy, aid them with career planning, engage them in meta-learning and enable reflection on what career success means to them. The module helped raise the profile of CR across the institution and informs strategic departmental support based around career readiness phases, rather than traditional careers topics.
The University of London Careers Service have developed the Career Stage Framework. This is used alongside CR questions at enrolment / re-enrolment to offer the right development opportunities based on what stage of their employability journey students have reached, as well as their career thinking phase:
Career Starters: Limited work experience, using their studies to launch their career.
Career Developers: Extensive work experience, using their studies to enhance their career.
Career Changers: Substantial work experience, using their studies to pivot their career.
This enables the service to offer time-efficient careers education to students with multiple responsibilities who often have limited time to engage with careers. Alongside informing careers education resources, services are joining CR data with other sources to build a picture of the whole student lifecycle.
Measuring the golden thread
CR data, when combined with engagement and outcomes data, provides a ‘golden thread’ tool for understanding the development of student career thinking and readiness. University careers and employability services now collect and hold large volumes of data across the full student lifecycle, from CR to engagement data (careers fairs, appointments, work-based learning initiatives), student feedback and outcomes data. This data provides careers services with opportunities to incorporate data to target resources and interventions, and to support and anticipate student needs.
At University College London, the linking of CR data, engagement, attainment, and outcomes has enabled better understanding of the factors associated with ‘positive’ graduate destinations (highly skilled employment, continuation of study, current activity fits with future plans). We know that later phases of career readiness are more strongly associated with being in highly skilled (HS) employment, positive destinations (HS employment or further study), and agreeing that current activities align with future plans. This is powerful information to share with students to help them understand why early engagement is beneficial to their employability development.
Closing the loop
Due to the success of the tool, many universities are incorporating CR questions in degree ceremony enrolments. Closing the loop by adding this data collection point enables careers services to provide support to graduates identified as at risk in terms of attaining positive graduate outcomes. Services can then effectively target alumni careers resources and support to those most in need.
Cross-university approach
Fostering careers and employability engagement throughout the student lifecycle is not just the remit of careers teams. A whole university approach should also be supported by academic departments through embedding employability in the curriculum.
It is key that we engage academic colleagues with CR data in planning conversations, frame careers support through the lens of career readiness and develop evidence- based strategies through combining the golden thread of CR, engagement, and graduate outcomes. By taking a shared approach, we can tailor support needs and focus resources, empowering students to navigate their employability journeys with purpose.
About the author
Fiona Cobb is an experienced social researcher responsible for strategic planning and delivery of data insights, evaluation and research projects focusing on engagement, outcomes, and widening access across the student lifecycle for a wide range of higher education institutions (HEIs). She has a substantial breadth and depth of experience in leading and delivering strategic data insights projects within changing policy landscapes, including the National Careers Registration Learning Gain project, working with stakeholders from a range of HEIs, and engaging sector bodies including HESA, the Office for Students, and JISC. She developed the Careers Registration Practical Guide to support HEIs in leveraging data for institutional impact, and is an advocate for data-informed practice in the sector.
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