Giving students the skills they need for professional success in a rapidly changing world

hi and welcome everyone to the giving students the skills they need for professional success in a rapid changing world my name is Robin McKenna and I'm the regional business director for McGraw-Hill I'm very excited to introduce you today um to our panelists who are very excited to hear your thoughts and questions before we kick off though I want to make sure we go through some quick housekeeping so that we can make sure that you can take advantage of uh having an interactive discussion with us today so as you will see um you can see us on the screen but also that there is five little buttons that are in red below you'll be able to put the Q a on all of your q a into the Q a section and make sure you put the live chat into the live chat section making sure that you put the questions into that q a section we'll ensure that we are able to have visibility of everything we need from uh so that we can actually have visibility of all the questions from today so without further Ado I would like to get started and introduce our main panelists first off we have Kate Dabney Kate is the director of the careers group The Federation services at the University of London she has worked with pre-18 higher education advice education employability strategies around the world some of their work and research in the space discussed today that she has written excuse me uh has been published in the higher education skills work-based learning teaching employability is not my job redefining embedded employability from within higher education curriculum she has also recently published a book with open University press careers education to demystify employability a guide for Professionals in schools in higher education and in her spare time as a board member she's a board member of the careers Wales a very big warm welcome to Kate next up we have Alexandra mihai Dr Alexander mihai is currently the assistant professor of innovation in higher education at Maastricht University at maastrich University School of Business economics she has created a competency-based coaching program to embed employability skills into the overall curriculum which Alexandra will share some of the information about in a discussion today she has built up her extensive experience in knowledge and e-learning curriculum design and Innovation teaching strategies for her time from her time at the Fulbright Schulman's scholar at the purview center for teaching and learning at Yale as a learning designer at University College London as an associate researcher and lecturer at Institute of European studies in Brussels and as a coordinator of the center of teaching Innovation at Hertz School of governance in Berlin and in her spare time she said she shares her European perspective on education and Technology through personal her personal blog and newsletter we'll share that in the chat just in a minute a very warm welcome and a big thank you for joining us today Alexandra last up but not least up we had John Lee's one of the UK best known career strategists and author of a wide range of business titles he is the author of how to get the job you love one of the best known career books by British authors he has spent most of his career focusing on the world of work spending 25 years training recruitment Specialists he has worked with large range of organizations including the British British Council career management Consultants cipd hbos at the House of Commons HSBC Business Schools across the UK orange Rec the association mbas just to name a few I'm not going to go through the whole list John and he's a former chief executive of The Institute of employment consultants and founding board director of the career development Institute again a very warm welcome to you John um and very warm welcome to everybody today now let's get started though with the discussion because I think that's why everybody is here today so on to our first question for each from each of your perspectives what are the key employability skills you and your institution are being asked to support and how have you seen technology influence these skills do you want to kick us off Kate thank you so just to be clear before I start I want to Define careers and employability because these are not often completely understood terms so when I talk about them I'm gonna I'm gonna mean that careers is the personal journey of self-discovery that we all go on as individuals throughout our working lives when we're making choices about what we want to do about what our workplace values are and how we see our careers Journeys um but by contrast employability is a kind of continually accumulating set of assets and those assets are really around knowledge skills attributes and experiences and we accumulate those throughout our education and working lives and they're there really to help us achieve our career goals so I think with that in mind I think one of the really big challenges that we face is that with an unimaginable future of work nailing down any let alone the key employability skills is going to be very very difficult if not impossible and there are a number of approaches that universities in the UK take from creating short lists of say eight to ten skills and action beats that both reflect the institution and the aspirations that University might have for their graduates so in other institution it's a much more complex taxonomies of skills that academics can use to really surface and articulate to students the transferable skills that those students are innately developing in each of the subjects that are being taught so I think my main point is that there's no right answer here but I think the key has got to be making sure that students actually know that they are developing skills through their academic learning because that is happening but students often aren't aware of it and quite often even if they are aware of it they lack the language to describe those skills so whatever skills and institutions are identifying I think developing their ability to articulate those has got to be a priority however I think there are some other ways to look at this um probably because I have an enormous Good Fortune last week to hear Professor Karina juritzma speak she works at the future of work Institute at Kirsten University in Australia um and she was speaking at the global Career Services Summit that we hosted at the University of London last week and the future of work Institute is proposing that rather than trying to nail down skills we focus instead on actually actively embracing uncertainty and interconnectedness and in doing so we developed the skills and attributes that will enable us to work more effectively in a very uncertain space and can we explain what those skills and attributes might look like and how sort of thinking more holistically rather than a very granular level and finding key skills may actually help us have the confidence to navigate the unpredictability and I also think that when it comes to technology all our interactions with artificial intelligence are going to benefit from understanding the role that in particular critical analysis skills are going to play and I think in particular developing and applying judgment skills on the outputs of AI is going to become really essential fantastic thank you Kate um and Alexandra to announce that yeah thank you very much and thanks Kate for the really great introduction clarifying the terms because I think indeed we each uh mean different things when we think about those terms so I think it was really really important and also for this idea of a more holistic approach um I'll share a little bit from our perspective so at Master University we sort of our signature pedagogy is problem-based learning so I think everything can be seen at least ideally through that lens I'll explain a little bit more later so of course uh any Active Learning and specifically problem-based learning really brings Knowledge and Skills together and they're really intertwined and we try to have that reflected in courses but also in curricula in programs uh but of course that happens at different two different degrees let's say in the different courses and programs however the skills that are mostly let's say practiced and developed hopefully through our courses uh are basically obviously related to collaboration group work which really happens on a regular basis this is how we learn and teach actually through very small group tutorials where students always work in groups so it's just intrinsic to that uh to that Arrangement modes operandi in a way to learn uh in groups but also uh partly um independently so we have self-regulated learning Independent Learning periods and then group work periods just intertwined and then of course um critical critical thinking you have to solve a problem so that's the whole approach um it's it's really at the at the center of that together with communication and facilitation skills of course as students need to be sort of uh taking a lead in their own and ownership of their own learning uh in terms of uh framing it um again something that resonated with what Kate said we do it in a bit more holistical way we don't really use employability as such but we put it under the framework of a global citizenship which really can entail a lot of things it can also be quite an empty term if we don't really operationalize it but and many of our teachers unfortunately don't really understand what it means but it basically includes all those skills and more you know adaptability all that things all those things we will be probably touching upon in this session and in terms of Technology just very quickly uh something that sprang to mind when when I saw the question um we are using uh um at least the marketing department in our faculty is using VR for has been using VR for quite a long time now to develop skills so to to train students for interviews and for communication various Communications settings so um they've been doing that quite uh quite successfully yeah it's just one example I think we are just discovering now and in the wake of the pandemic uh what technology can really do especially for the skill spark thank you great thank you Alexandra I'm John over to you well it's great to be here today uh I do some work with University career services and also with Business Schools looking after the career needs of their students but I'm coming at this from the perspective of many of the people that I work with as a career coach who are often coming to me from any age from 25 to 65. and so they're looking back at their the early stages in their career and thinking about how they got their first job whether that's a good role and their the whole career path so a slightly different perspective the just quickly tackle a couple of questions what about technology is really interesting to me because um it seems to me that we live in a world where everything seems to be solvable using technology included the kind of Technology we're using today but the reality of how people actually Reach Out make connections and influence and get embedded in teams particularly in a world of hybrid working is that so-called soft skills are really really important right now so it's almost counter-intuitive we're talking about technology skills and sometimes forgetting that interpersonal skills make the world to turn you know especially the the ability to read a person or a situation quickly to listen and understand to absorb information to communicate well and the second Point really is that we like to talk about transferable skills and I sometimes think that we need it's good to take a different angle on that and not worry so much about what skills we mean by transferable skills but to think about the process itself to think about what makes skills transfer now for me it's a mixture of two things it's a mixture of research and translation so research means really understanding what skills are valuable to the audience you're trying to reach whoever that is even if you just conducting an informational interview just starting to understand what skills are valuable in this context and how are those skills described and that's the second word is translation because transferable skills only really transfer if you put some work into them they transfer when a decision maker understands them and finds them exciting so that's my starting position [Music] tea and I'm thinking more holistically and then thinking about how you embed That Into You know being in Kate talking about how students probably don't even realize that they're actually developing some of these skills and actually making them aware that they are developing these skills I think embracing uncertainty is key to an essential we've found to being successful because the path that we're going forward is an Uncharted path and it is quite uncomfortable for many to do things that are Uncharted so I think that's a really interesting I I agree with that completely that's actually a really nice way to look at it and also I love the way that you've kind of built this in across the curriculum Alexandra with the different Knowledge and Skills and and actually looking as a global citizenship approach versus employability skills um and John you are so right when you talk about it's not necessarily a technology that's but the enabling those interpersonal interpersonal skills being able to read people in different ways it's it's a harder skill to have especially when we're one or online so really really interesting points all right so moving on to the next question why is it important for students to have these skills before they enter the workforce and how have you seen this change over the last five ten years shall we start with John this time Flip It Up yeah well thank you well I we're very used to the idea of telling Market entrants and I'll say that because it doesn't really matter what age you are if you're coming out of Education going into the workplace you're a market entrance and they're they're told you know that organizations now want people who can learn things quickly and they have the right attitude and they fit in and all those kinds of things the trouble is it's quite hard to do something with that information it's hard to understand what to do with those ideas even something like how do you show the right attitude there's a huge amount of decoding involved in that so what I'm really aware of is that expectations have changed absolutely the last five to ten years and as I mentioned earlier on the other thing that's changed at the same time is the way that organizations um encourage and allow people to interact and how the workforce operates is now very much around either hybrid working or sometimes entirely remote working and that changes the flavor of everything you're going to do in terms of building relationships and starting to influence and be noticed to become visible in an organization so I find that profoundly interesting that one of the big effects of lockdown is that to be is being that we need to develop an entirely different skill set in terms of how you land in an organization how you build relationships and and there's that really subtle thing about how you project an image of yourself so that people notice what you're doing without being inauthentic how do you demonstrate initiative how do you influence a show where you've added value in a way that feels authentic and natural so I think my summary statement for all of that is that career management is a skill set in itself and one we could always think a lot more about very interesting I'm Alexandra yeah absolutely career management is it's just a term that I'll keep in mind I think generally for all of us it's not really related to our students only I think we all have to really think about that and continuously it's not it's a process um so yeah from our observations because at our business school we work a lot also with different companies uh in projects you know they Mentor students and do projects together um so we also are quite in touch with with the the industry and and also not technology industry but different sectors and they do tell us um quite a bit about what they would like to have of course they help us also um train students in that manner and uh towards those skills those more uh subtle Untouchable let's say uh skills that John mentioned um but but what they do say the general message is that they really want people who can collaborate efficiently but also work independently efficiently so really take initiative but then also really in this more complex usually Intercultural multi-modal environments in which we operate and I think this is really this this um this really this really subtle Nuance mentioned before and that's something that we can't a lot of people would say well we can't teach that and maybe it's true we can't teach it as such but I think it's a product that comes together with lots of other things that that students do in the classroom and Beyond the classroom and that we can do together with them and I think this is really and this is really important and the other really important thing I wanted to mention is um really the importance of learning how to learn I think this is something that that employers usually mention they really want people that can really learn quickly there can be thrown into something and really uh develop their own you know metrics for for learning the new the new the new things and really adapting to a new environment quickly um and I think this is a skill that we try again to integrate in the curriculum as much as possible to and I think a very important Point here is reflection because it's all metacognitive so you know learning how to learn I think that's something that really can help you throughout the career but it doesn't come automatically so I think this is one of the things that we need to to really keep in mind I agree completely with all those points that I feel like you guys have a a full task ahead of you with the amount of different skills and how they're evolving and the way in which you know I think there's definitely some practices that you're seeing at universities where they are um teaching these skills probably indirectly but actually how they apply to how they'll be successful moving forward in their careers is maybe the link part that we need to probably work on a bit and okay over to you yeah I think it's such an important point about moving away from knowledge gain and more towards learning agility lifelong learning the ability to learn in depth and you know and I think that's part of a range of discussions that are taking place in recruitment of both post 18 and Post University level um which is really thinking about you know what's the most effective way to get that message across to new employees as part of a recruitment process um I'm really pleased to see a much greater emphasis on inclusion and diversity as priorities in how employers recruit but I think that's also led to some of these really interesting shifts that Alexandra was just talking about and moving away from that more conventional focus on grades and knowledge and instead trying to enable applicants to actually identify and articulate the skills that they have which reflect the profiles of the jobs that they want student they're going to do and I think that in general is a more inclusive approach particularly I think if schools and universities can play their part in enabling students to learn how to do that through curriculum and experiences and I think to Alexandra's point you know can you teach the stuff you might not teach it but students can learn it because they have curated experiences and ways in which they can develop that um I mentioned we we hosted the global Career Services Summit last week and it was very interesting we had um strengths-based recruitment consultancy cap finity come and talk about this whole process of getting students ready for work and they call it pre-skilling and I think there's a lot of work that can still be done on the education side and I I might come back to that a bit later on but I think what we are going to see is more evidence of that kind of long run up into recruitment over the next couple of years and I think actually when we look at things like chat bot tools putting at risk conventional text-based application approaches like submitting a CVO recover letter I think we're going to see increased shift towards skills-based recruitment in person um and that's going to be a much greater emphasis I I think it also make make a point here about students and graduates that it's not just about getting into the workforce but to tie back to something that John said it's about progressing through it and I like to think of that in a way is kind of a fabric of continuity in your in your career skills I think this ties into into how John was describing career management because I think if we think about different skills as different kind of colored threads there'll be a kind of stunning rainbow of of different skills that all Learners bring when they're coming in with diverse subject learning when they start their careers but as they move through those kind of threads are going to intensify into fewer different colors as sort of subjects specialisms and knowledge specialism sort of um begin to focus in and I think what's important is that those skills that perhaps aren't particularly relevant in one context will probably surface further on down the line so one thing I think we could do really well in education when we work with students and pre-18 Learners is just to support them to understand that that's going to happen all the time that's kind of evolution that happens so while a recruiter might kind of prioritize looking for particular skills for the first job of a student's life in fact that student as they become a graduate as they come into the organization they progress through as an employee whether and that business or some some other business is really going to keep developing those and all sorts of other skills in the role and I would describe that as sort of getting on rather than just getting in and so I think that's that's a kind of useful way to help students overcome also that feeling of I'm committing to one job for the rest of my life whereas actually you're not you're just committing to your first step and everything you have you're going to take with you I think that's a it's a great point that you know coming into um a role you're going to have the foundations but you're going to be continuing to learn and evolve and roles are continuing to change as the needs and requirements or continue to change so that kind of acceptance that your skills although you might have foundations the key ones for right now are going to need to evolve and change and you're going to continue to learn as as you evolve within your career and even within specific you know in that role um as as the needs of the business change and evolve um we we make that a key priority within our region to empowering or literally we have four goals and one of the goals is empowering our teams and making sure it's a priority that they spend time developing themselves because if they don't continue to do that they'll fall behind and I think that skill of just that continuous learning is something that is is a good one to embed and make sure that their their harness as much as possible all right next question how can universities work to make this a whole of institution responsibility and what does your University your University doing already in this area um shall we start with cake this time thank you so I'm actually in the really fortunate position as you mentioned in the introduction of leading a Federation of University career services that sit under the University of London's Federal umbrella so what I can definitively say is there are many ways that this can be done and I think that's actually a really good thing because I think it demonstrates that universities are really evolving approaches that work for their students and for their course profiles and in doing so I think that also recognizes the complexity of the employment Market that students are now entering um before I was in this role I was head of careers and employability at King's College London and I developed an approach of surfacing the transferable skills that are innate to all the different subject areas because as Alexander said earlier that kind of focus of acquisition of knowledge is something that we we assess for quite often in education but isn't really what employers are looking for they're looking for skills and they're defining roles and they're recruiting on that basis so as I've said before I think we need to do a lot more to help students recognize that they have their those skills and they aren't just developing them when they go into the workplace and you know this is to John's point about transitions you know how do you recognize that skill and then take it with you as you move forward so at Kings what I did was to develop a taxonomy of transferable skills that helped academics feel confident that the academic rigor of their program was intact but that students were also developing this richness of transferable skills that had a wider value for employers and it meant that academics could celebrate curriculum and students felt confident that that longer term value was still there and quite often these days I talk about value rather than employability when I talk to students in particular students don't necessarily engage with the word employability but they will engage with the idea that there's some value some longer term value from their program um I want actually though just to highlight another quite contrasting approach from the University of the Arts London because actually it shows really nicely how many different ways there are to address this um at the University of the Arts London which is a different Federal Institution with lots of arts and fashion colleges from across London the head of careers there Richard sand co-created with students and academics and creative arts professionals what they call a creative attributes framework and they did this because they wanted to recognize that most graduates of creative practice courses are likely to be self-employed or they're going to go and work in small and medium Enterprises so they identified nine skills and attributes so this sort of really reductive list I was talking about being quite difficult earlier they've managed to do this really brilliantly because it reflects the students Journey from learner to practitioners to Independent professional and I really love this model because it recognizes the need to give students some core consistency and understanding their own development but it also so I think gives us a really powerful narrative for Creative practitioners that says look in some contexts that technical knowledge and specialist expertise is really important so I think it embeds the idea that there are some core pillars that really support an individual's growth and development throughout their career I love that you said about it it's focusing around the student profile the different universities I think that is essential it's not a one-size-fit sales model and tailoring it to the specific students that you have at your University will enable it to assess Alexandra over to you yeah thank you very much really interesting to hear about these other approaches from various universities I will share in a second what we do at Mass Street at least in my faculty of course there are probably different other initiatives in other faculties that even I'm not aware about but I think before that just two main ideas or pillars let's say on which an institution-wide approach should be or is based and I think we'll come back to the same idea of skills not being taught in a vacuum but basically together with everything else and developed and not taught actually um and and that means that ideally again we're talking sometimes a fairy tale or Ideal World they should be really um tackled in a holistic manner at program level so integrated in the curriculum at course design at curriculum design level already so there should be a lot of thinking going into that by different actors within the University faculty management staff students again the idea of co-creation that Kate brought before again that is usually an ideal situation it does happen in some universities and I'm really happy to hear about other examples and to share something from from our practice but I think that's yeah it's not the easiest of processes and then the other pillar I would say again something that was mentioned before especially by Kate the idea that students own the process as well so giving it back to them or really putting it in their in their hands uh to really create their own personal development stories so not only the knowledge they gain without within their courses but really this you know studying studying at University is a personal Journey that is made up by knowledge skills and lots of other things um but them putting together this puzzle and doing it explicitly again something that Kate mentioned and I think it's super important that we are explicit about it as Educators and as institutions but also that students explicitly can speak about their skills about their personal development before through out and after University I think this is super important and what we do so I'll share I'll share what we do at our faculty uh in our master of Learning and Development in organizations so there are already people that think about that of course it's a little bit biased uh but um so aside of all the other courses uh throughout the year there is a sort of separate track I would call it which we called a competence-based coaching so coaching already says the way it's uh um sort of run um and how we how we basically do it is that students choose in the beginning of the year so this runs along the whole year right and it's there is no grading at the end it's just pass or fail but uh students start by choosing four competency areas where they want to work on and within those competence areas uh specific skills so it can be you know communication academic skills um time management self you know project management these are some of the areas they chose they choose the areas and then they focus on specific skills within those areas so again consciously with our support I'll come back to that in a second but consciously they do it they decide and they have to explain why uh and this is a little bit tricky because because even if it's not graded it's part of their program sometimes they choose to work on skills that they are very proficient in just because they don't want it to affect their their their grades their you know diploma at the end but the idea is exactly the opposite for them to develop skills that they need to still work on so this is a sort of dialogue we keep having with them so they choose the skills and then they work throughout the year within the courses but also in their extracurricular activities personal life and so on uh on developing those skills and they have to document it uh throughout and in the end they have to submit a sort of portfolio but it can be in any form so it can be a podcast it can be a video it can be a real portfolio uh e-portfolio um and that that they have to then pitch at the end um to us they have to actually talk for 20 minutes about their development and I find it very difficult from my perspective too so I'm very impressed of what how how explicit the students can be at the end of this year at the end of this process about what they gained but we actually focus and we want them to focus specifically on how they will use what they gained in their future not only employment but just future development and that's a difficult part I must say because even though they become conscious and self-conscious throughout this process it's quite difficult for them so there they need support to link what they've done with imagining themselves in a future career and position uh and just to complement that they actually work together so in the whole process they work together with the academic coach so we play the role of academic coaches we teach each have a group um and with a professional coach so they work with someone from a company or from an organization usually our alumni played that role and we have regular meetings with each of them both us as academic advisor coaches and the professional coach so that's really supportive and we need to also really work on supporting the reflection and reflection skills because it's all about reflecting while developing the skills and again that's not something that comes automatically so yeah it's a very challenging process for both us and the students but also very rewarding that sounds wonderful and I I'm sure many would love to replicate a process like that at their universities um all right and over to you John well as the one person here who doesn't work in higher education it's important for me to be really clear that I think that universities and their career services do a great job around employability as you've heard from my colleagues here today in the career sector as a whole that what happens in higher education is known as being distinctive for its polity um as I mentioned earlier in terms of new angles new approaches I do think looking again at transferable skills and how they transfer is important and I'm encouraged by all the things I've heard so far there's something I don't see an absence that I am aware of and I sometimes think needs a bit more Focus it's nurturing a kind of curiosity when I'm talking to people who are leaving University or business school I find they're not terribly interested in the world of work and I'd just like to see what we can do about that if we could find a way that they can find work sectors and organizations and Brands and technology and systems and even some of the people that work in these industries could find those as intellectually stimulating as their academic subjects that's going to be a powerful engine I think to encourage curiosity finding more things out but also encouraging great questions if you ask great questions of course what you're doing is communicating employability so something about curiosity seems really important to me okay great thank you John and I appreciate some of these questions are very institutionally focused so all right now we're going to dig a little bit deeper into the specific areas kind of the niche areas are that you know you potentially focus on even though you've all touched um students at different stages of their career Journey Journeys okay if we start with you from your work with the pre-18 group what are some of the key challenges for students on their careers and employability Journeys that you've seen well firstly I think that they don't necessarily understand the distinction between careers and employability and actually the word employability is very rarely used in the pre-18 space and it's not well understood I think when it is and I and I think one of the reasons for that is that the one of the biggest challenges we have in the creatine context and I think this speaks actually back to the point that John was just making is that Learners are so focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the kind of accumulation of Bits of Paper and qualifications that in a way I think curiosity is knocked out of them I I think that just broadly those wider transferable skills and attributes that they're also developing through their curriculum so it just doesn't get recognized so it's much much harder for teachers and Educators to actually surface those skills and attributes for Learners and yet of course as we've already discussed today it's so important that actually that does happen um there's a really interesting emphasis I think quite often on on the role of work experience in preparing Learners to work I think we perhaps had a question about that in the chat but in so many cases and for so many reasons Learners often will have a barrier so getting work experience at all so when we think about a narrative that says that qualifications and work experience are essential for entering the workplace I think we suddenly marginalize a huge number of Learners who might be at risk of thinking that they aren't employable perhaps they're not achieving with qualifications even though they're in education perhaps they've got barriers to accessing work experience and I think that's a really unacceptable outcome that those Learners might think that they're not employable because it's not true we're developing skills and all of those learners but when we assume that we're really reinforcing I think some existing inequalities and some social injustice so when we then add on to that a really persistent narrative that does stick in government unfortunately about a linear relationship between the subjects of study and potential future career choices which I think is really harming Humanities and social sciences we then have a really quite a big Perfect Storm of risk that I think could actually quite easily result and a large number of Learners feeling that unless they take particular stem subjects for example they're at risk of having nothing to offer the jobs market and again that's completely unacceptable we can't be in that position so I think if we were also able to talk about the transferable skills every learner is developing across every subject area that they're studying at pre-16 and a pre-18 education and we focus on that as an outcome of Education rather than just qualifications then I think suddenly we're able to make every learner understand that that they are actually developing their employability that that's the value they're going to carry forward um and in that way we make sure that no one is left out and then if we look as I've done in my research and practice so all the different subjects taught in schools through that lens what we actually find is all those Learners at pre-16 and pre-18 are developing a massive richness of transferable skills and in fact in the taxonomy I developed from creating curriculum every single subject develops at least 50 distinctly different transferable skills it'd be amazing if we're able to get that message across the Learners and they'd feel really empowered there is a huge piece of work to be done there very happy to talk to anybody who wants to try and do that piece of work thank you Kate so it sounds like we need to almost Rebrand whatever some of the work that's already been done um so that they understand what what is that Journey that they actually are taking at this point and that's it it's amazing to hear and it's great to hear that so many different areas are being worked on already so it's just how do we surface them and kind of show them show them how they translate into these types of skills okay I'm going to transfer over to Alexandra now Alexandra maastrick has been doing at the School of Business and economics sounds like the ideal solution but maybe for a university that doesn't have a program like this where would you suggest they start if they're interested in rolling out something similar at their University yeah that's that's a very good question because uh obviously as I said even for us it's not always working perfectly so there are lots of institutional issues obstacles uh not only institutional but mostly institutional that come in the way but I think the first thing I want to mention is more of a mindset thing and that is really you know I my first advice would be start by making the case for a better integration of skill development at an Institutional level so that's really a bit of lobbying really getting it on the table and trying to also break the myth that higher education is all about knowledge so what we just said before so really saying okay skills are a thing be explicit about it in the learning objectives uh in the Reflections in the assessment everything so really integrating it through the curriculum and that's again a process but it's also um a mindset that needs changing so I think getting the institution and the different actors at institutional level to talk about it is really the first thing so otherwise it's always implicit Always Somewhere in the back yes skills citizenship whatever you call it uh no make it explicit bring it to the fore and at the Practical level again something that we're trying to do with programs that don't have it because not all the programs have such a track like we have it but because they saw it again this peer pressure sometimes helps so because they sell it for our program they actually asked how we could uh develop such a skills trajectory basically um and we are working together with a lot as now I'm putting my educational developer hat on so we are working together with a lot of the other programs to actually develop such such skills track um and what where it all starts is basically basically getting course coordinators faculty to work together to sit together in a room discuss about their courses how they puzzle together in a program sometimes that's already something completely new for them to actually sit together and discuss about how their courses come together um and then deeper into how each of the courses and which skills each of the courses aims to develop again being explicit about it putting it on the table my course encourages or works on writing skills which other course works on writing skills oh yours and yours okay then we can form a small task force and see how we can actually work together so that the student gets a coherent picture from their side because we often don't empathize with the students we don't put ourselves in their place and they see such a chaos most of the times where we think it's a very coherent program so sitting together physically at the table now that it's possible again with a lot of Post-its and a lot you know and then coming and creating that trajectory um for skill development throughout the program of course you can do it at the course level first but then ideally if you want to do it at the program level and then an Institutional level you need to have those people sitting together and really The crucial thing is to really talk about it and break those silos that that exist at University in general foreign I think uh easy said making it a priority is key because there's so many different competing priorities how do you if you make this a priority getting everybody in the room together discussing how actually the courses were together which is interesting um and then bringing it um you know making sure that it all links um somehow in some shape that's some really uh useful insights now John as a career coach uh What uh do you would you say are the most uh important lessons that universities should be imparting on their students and how can I prepare students not only to get their first job but to continue to climb the query ladder or or create their own career path I'm gonna deduct the first part of that question very slightly because I think it's probably outside above my pay grade but what I was first of all I'd like to really pick up an echo what Kate just said about the the current one-dimensional understanding about what academic subjects are most useful in terms of employability um I'm speaking to someone with two degrees in English and I've always found them very useful I was talking just in a seminar last night about the client of mine who had very successful jobs in telecoms and then later as a chief executive in the health sector and his first degree was in classics so and recruiters would say to him well what's the degree in Classics how is that useful to you as a senior manager and he said well once you've just got once you've learned about uh the lives of the Roman emperors you know everything to know about organizational politics I wish I thought was a great answer so he had actually was one of those great people that really understood the intrinsic value of doing a degree which really makes you think really makes you understand people or systems or organizations and how that was in impactful in the career that it enjoyed so what would I say I'd say in terms of um the second question helping to prepare students to get their first jobs and climb the career ladder yeah that's really important um so there's something there about instilling a sense of career development and ownership of skills um there's something there about um helping people land well in their first job and developing their careers from there on is it's fascinates me having worked in this sector for many decades that people only use the word career and what I'm talking about ordinary people people in society use the word career when they mean job change so if they want to buy a book about careers they're looking for a book that's about CVS or job interviews so they think the word career when they're thinking about transition they really think about it in terms of actually managing their own Learning and Development or growth and what the next 18 months is going to look back so that's that's part of it is sort of instilling that idea um helping people move onwards from that is it's an interesting mix isn't it it's about self-awareness to start with and one of the things I have found um a challenge sometimes is helping people in every decade feel comfortable talking about themselves describing their own strengths and their and their skills and that's a that's a piece of work in itself but there's something about looking outwards as well so in terms of Landing well in an organization and managing a career path a lot of that is about learning a new set of skills around mapping the organization building relationships really quickly and recognizing that you need mentors and enablers and champions and maybe a coach as well all kinds of people that are required in this process um and you need to work out how to ask for things and to talk about where you've added value but you need to do that in a way that feels authentic to you and too many of the models we have around that require uh extroverts Dom you know dominant extroverts to do the talking we need quieter gentler more authentic models of helping people say this is what I need this is what I'd like to learn and this is how I'd like my career to develop John I think that's that's a group all right I have a couple of questions from the audience that I would like to get to so that way we can get to the things we want to make sure that they feel involved in this discussion today um I have one from Alex James uh at Exeter we found that students who did a year in industry came back with a very different and more positive approach to their own learning to what extent do you think that all he qualifications should have some form of placement in them who would like to go first I think everybody could probably chime in for this one okay great I'll jump in on this although I'd be really interested to hear what John's thoughts are on this um I think a placement is a really important opportunity for exposure to the workplace and I think the opportunity to actually understand what is my transition to work like it is very important my caveat always is that if we're assuming that let's say in the third year of a degree program that a student has sufficient sort of confidence in what they want to do to be able to take advantage of that experience in the same way and I think that's where you can have enormous inequality of experience um across around 80 or 90 universities in the UK we we ask what we call career Readiness questions every year for all students where are you on your journey how clueless or certain are you feeling about your future and I think we're at risk of suggesting that a student going into the workplace for a third year placement is very sure or at least sufficiently sure of what they want to do to really benefit from that experience and I think we can't make that assumption but we can very carefully bookend an experience of a placement year for students who are perhaps lesser to make sure that they can benefit and I think that's what I would say is yes do you know what I think probably it's a great solution I know this is much more common in other countries than it is in the UK we're very behind the curve here um but let's do it in such a way that the student actually benefits with their career planning and their career management skills and their General readiness yeah I can I just add to that because I think I I completely agree with Kate on that I think we do I think most of our Bachelor programs in the business school actually include now uh a work placement or at least an internship for a period but um longer or shorter but I think it's there and it's obligatory but I think it's really important again how that is integrated in the whole program where does it take place um how do we support them to to go in there and to come back from there and to to to reflect on it so I think those are really super important issues and for the on the other side what we also do not really a work placement but in some of our project-based courses we work as I said before we are together with companies um and basically they so students act sort of like Consultants to those companies so in a way it's it's not a full placement they're still studying uh but they do work with uh with uh one of the future employers so they do get a feeling for what that would look like uh especially if they want to continue working as consultants or at least start working as consultants in in the beginning um but again it's really important what they make out of it and that it also still feels even if it's a work placement or or work project that it still feels like alert that it still is a learning experience and not just thrown into the workspace so I think this is our task in a way as Educators and and program leaders to sort of integrate it well foreign ly agree all placements are great it's just about exposure and exposure to language and culture and values and just how organizations work I would Echo the idea of short placement to me even a good conversation with an organization is a kind of placement and that's a mindset thing that's really important um it's just about that cultivating that sense of curiosity really and I think students often really don't understand the opportunity they have because it is a great door opener if you say I'm studying this subject I'm interested in this particularly you're in a business school I'm fascinated by most organizations will talk to you because you're obviously not saying please give me a job so you know it's such a there are so many opportunities to open doors to have conversations like that and if you think of each of those almost as a kind of mini placement I think what have I learned out of this or what questions have I got if I'm going to have conversation with someone else in this sector then you're going to get a lot more out can one sentence here I we actually do that quite a bit with alumni so I think one really use useful resource you can use are alumni networks when your university has that not all universities are well sort of you know organized on that but I think that can be very helpful so we have alumni talks one or two or three alumni in a panel come and talk to the current students and that they find really useful again it's just a conversation but it Spurs their curiosity they they even open their eyes to some field or a sector that they hadn't thought about before as a result of their studies so yeah seriously thank you I think we have probably time for one more question remember General one so it might I think everybody can probably chime in here um what would you like to see happening across your institution and what are some of the blockers into achieving achieving some of those activities or projects that you would like to see so your magic wand question I guessed if you could could and Kate I know you you're working across multiple institutions at University of London so is there any kind of practices that you would like to see being embedded across or built on I think I I think I'd like to see the parallel narrative not the substitution narrative there is still a desire to hold on to the idea that it's knowledge or skills that its curriculum or skills no it's an also narrative with this is also happening you know we can we can have that really important conversation about value I think when we take the e word out of it we stop talking about employability and we talk about the values the longer term value to students of their degree program I think it's much easier to have a very inclusive conversation of everybody in an institution about how we support students to take to identify that value and take it Forward at the many future stages you know career is not a linear thing anymore it's multiple it's complex it's parallel it's student-centered it's got to be their choice but let's at least give them ownership of that and I do think that's a whole of institution conversation that is not just the job of the career service gets off pedestal immediately we'll get very cross about that and Ellie Alexander you I mean you've yeah I've embedded a nice um C based program across so you kind of have the ideal World many people probably wanted to get to in some cases um what what's something that you would like to see moving I would actually like to see um again more conversations people making time and getting support to have these conversations on how to to you know holistically look at skills and not just as an afterthought basically but most of all actually as I heard you all talk now I think um I would like us to find out to create mechanisms to involve students more in that as well because sometimes I feel like there is this big divide that we talk about how we should be acting and then the students yeah we talk about them as well but I don't feel like I have enough information often about what they would like what their preferences what their challenges their worries are um and maybe I could have if I talk to my career service colleagues or career or counseling student counseling colleagues but I feel like there should be more processes or mechanisms that really involve the students as co-creators what's something that Kate mentioned before from University of the Arts probably it was this creative framework really having students also really have a say in that at the moment more institutional level that's great we uh one of the things that we've actually started doing is actually in we have mentorships programs um with senior leaders but actually we're bringing in more Junior roles into disc and to meet with our Senior Management to understand a bit more about the different dynamics of this new um generation that's coming in so that way we understand the different um values that they have the different ways in which they're viewing the world and the way you know how they're looking at their careers which I think is essential because it's not just us telling what we want it's a conver it should be a conversation to understand each other's and and to get the most out of the relationship together so I think it's really interesting that bringing the students voice in is I think it is a key thing I'd love to Kate brought that up earlier but that is a really interesting point that we should be embedding it probably more more throughout our decision basis and how we're building projects moving forward and John anything to add from your side well I think anything that encourages agency is important is it's moving away from passive models and I have to say speaking frankly sometimes it really disappoints me I've been to alumni events I've been to event even at my older universities where you've got a panel of people with Decades of experience in particular Industries and nobody in the room has any questions for them so you think okay so what do we do to encourage that sense of I don't want to take control I want to ask my questions are important to me and I know what the questions are that will matter when I leave this institution in let's say 18 months time I don't have a magic answer but I I'm planting the question laughs okay all right well we are just about a time I just wanted to thank each and every one of you for joining the discus

2023-04-07 16:56

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