graduateemployability – View From A Bridge – management, education and personal thoughts

FROM FUTILITY TO UTILITY

Collins Dictionary tells us that, “If you say that something is futile, you mean there is no point in doing it, usually because it has no chance of succeeding.” It is difficult to think of a better description of a student scanning the Times Higher Education or QS World Rankings or any of the multiplicity of other rankings that have proliferated from those organizations. They don’t really tell students anything useful about whether the institution is right for them as an individual or whether it will allow them to fulfil their life and career ambitions.

All the evidence suggests that the primary motivator for going to higher education is to enhance job prospects. Chegg’s survey across 21 countries, INTO’s research with agents and Gallup surveys are among indicators that for both home and international students a degree is largely a means to an end. That is not to say that people don’t want to study something they enjoy – just that the degree is the aim.

Most existing rankings are, however, just an attempt to monetize industry data for commercial ends and the sector collaborates, possibly because it’s the way things have always been done. The rankings, as someone said, “Xerox privilege” by reaffirming existing hierarchies and usually allow institutions to manipulate their data, sometimes beyond the point of criminality. For the institutions they are vanity projects which lead to dubious internal resource allocation, avoid hard questions about graduate employability and distort the decision making of Governments, funders and students.

Utility, on the other hand, is “the quality or property of being useful” and we may be beginning to see the glimmer of some media developing data to be genuinely useful to students. It is a timely and smart move because we are nearly at the point where AI will give students the opportunity to have near total, instant and absolutely personalized university search capability at their fingertips. That should send a shudder through ranking organizations that are wedded to a business model and presentation based on early 2000s thinking.

Money magazine’s Best Colleges 2023 may point the way. It still has a vapid “star” system to allow colleges to be ranked but the database begins to say some useful, student oriented, things about Acceptance Rate, tuition fee (both headline price but more importantly average actual price) and graduation rate. Imagine if that database approach married itself, in the US, to the work of a company like College Viability, LLC which gives an insight into reasons which a college “…may not be financially viable for the time required to earn a degree from that college.” Then, add to the mix comprehensive information on the graduate outcomes and career payback from specific degrees – the Princeton Review Best Value Colleges gives a flavour but still ends up as a ranking with limited coverage.

In the UK, the growth of private universities and the significant difference in tuition fees at graduate level between public universities makes the approach equally appropriate. Such a database would begin to answer the most pressing of student needs – will I get in and with what grades, am I likely to graduate, and what are my career and earning prospects thereafter? There could be plenty of further nuance added, including grades required, accommodation, measures of student experience and so on.

All of this could be done without the need for a grading system. The problem with rankings is that the company doing the ranking sets an arbitrary test which institutions do their best to pass with a high grade. This entirely excludes the student from having any input into the criteria but the results are then presented as an aspirational or emotional nirvana for them to consider.

A smart organization would be ensuring that their data collection is driven by the real world needs and concerns of students. It’s time to remove the worthies who make up the Advisory Groups and Panels for the major ranking organizations and find ways of engaging directly with potential students. The outcome would be relevant, dynamic and have utility for millions around the globe.

It would also be a driver for universities to engage more effectively with the issue of graduate employment both through on-campus services and establishing strong data on careers and jobs. Colleagues including Louise Nicol of Asia Careers Group and Shane Dillon of CTurtle have been demonstrating for years that smart use of technology even makes it possible to leave antiquated, email driven surveys of graduates behind in collecting the data. The answers might even begin to convince Governments around the world that universities are engaging effectively and adding value to economic growth and sustainability.

McKinsey and many others have written about personalization of the customer experience in retail with much of the impetus being given by technology. The insurance world has seen the rise and rise of aggregators and there is talk of the “personalized insurance engine” that gives a fully automated customer journey. Potential students are hungry for better decision making option and education needs to catch up fast with the opportunities that exist.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

From pathway to runway and lift off for employability

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First published in University World News 17 July 2021

Pathway operators are becoming the unlikely force behind new initiatives in international student graduate employability. It is a phenomenon that deserves some applause since it reflects the needs of students, but it begs the question as to why universities are not doing the heavy lifting in an area that is critical for national competitiveness in the post-pandemic world.

The answers suggest that it may be time for more radical solutions to careers guidance and advice services.

CareerAhead (Study Group), CareerFirst (INTO University Partnerships), Career Core (Kaplan), Career Accelerator (Shorelight) and Professional (Navitas) are all variations on the same theme. Some are costlier and have more guarantees than others.

It is early days and this may just represent an opportunist response to student concerns in a period of economic uncertainty, rather than a long-term plan to support graduate employment. Serious, smart and strategic operators should be building in robust longitudinal measurement of job placements, career progression and comparative performance.

It is no secret that international students are highly focused on the return on investment they get from their expenditure on a degree overseas.

In 2016, Hobsons research indicated that four in 10 (40%) said they would go where there is high demand for employees and 38% would choose their study destination based on expected high earnings associated with the industry for which their degree prepares them. A 2021 QS study of students interested in studying in the US showed 54% said a high graduate employment rate was the most important metric they considered.

Failure to support graduate outcomes

The pathway providers’ decision to take the initiative in this area may suggest that they have given up on the notion that their university partners are willing to provide what international students need or are capable of doing so.

One of the big selling points of the pathway providers has always been that, on arrival, students are “students of the university” with access to all the resources and facilities of the hosting institution. Any reasonable person would think that includes the careers advice and guidance services which are the institution’s go-to resource for helping students get jobs.

Another underlying dichotomy is that the implicit purpose of getting a degree is that it is a route to having more choice in the career one follows. The need for private providers to charge extra money to ensure appropriate levels of support reflects the broader truth that a degree is no longer enough.

Institutions would do well to consider how this will begin to change the return-on-investment calculation made by students when choosing a university.

Universities may also be hoping that, just as they have handed their brands over to pathway providers and allow them to directly recruit students, they will not have to invest further in careers advice and guidance.

The low level of investment by the sector in graduate outcomes was laid bare by research from Tribal/iGraduate which showed that universities are spending over nine times as much on marketing as they are on career advice and support.

This is aligned with a collapse in data gathering around graduate outcomes that means decent comparative information from the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) will not emerge until 2023 – six years since the last meaningful data.

Even when the HESA numbers do arrive they are highly unlikely to provide any genuine insights into the outcomes of the 75% or more of international students who plan to return to their home country. If employability is to be a key battleground for countries, universities and pathway providers to prove their worth, this is a significant gap in data on which to build a reputation.

Alternative data collecting models are already being used by forward-thinking universities and demonstrate where individual universities are able to make a difference for their graduates.

Outsourcing careers services to meet need

Leading industry commentators have argued that “career services must die” and that would seem increasingly true, given the lacklustre support that most are able or willing to give to international students.

There is a real need for institutions to rethink their performance criteria and even for governments with ambitious international student recruitment targets to consider how national reputations can be made or broken. This may even be a good moment for higher education to pass their graduate and careers advice investment to private providers who are able to deliver both genuine support and an accurate measurement of performance.

It may seem radical, but there is evidence that career progress has become a highly nuanced, technologically advanced and competitive business where increasing numbers of graduates need every piece of support they can get.

It is clear that the world of work has become as oriented towards aggregators like ZipRecruiter, Indeed and others. Universities need good quality information to be able to orient their academic offerings to the changing needs of the market, but there is no reason to expect them to be experts in services to secure employment.

Outsourcing non-core business such as accommodation, pre-degree teaching and maintenance has come a long way and seen some substantial gains for the sector. Focusing on teaching, research and social impact is plenty for most institutions to be considering and the pace of change required when it comes to ancillary services will always be secondary to these core activities. There is a certain symmetry in providers of pathways to degree level education also becoming the runway to career success.

It could lead to the tantalising possibility of private providers also taking over aspects of alumni relations with a focus on networking to build job prospects rather than seeing development and fundraising as the point of staying in touch with ex-students.

It is only a short step from that to building and recruiting to boot camps and re-skilling and upskilling short courses. With imagination, ingenuity, care and private investment this might even become a radical reinvention of lifelong learning led by private providers to meet the skills requirements of ‘Global Britain’.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, and Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

Graduate job recruitment – From fish in a barrel to go fish

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First printed in University World News 03 July 2021

The graduate jobs outlook still looks bleak for students who graduated earlier this year and for those graduating in the summer. Just-in-time recruitment, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, digitisation and artificial intelligence are all combining against the background of a global pandemic and economic recession.

In response and as we emerge from COVID-19, we see a new breed of careers information advice and guidance better suited to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous or ‘VUCA’ world we find ourselves in.

It was not too long ago that thousands of students attended face-to-face graduate fairs with numerous graduate employers in a bid to land their dream job. It was a scenario that was reminiscent of the early 1900s phrase ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ because nobody could miss – employers knew where the students would be and the students knew where to go to get a job.

But when nobody can travel and there are fewer jobs, the game changes and is more like the guessing, bluffing and occasional skill associated with the card game ‘Go Fish’.

In the United Kingdom in 2020, at least 30% of university students lost a job or an offer of a job between March and April after the sharpest monthly increase in unemployment on record. At the same time, competition for graduate jobs is at an all-time high: With graduate job openings falling by 77% since the beginning of the year, there are on average 100 graduates vying for every role.

At least 20% of Britain’s biggest employers have suspended their graduate recruitment selection processes and stopped making graduate job offers and experts say the true scale of the damage inflicted on new graduates will not be fully realised until next year.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has warned that graduate overqualification has reached “saturation point” and squeezes lower-qualified workers out of jobs. It has bemoaned the crude approach to addressing the UK’s poor productivity growth with a “conveyor belt of graduates”.

There are fears that the situation is unsustainable, given that the government estimates that 45% of university graduates will not earn enough to repay their student loans.

The situation is no better elsewhere in the world: according to the Institute of Student Employers’ summer 2020 report, COVID-19: Global impacts on graduate recruitment, the pandemic is having a profound and damaging impact on the global economy. Many countries are reporting dramatic rises in levels of unemployment and there is growing evidence that these changes are having a disproportionate impact on young people.

The report explores how these economic changes are impacting graduate recruitment in 21 countries, with results broadly reflecting the issues in the UK graduate jobs market.

Career services must die

The solutions are challenging, but were foreshadowed in 2013 by Andy Chan, vice president for innovation and career development at Wake Forest University. He gave a TEDx talk, “Career Services Must Die”, where he challenged colleges and universities to completely rethink the traditional delivery of career services. Seven years later, he did an update.

He says: “Sadly, not much has changed at the majority of college campuses; career services continue on pretty much as before – with dissatisfied students, alumni and employers having to struggle on their own. True breakthroughs in career services will come when higher education embraces career as part of its academic core instead of a fringe student affairs offering.”

The reality is that some universities have been treading water as far as careers education is concerned, but now we do see a sudden shift. As is often the way, necessity is the mother of invention.

Changing careers education

There is and will always be a place for face-to-face or virtual careers fairs, CV workshops, mock interviews and assessments, but it seems like the stage is now set for innovation and out of the box thinking.

So here are some thoughts on reinventing careers education at university:

• First and foremost, careers information advice and guidance should be for all students, regardless of disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion or sexual orientation, whichever country they are from or heading to post-graduation.

• Careers guidance needs to be well informed by robust graduate outcomes data and insight, graduate destinations, benchmarked employability metrics and up-to-date labour market information for both the country of study and also for major overseas student markets, for example, China, India and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region.

• It will be important to personalise careers information advice and guidance and establish from the outset where in the world students are looking for their first job, for example, in their country of study or elsewhere. Careers advice will differ depending on their preference. It is likely that Asia will bounce back from the recession far quicker than Europe, so could there be exciting opportunities for graduates from other regions further afield.

• There will be a need to manage student expectations because in the present situation they may not initially walk into their dream job. However, a stop gap role working in an alternative industry or non-graduate job may provide them with valuable experience. In fact, speaking to many graduate recruiters in both Asia and the UK, many focus more on a candidate’s part-time work than they do on their degree during interviews.

• Widening graduates’ horizons is essential, for example, finance roles are not just available in banks. In Malaysia, oil and gas giant Shell employs over 1,000 accountants. For many employers, degree discipline is less important than one would think. They are looking at a level of education, but more importantly an attitude and resilience, which should be available in abundance in today’s graduates who have survived the pandemic and gained their degree.

• Students need to be given techniques and tips to find jobs that are not advertised, obvious or may not even exist yet. Effective account mapping and outreach to hiring managers and section managers could be a way of securing a job that has not even been advertised. This year’s graduates are going to have to be ‘job makers’ not just ‘job takers’.

• Students will have to think out of the box and commit time and energy to their own enterprise, join the gig economy and-or become a freelancer. This requires a different set of skills and commercial acumen that most employers find desirable in new recruits.

So, this and next year’s job search for both employers and graduates will, unfortunately, not be like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. It will require new skills and a new way of thinking and navigating complex labour markets and employer needs.

Like ‘Go Fish’, you will be dealt your hand and must bring your wit, ability and judgement to bear to compete with other graduates in a fiercely competitive market.

For higher education, a focus more on employability alongside increasing resources in this vital area of development will not only add value to their students at a time when many are increasingly questioning the value for money of their tuition fees, but also equip them with new, more innovative skills to be successful in a VUCA world.

Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge and Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD.

Image by tomekwalecki from Pixabay

UK’s International Graduate Employability ‘Promise’ – Next Steps

It should be possible to wholeheartedly welcome UUKi’s Conference ‘International graduate employability: Making good on the promise’ because it is an important topic. But I doubt we will see 90% of the time devoted to employability for students leaving the UK after study, although that’s the percentage that will probably look for jobs in their home country. Neither is the Conference likely to have the necessary quality of data about graduate outcomes and views despite the investment made in UUKi’s International Graduate Outcomes 2019 publication.

Even more discouragingly, the publicity for the event majors on the point that ‘we have the post study work visa we have argued for for so long’. This encourages those who want to focus on short-term enrollment growth by maximising the post-study work windfall rather than serving the broader international graduate community. A more balanced view would reflect that providing careers services, alumni relations and employer networks suited to international students returning home will be a key point of strategic differentiation in the long term.

In addition to getting the balance of time in the Conference right it would be good to see discussion and commitments on how to make progress in four key areas:

Make Sure Data Reflects Reality

Several assertions in the International Graduate Outcomes 2019 report are heavily caveated and require detailed explanation in a footnote or the annexes. The most egregious is the claim that “The balance of respondents to the i-GO survey by nationality was broadly similar to that of international students studying in the UK.” (page 17). With only 6% of the total respondents from China this is nonsense and, as a footnote confirms, “in the year 17-18, Chinese students made up 33% of the total non-EU student population…”.

Assertions on comparative salaries (page 49) for UK graduates working in other countries are problematic and confusing. For the diligent reader these anomalies are explained away but the headline claims seem to be a naïve overstatement of the benefits based on data that is not comparable and in some cases is very limited. If this begins to work its way into university marketing materials we are likely to see the Advertising Standards Authority called into action again to correct misleading claims.

Other sources and methodologies, which have more substantial samples and better reflect the nationality mix of UK-enrolled international students, are available. They also offer the potential to compare performance across competitor countries and give substance to claims about the pay premium that returning students can expect. Individual universities are already buying these services but the competitive future of UK HE seems worth a sector-wide approach.

Get Serious About Careers Service and Advice

In the foreword to UUKi’s report Chris Skidmore Minister of State of Universities, Science, Research and Innovation comments, “Together we can build on this research to help ensure that international students who graduate from the UK’s world leading universities are in the best possible position to go on to further employment be it in the UK, or their home nation”. The latter will be difficult if not impossible if there is no concerted effort to build relevant support and services for international students.

The report highlights that only 2% of international students found jobs through their University Careers Service. It is arguable that few of those Services are equipped technically, with funding or with genuine insights, to help international students engage with employers in their home countries. Whatever the reason, it is a dismal outcome and an indictment of the services international students receive for their fees.

Pay More Attention to International Alumni Relationships

Details on response rates are not wholly clarified but the Report stated it was, “… less than 1% of total international graduates from UK higher education institutions” during the sample period. It seems plausible that those who did respond are outliers in the alumni community who feel particular affinity or allegiance to their institution and/or the UK. If so, it is dangerous to assume that high levels of approval and support for the educational experience are commonplace.

Most service organisations are more interested in finding out about customers who are dissatisfied so that they can improve their offering. Lack of engagement means that institutions may be getting highly selective feedback and missing information that could help them build more effective curricula and better support. Even if the responses are representative and the low rate just the result of inertia, it means universities are missing opportunities to develop networks of graduates around the world who may be supportive of future students seeking employment.

Target Connections with Employers Through Better Data, Insight and Graduate Support

HEIs should know the destinations of international graduates and develop targeting to match graduates with relevant skills to employers who need them. The importance of this is apparent in markets such as Malaysia where students ranked nine Asia-Pacific regional companies as the most desirable employers in their top ten for business and commerce according to Universum 2017. In terms of graduate employability many Asia-Pacific based corporations would also benefit from universities providing better information about courses and the strengths of their students.

There are major opportunities for universities that are able to fit together the jigsaw of graduates and employers. Better employment prospects and evidence of thriving careers is a siren call for both potential students and major organisations who are seeing job-prepared employees from favoured institutions. The best way to achieve that level of synchronicity is through data that is individualized to each university delivered with insights about regional economies.

A Strategic Advantage and Virtuous Circle

I would like to give three cheers to the UUKi for staging a Conference on an important issue and their effort to develop a worthwhile piece of evidence that underscores the UK’s position as a high-quality study destination that delivers enhanced career and life prospects. For now, I can only manage one-and-a-half because the Report errs on the side of marketing at the expense of more hard-edged insights, and the Conference may simply reinforce short-term, narrow thinking about finding jobs for students who stay in the UK.

More positively, both are good starting points which, with imagination, conviction and investment, could become the basis for a genuine strategic advantage. This would mean investment in demonstrating through data and insights that the UK produces a global network of alumni with thriving careers. With graduates choosing to work overseas getting appropriate support as they start their working lives, businesses around the world would better understand the value of a UK higher education, and international students would choose the UK knowing it gives them an employment advantage. It’s a virtuous circle worth considering.

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