Five reasons University career services need a new approach

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash

The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement.

All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach.

As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change:

1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority backgrounds or in an international setting, have limited financial resources and social capital and have a limited or no understanding of professional work and life. Their engagement is often very transactional, and they are unwilling to spend extra time or effort on any additional courses and support even if these are offered for free. While universities design their curricula and service provisions around a model of undergraduate students looking for academic progression, the real student is very different, requiring differently designed and personalised intervention.

2.        Skills obsolescence: Skills become obsolete faster, often within a few months. Technical skills, which were more directly related to employment prospects only a few years ago, become obsolete even faster. While the traditional approach has focused on ‘skills’, that skills are dynamic and context-specific is often forgotten.

3.        Limitations of Professional Certifications: Many universities around the world are looking to plug the ‘employability gap’ by embedding professional or technical certifications. The experience shows that while the certifications enhance the role-fitness of someone who is ready for employment, they don’t enhance employability by themselves. Technical certifications suffer from what’s known as ‘Matthew effect’ – it helps the ready students but discourage others who are unable to put the extra time and effort to complete them.

4.        Changing employer expectations: The entry-level recruitment has significantly slowed due to AI, tax changes in the UK and general economic environment, and the employers are now operating in a ‘buyers’ market’. The emphasis is shifting from narrow role-fit to versatility and professional readiness. Broad capabilities, such as readiness to learn, ability to influence others, to use technology productively, work in multicultural environments etc., factors, which used to be ‘nice to have’, now feature as ‘must have’ attributes.

5.        Changing nature of work: While internships and other forms of work immersion remain popular in the traditional approach, the workplaces are more dynamic and entrepreneurial than they used to be. The candidates are expected to balance between structures and processes (learning the employer's language) and yet find new opportunities and build collaborative endeavours across teams and functions (to be the change agent, bring fresh pair of eyes). This is not easily achieved through traditional internship or apprenticeship model, which emphasises process compliance over innovation, time spent over products built and individual achievement over collective performance.