‘PEOPLE GET MORE HELP CHOOSING A TV THAN THEIR CAREER’, SAYS EXPERT
The Scotsman newspaper has put UK careers advice under the microscope – and the findings aren’t impressive.
All four experts interviewed for the article (including me) agreed that something is very wrong with the way we tackle careers advice in this country – from school through to university and beyond.
Graduate Fog’s favourite quote came from Chris Humphries, chief executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, who said:
“People get more advice and information to help them choose a television than a career.”
If the emails I receive from you lot are anything to go by, I agree 100%.
Although graduates say your university careers centre is bursting with info on basic stuff like how to write a CV or where to find advertised vacancies, their help doesn’t go deep enough and you really struggle to find useful advice on the trickier stuff.
Many of you come to Graduate Fog because you feel that university careers advice is aimed squarely at those who already know what they want to do – or those who want to get into highly structured careers.
Do the people who currently dispense this advice think you’re robots?
Because to you, it looks as if university careers advice is designed for the people who actually need it the least!
What about those of you who don’t know what you want to do – or have a clue where to start? Should you do an MA in the meantime – or would that be a total waste of money? What about those of you trying to break into hugely competitive industries like media? If you’ve been trying your luck for a year (unpaid) but it just isn’t happening, where can you go to discuss your options about what to do next?
You might be interested to learn that the five most popular ‘Advice’ pages on Graduate Fog are:
– How to choose your career
– How to find vacancies
– How to decide about further study
– How to understand recruiters
– How to fight the recession
Does this suggest that these are the areas where your university careers centres are falling short?
Another big problem – the experts agreed – is that careers advice is not updating itself fast enough in line with the way the world of work is evolving.
There is a clear mismatch between the help offered and the help you really need.
You are still being given rigid, static advice – as you enter a new world of work, where the rules are changing every day.
Graduate Fog believes graduate careers advice providers need to start presenting their information in the context of the real world as it actually in 2010.
I think we should move away from this idea of ‘planning’ your career up-front and then just getting on with it. Because these days, the truth is that most people just start somewhere and work it out as they go along!
They also need to help you factor in the way the world is changing, so you can properly assess the risks of entering an industry with an uncertain future (like media). They should also point you in the direction of industries with real growth potential, such as green energy and online social networking.
As Vivienne Brown, at Skills Development Scotland, put it in the Scotsman article:
“A friend of mine has a daughter who went to school for the first time this year. I was thinking she might still be in work in 60 years time. If you think about the amount work has changed in the past 60 years it give you an idea of the sort of challenge we face.”
No careers adviser will ever be able to give you all the answers – or predict the future.
But I do think the universities (and schools) could do a much better job of empowering you to make your own decisions about your future – and showing you how to navigate your career as you go along.
It’s a challenge – but it’s totally do-able.
Making a bigger effort to understand the needs of their customer (you lot) would be a good start.
I live in hope…
MESSAGE TO CHEAPSKATE UNIVERSITY CAREERS ADVISERS:
When I post on this subject I always get at least five emails from university careers advisers saying, “Well if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell us what we should be doing differently?” If you’re thinking of doing this, please don’t – because I won’t reply. Study Graduate Fog in your own time, buy Dude, Where’s my Career? and figure it out for yourself. It’s not my job to translate my work into a list of action points for you and your colleagues. You receive a fat paycheque at the end of every month, I don’t get a bean. If you would like to pay me to advise you on a consultancy basis, please contact me here – but I know you won’t because of ‘budget constraints’).
Graduates – did your university’s career advice work for you?
If not, why not? Do careers advisers have an impossible task? Or have they just got lazy – and forgotten how it feels to be in your shoes?
In truth, for me it wasn’t the case the the Careers Service was bad, but that I simply wasn’t aware of the urgency of using them. Not once was I ever made aware of the cyclical nature of graduate recruitment – I just assumed that I could apply whenever I felt like it and get a job if I was up-to-scratch.
Thankfully, I played poker semi-professionally at the time, so I had a viable way of killing time until the cycle restarted, but I feel sorry for the under-informed masses who miss all the deadlines because they hadn’t thought to apply for a job until June/July after they’d finished exams, and instead end up stacking shelves to make ends meet until they are able to apply to graduate schemes.
True, not ALL of them run cyclically, but the majority do.
The most important thing that careers services do is to make graduates understand that the pressure is on and that you can’t just seek work on a whim.
*The most important thing that careers services do is to make graduates understand that the pressure is on and that you can’t just seek work on a whim.
Should read:
The most important thing that careers services CAN do is to make graduates understand that the pressure is on and that you can’t just seek work on a whim.
I think the problem starts in school. Career advice in school is non – existant or biased which makes careers advice in university hard to understand because I think students need a degree in careers advice to understand all careers information unless a person comes from a rich background. Careers advice is a confusing and needs to be a complete especially in a rapidly changing world.
Yes, the state-funded careers services too often don’t help those who need careers guidance most. It is a resources problem though – careers information is cheap to provide but individual guidance costs a lot because it’s extremely time-consuming. If you were going to make guidance generally available, you’d need to hire a lot more career advisors and I can’t see that happening!
You’d also need to hire careers advisors with different skill sets (eg properly qualified and experienced psychologists to oversee the psychometric side of careers guidance).
I agree the present situation is wrong and unfair but I can’t see it changing.
Hi Tanya
I’d just like to remind you that in writing your book you received a considerable amount of help and advice from a certain university careers service. Does that mean your book is tainted with incompetence? Maybe the national joke is on you.
It has been entertaining watching you pick fights with various organisations as a method of self-promotion. However, in this case maybe you should beware of the damage you are doing by perpetuating inaccurate myths and stereotypes about university careers services.
I’m not saying that all careers services in the UK are perfect. Some of the advice offered at school level does seem to be pretty dire. Although many of the reports that trumpet how bad the situation is are hardly rigorous in their evaluation of effectiveness. (It’s quite easy to find a discontented group of people to slag something off if you have the motive to look hard enough.)
Much of the criticism of university careers services is anecdotal. It would be just as easy to come up with individuals who could talk about how much they have been helped. Maybe it just shows that careers services are not as good at self-publicity as you – perhaps you could give us some lessons.
Many university careers services, despite struggling with diminishing resources, are working in innovative ways to engage students with the complex business of navigating their careers in the modern workplace. Many are using Facebook, group learning, alumni networking and skills development schemes. It’s frustrating that the students who would most benefit often don’t bother to engage until it is too late. Maybe it’s because they believe erroneously that careers services are for people who already know what they want. This is definitely not true, and maybe careers services are guilty of not marketing themselves appropriately. There may also be a problem with the university hierarchies and academics who do still see careers services as merely providing information rather than helping people to think for themselves and to develop strategies for launching oneself into the employment market.
If you consider yourself a serious journalist rather than someone who just wants to sell copies of your book, perhaps you will take up the challenge to investigate and report on examples of good practice in university careers work. Maybe that would serve as a good example to any services out there who are behind the times. You may also help to dispel the myths and stereotypes that prevent students from using their careers services as effectively as they could.
David
@David Winter
Thanks for your comment. I’m sorry to see that I’ve obviously offended you, for which I sincerely apologise. I very much appreciate all the help that you and your colleagues at The Careers Group, University of London, gave me with Dude? and I have singled you out on several occasions as being one of the most visionary careers departments I have encountered! I just omitted to do it during this post, because I decided to make a strong statement about university careers advice in general – which I meant every word of.
I’m glad that you have been enjoying Graduate Fog until now. However, whole point of this site is that it’s not just for your ‘entertainment’ – it’s for proper, live, fiery debate – the stuff that we all know isn’t happening anywhere else on the Internet! We won’t all agree on everything – but things do need to be discussed. Opinions need to be aired. I’m proud that Graduate Fog has become a place for this kind of discussion – and I will work hard to keep it that way.
As for this particular post… The title of this post was intended to be provocative – but if you think that means I’m not serious about the subject subject then you’re mistaken. As you know, a lot has changed since I worked with you on the book in 2007 (you’ll remember it came on sale June 2008). The recession, rising tuition fees, the spread of unpaid internships and a lack of government support for jobseeking graduates have combined to give this latest crop of graduates an extremely tough situation this summer. I feel that many of them have been robbed and abandoned – and no, I don’t feel that’s too strong.
My point is that when it comes to the welfare and future of young people, this is simply too important an issue for us not to discuss, just because a few careers advisers might get a bit offended. I am sure you were as upset as I was to read about Vicky Harrison, who committed suicide after a two year job-search. Of course, I’m not saying university careers advisers were to blame – I’m just underlining that this is a very serious subject matter with potentially grave consequences if we get it wrong. If I have to take a few knocks from you and your colleagues to make sure people like Vicky get better support in future, I’ll do it!
It’s honestly not my goal to upset other people who are working hard to provide a service that they think is working. But if it ISN’T working, we need to discuss this. For too long, this issue has been ignored, for fear of upsetting the status quo (and offending good people like yourself). But frankly, I think careers advisers need to toughen up – and fight back if they don’t agree with me (as you have done!). But then again, perhaps it doesn’t really matter what I think – the whole point is what do students and grads think? We’ve already heard from a few users above – in time there will be more and we can make a proper assessment.
I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting I do in order to prove I’m a ‘serious journalist’ (not that i’ve EVER positioned myself as this, btw!). But I am definitely not about to undertake an exhaustive review of university careers services just to prove I’m a ‘serious’ journalist. Just to be clear, I base all my views on university careers advice on what my users tell me. And I’m afraid to say that the message is coming through loud and clear that the current situation just isn’t working for them. I don’t need to do surveys to measure the effectiveness of anything – I know what they tell me because it happens every single day. I know how many graduates there are who – for whatever reason – the universities have been unable to reach. They come to me. And I also hear from graduates who have made terrible, terrible decisions that have cost them huge sums of money (pointless MAs they never knew what they were going to do with). All I know is that a huge number of people are not getting good careers advice and since the universities should be the first port of call in this, I am assuming that this is the point at which something is going very wrong.
I think universities find it very tempting to blame their students for not coming in soon enough or engaging properly – but this isn’t news that young people don’t want to worry about the future when they’re having a good time! And even if we say this IS the main problem with the current system, that is STILL a failing of the universities – not the students. To me, this suggests a major marketing problem? A shop keeper doesn’t blame his non-customers for not coming in – he does everything he can to understand the needs of his customers and make his shop more appealing. Why is this not happening with university careers centres?
As for your point about diminishing resources, I take your point – but this is exactly why we need to stop wasting money on things that aren’t working, so we can spend it more cleverly on new ways of tackling this problem. And you may like to know that I built this entire website for £500.
And finally, to address your suggestion that I’m doing all this work just to sell my book… You may like to know that I earn 25p per copy of Dude I sell at full price. Yes, that’s right – 25p. So all the work I have put into getting this site off the ground has certainly NOT been about flogging books for pennies! There is a much bigger issue here that I feel 100% passionately about. Do you really think I could run this site every day if I didn’t care about this subject?! Because there must be FAR easier ways to make a living! ; ) x
@ David Winter
I couldn’t agree more!
Don’t worry Tanya. I’m not offended. I welcome any opportunity for intelligent debate on how careers services can be improved.
However, I just wanted to engage in the debate in a similar manner to the way you started it – to make a point very strongly (maybe slightly too strongly). And if you feel aggrieved that I’ve misrepresented your motivations, then perhaps I have succeeded.
Just like you, I get extremely annoyed by the number of students who are being let down by the university system. I certainly don’t want to absolve careers services from the responsibility of providing and marketing the best and most appropriate services they can to students, but I just want to make sure you are pointing the finger of blame at all the right people.
Most careers services know that a lot of students are too busy focusing on more immediate concerns to engage with the far-off and frankly scary prospect of facing up to their futures. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to get access to them in their departments. With a few admirable exceptions we are often met by apathy (if not outright hostility) from many of the academics who see careers as an irrelevant distraction from the important task of learning.
We often spend time battling against university marketing departments who try to force us into promoting masters courses that we, as careers advisers, know to be of dubious resale value to employers. (I spend a lot of my time trying to raise questions in the minds of students who are dead set on pursuing inappropriate postgrad study.)
You could also tackle the politicians for luring unsuspecting young people onto university courses with the false promise of automatic social mobility and guaranteed job satisfaction.
My ‘serious journalist’ comment was based on the fact that you seem to be setting yourself up as some sort of dogged investigative journalist passionately pursuing the cause of truth on behalf of the hard done by. If you’re going to take that stance – good for you. I’ll be behind you wholeheartedly, but make sure you get your facts right and you pick the right targets.
David
@ David Winter
Thanks for your reply to my reply!
Putting our squabble ; ) to one side for a second – I was genuinely SHOCKED to read this:
It sounds like you have serious questions about the ethics of this – have you raised it with anybody? What was their response? It sounds to me like a shocking conflict of interest!
By the way, less of the spin on Twitter please.
‘Hilarious – prickly careers professionals furious that #GraduateFog suggested yesterday they could do better! http://bit.ly/ajqMrY‘
I’m not ‘prickly’ and I’m not ‘furious’. If you want to convince me that you are serious about this debate rather than just out to promote yourself, your site and your book, then keep it clean.
David
@David Winter
Point taken, but I’ll tweet whatever i like thanks ; ) People will read and decide for themselves when they get here!
Having worked (in an administrative capacity) alongside professional careers advisers in the past I can certainly confirm that things are changing. The world of “professional” (by which I mean university based and therefore funded directly by students) careers advice IS changing, evolving and improving all the time BUT the pace at which it is doing so is no match for the seismic changes occurring in the national and global job industry due both to the economic crisis as well as to the direction in which many industries are heading as a result of the fast-paced and ever-changing modern world we live in and the way in which it works. However, despite the efforts being made to keep up to date and change with the times, I can confirm, from my own experience of processing feedback forms within a university careers department, that this is not working and is simply not adequate. It is not working at the level of individual universities nor is it working nationally. And the problem, I believe, lies with the lack of specialisation in terms of the knowledge held by careers advisers. Until we have advisers who have specific, targeted and up-to-date knowledge, contacts and know-how with regards to the job market and how graduates from THE SPECIFIC DEGREE PROGRAMMES OFFERED BY THEIR INSTITUTION fit into it, graduate careers advice in the UK will continue to be, in my opinion, very much a national joke.
” We spend a lot of time and effort trying to get access to them in their departments. With a few admirable exceptions we are often met by apathy (if not outright hostility) from many of the academics who see careers as an irrelevant distraction from the important task of learning.”
I can vouch for this. In the university I worked in this was very true. We would often send information/advertising material regarding the careers service to the academic departments for them to display/distribute to students which was sent back and/or we received e-mails/telephone calls asking us (the careers department of the SAME university) to stop sending them information! This is an important issue. The academics are frequently disinterested in the realities of the world of work and career opportunities seeing it a distraction from scholarly activities (read their research and not teaching students!), which is fair enough for them as they already have a career in academia, but it is absolutely not acceptable for them to block the communication of potentially useful information from reaching students! This fits into the wider context of the issue of research/teaching. All too often teaching (particularly undergraduate students of arts/humanities degrees) is perceived as a distraction (read waste of time) by academics who see the main thrust of their role as being research based. In fact, if they weren’t being supported to do their research and write (read sell) the publications/articles/books they produce as a result of the funding they receive from (mostly) undergraduate students (who assume they are paying for teaching), they wouldn’t even be teaching classes. Too often academics view students with contempt and the realities of the world of work as irrelevant. It goes without saying that this is a major hinderance to the development of careers advice in the UK!
@Christopher
I think it’s fairer to say that the ability of careers services to keep up to date with the seismic changes in the job market is patchy. There are some fantastic examples of careers services that are innovative and forward thinking and there are some that are less so. I’m not sure where you worked and when you worked there – and it’s probably not fair to name names.
As far as more specialised careers advisers are concerned, they exist already. Many institutions have careers advisers with dedicated departmental case-loads. But it doesn’t always work as well as you might think.
It’s often fine for more vocational subjects such as Engineering or Law, but what specialist knowledge would be useful for a History or English graduate when the range of careers that such graduates end up in can be so broad?
And what if you have Engineering students who don’t want to be engineers? Linguists who don’t want to be translators or teachers? What if your students want to do something that is not covered by the degree programmes offered by your university? Do they just miss out?
It’s dangerous to assume that, if you have detailed information you can easily match someone to an ‘ideal’ career in their twenties that will be appropriate for the rest of there lives. Here I agree completely with Tanya. Real careers are grown not minted. They evolve over time and they change, just as we change through acquiring more experiences.
If we, as careers professionals, just focus on trying to match people to something that appears suitable at one point in time, we are short changing them. What we need to be doing (and some of us are trying) is to equip students with the skills, tactics and ways of thinking and decision making that will enable them to thrive in a constantly changing job market. Giving people the ability and confidence to sculpt their own careers, I believe, is much more valuable than just giving someone information that, no matter how up-to-date, will be useless in a year’s time. (Teach someone to fish, rather than giving them a fish, and all that.)
Good careers guidance isn’t about telling people what they should do right now. It’s about helping people to understand how they can work things out for themselves more effectively so that they can help themselves in the future.
That’s the direction that a lot of careers services are trying to take by introducing career management modules and skills training. We should be celebrating and encouraging these efforts rather than bashing services based on inaccurate and out of date criticisms.
@Tanya Re:marketing postgrad courses.
OK – don’t explode on this one – I overstated the case for dramatic effect.
We are not being ‘forced’ to recommend inappropriate post-grad courses. As professionals, we do insist on and exercise our freedom to give independent and unbiased advice and guidance to our students. But we don’t always get to see the students before they have been convinced by the marketing that a post-grad course is the way forward.
Let’s be completely honest. The biggest factor in students choosing inappropriate post-grad courses is not university marketing, it’s not the unavailability of accurate and up-to-date information. The biggest contributing factor is the desire of many students to try to find something that seems like an easy answer to the difficult decisions they are facing.
Part of my job is to say to people ‘Stop looking for an easy solution – there isn’t one. You have to put the difficult work in if you want to get success out of the other end. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible – and I can show you ways to make it a bit less painful and uncertain.’
Anyway, enough of the ranting for today.
Just a reminder – I’m not ‘prickly’, I’m ‘passionate’ about the subject.
We’re totally on the same page here David – i knew there was a reason we had such fun working on Dude? together! : )
I’m less keen on this idea though – largely because I know it just doesn’t work! Before Graduate Fog, I tried to push for change (or at least some honest discussion of this issue!) for over TWO YEARS by being very polite about the fact that I thought a lot of people were doing a bad job of careers advice. It got me absolutely nowhere – and improved nothing for graduates.
Okay, so at times Graduate Fog can be a bit aggro – and perhaps even juvenile! But I can feel that I’ve achieved more in three MONTHS since we launched than in the two YEARS prior to that. The reality is that we need to shout loudly and clearly about this stuff, or we simply won’t be heard and nothing will ever change.
Just one more thing… Although I’m pleased that the careers community wants to join in the debate on Graduate Fog and you’re very welcome here, please do remember that this website was never designed with you in mind. First and foremost, it is for jobseeking graduates – and this isn’t about to change! x
I’m passionate too!
And re that tweet, i actually wasnt’ making it up – your first comment sounded pretty ‘prickly’ to me – and since you said some kind of mean things : ( I took that to assume you were pretty angry! Especially as I know you’re usually such a nice chap : )
I’m glad we’ve hugged it out though ; ) and you’ve reminded me today that we do agree on a lot of things. I know you’re not crazy about my way of going about things – and i understand that. But i think that Graduate Fog – that’s me and the users – have a vital role to play in this debate. For too long the graduates have had no real ‘voice’ in this discussion and I’m determined for that to change!
I’m wondering if it may be you who is a bit out of touch with what’s happening in careers services. I read your article on ‘how to choose your career’ and I don’t know any adviser who is trying to get a student / graduate to choose a career for the next 40 years. It’s about helping them to choose the best next step for them – whatever that may be – and equipping them with the skills to manage their ‘career’ (which, just in case you are in any doubt, may include more than a traditional job) throughout their life.
I also agree with David that maybe your comments should be founded on more solid evidence. By it’s very nature your website is going to attract mainly those graduates who for whatever reason have either had poor advice or possibly poor outcomes (which is not necessarily the same thing). I’m not suggesting for a minute that this doesn’t matter but you’re missing all those graduates who have been successfully helped into satisfying jobs or further study by careers services. And no, they didn’t all know what they wanted to do when they came for career advice!
So yes, we should always be looking for ways to innovate, to reach and interest more students, but I don’t think the argument should be so one-sided. Maybe by publicising some of the good things that are happening at university careers services around the country you could be helping more graduates into satisfying futures rather than encouraging them to rely solely on ‘grauate fog’ and your book – they can use it all!
First of all, it seems quite grandiose to claim to be “the only graduate careers advice website that’s actually helpful.” Second, while I don’t know the UK data, here in the USA, university career services are not a joke. NACE just released a study showing a strong link between senior students’ use of career services and their ability to land jobs. Source: http://www.naceweb.org/so/2010/0623/job_offers/
Dear Tanya,
I have read the book ‘Dude…’, have it currently on loan from my local library and followed the ‘digital’ conversation above. I am disappointed with the etiquette of offering constructive criticism, disagreeing and professionalism of handling differences of opinion in the voice of your responses above.
@Sharon
Thanks for your comment. I’m not quite sure what to say though! Let me explain that I’m a blogger who blogs about all issues that affect graduates, to prompt discussion about problems that are at present being swept under the carpet. Poor careers advice from universities is one of these issues. I am not an in-depth education reporter – or independent auditor of university careers services. Nor am i here to give free PR to the handful of careers services who ARE doing their jobs properly (a group it sounds like you are a member of!). Because I don’t have time to research everything myself at ground-level, I rely on Graduate Fog’s users to inform me about what’s going on out there – and they generally do a pretty good job of this. But I take your point that Graduate Fog’s users may be inherently less likely to feel positively about their careers service than those who don’t use this site. Again, i’m not quite sure what you expect me to do about this?
I have no doubt that you, like David, are doing your best to communicate the message that it is no longer necessary to choose your life-long career aged 22. However, I am SURE that this message is NOT getting through on a national scale – and it is vital that we start talking about this, among other problems. Every graduate I encounter is fixated on the question of what they should do as their career – which often leaves them unable to make good choices about what to do in the short-term. They are also under the impression that getting on a graduate scheme is the ‘holy grail’ – and if they fail to do this (which is likely, in this competitive market), they seem to feel that all is lost, which you and i know it isn’t!
So my question is: if universities are doing such a fantastic job of providing useful careers advice, why are there so many thousands of graduates who are either running round like headless chickens (firing off applications to jobs they don’t want or understand), signing up to postgraduate courses they have no idea of the value of – or sitting slumped on their parents’ sofa, losing all confidence and motivation as they try and work out what their ‘dream’ is? If you don’t believe me, visit the Guardian forum, the Prospects forum and the Milkround forum. All the people your colleagues haven’t managed to reach are on there, desperate for some kind of clarity to help them with their next step. Frankly, it’s a complete disaster – and very upsetting to read.
Why aren’t these grads going to their university careers services? And if they have been, why didn’t they find it helpful? We can’t keep ignoring these people just because it’s a bit upsetting for careers advisers to be asked awkward questions. Careers advisers may see these people ‘the ones that got away’ – but they exist in HUGE numbers, so this is a major problem!
@Janet
Wow, i had no idea anybody was reading this blog in the States – thanks for following! However, I’m afraid you have missed the British sense of humour – the claim to be ‘the only graduate careers advice website that’s actually helpful’ is tongue-in-cheek – and designed to let new visitors to Graduate Fog know to expect something quite different from this site than the kind of content they’ll find on regular careers websites!
I’m afraid I’m not well-informed about university careers advice in the USA, but i do know it’s a problem in the UK.
@Jonathan
Thanks for your comment – and for reading my book. However, i’m not quite clear what your point is. Are you offended by my tone? Graduate Fog is a forum for strong and passionate debate about an emotive subject – so some strong words from all sides are to be expected. But I personally wouldn’t want it any other way! : )
@David
I am aware that careers advisers working in Universities in the UK are supposed to have the sort of targeted knowledge I mentioned- In the universities I am familiar with (I have attended three and worked in two) the advisers did indeed have “dedicated departmental case-loads”. However, as you say, although this worked well for most students of vocational degree subjects, such as engineering, nursing, medicine etc it was and is a complete disaster for the (many) students graduating with less vocational degrees who are unsure as to their first steps after completing their studies. In the careers department I worked in (I agree it is not fair to name the university and this is not what’s important but I will say that it belongs to the “prestigious” Russell Group and is therefore one of the 20 most important research-led universities in the country) there were dedicated careers advisers for each vocational subject area and ONE working for students studying in the following departments: Institute of Theology, Schools of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts, Music and Sonic Arts, Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, History and Anthropology… Now, I would like to hear how exactly one person is supposed to have, to quote myself “specific, targeted and up-to-date knowledge, contacts and know-how with regards to the job market” for students on degrees in ALL of these departments….?! There is a vast range of career options which are open to students who study non-vocational degree subjects and in my opinion they are being failed by the university career services they are paying to support. It is unfair to expect one person to be able to assist students from such a wide range of degrees and it is, from my own experience and that of others I know who graduated with non-vocational degrees, all but a waste of time to see an adviser who clearly knows very little about the specifics of the industries/career-paths open to graduates of humanities/arts degrees. The advice doled out is generic, inefficient and useless to all- prospects.ac.uk and applying to the graduate schemes offered by the “Times Top 100” and the likes were listed as some of the main “action points” in far too many consultations with said adviser. I also completely agree that:
“It’s dangerous to assume that, if you have detailed information you can easily match someone to an ‘ideal’ career in their twenties that will be appropriate for the rest of their lives. Here I agree completely with Tanya. Real careers are grown not minted. They evolve over time and they change, just as we change through acquiring more experiences.”
but I also feel that careers advice departments are there to expose all the opportunities and possibilities which exist, particularly to non-vocational graduates, who may have very little idea as to the industries open to them. Careers advice should help graduates to initially find their way and get their bearings in the confusing world of work, not to get them a job they will keep for life. I agree that the situation is improving but I feel that exposing the dissatisfaction felt by many students and graduates (read “paying customers”) with regards to the careers advice provided to them through their university is extremely important. Only by discussing the shortcomings of the current situation can we remedy and improve it in the future.
Hello – Been following this with interest – but perhaps the issues are even more fundamental? Many – but certainly not all – will crave security and come looking for it often encouraged by parents or their peers. Careers Advisers may be the first people to start the discussions around why this is being sought, how relevant it is in today’s world and so on. We celebrate inviduals’ differences and choices.
Thanks Helen – can you expand a little bit on this? Do you think careers advisers should explain to students that there are very few guarantees / ‘safe options’ in today’s world of work?
Just that there are degrees of security – and it’s checking out with each client what they mean by security, what they can handle, how much of a priority it is etc etc.
@Helen
I agree that every student / graduate has different priorities when thinking about their future. However, I think a lot of those grads who may seem risk-averse may actually not be, deep down. I find that many of them simply haven’t made that shift from a passive, er, passenger (as they are encouraged to be, throughout their education) and into being more of an active participant in determining what happens next once they leave university.
In my opinion, this is a vital change of mindset that ALL students / grads should be encouraged to make before they start making serious decisions / applying to jobs that may be totally wrong for them. If, once they’ve made that change (and understand that the world of work is not like education), they STILL crave security etc, then fine. But once many realise they have other options, they choose to go and explore SMEs and other things they’d never previously considered – which often ‘fit’ them much better.
I see a lot of graduates who come to me distraught that they haven’t been able to secure a place on a graduate scheme – but when we discuss it a bit more it’s clear to me that this is only really because they’re panicking that everything else looks like a huge risk by comparison! Although grads know it’s tough to get on these schemes, they seem to have in their heads that it’s the ‘easy option’ once you’re on one. I think a large part of the reason is that everything is ‘sorted’ for them – in the same way that school and university is. That really is the main appeal. This makes me sad because I just feel it’s a very negative reason to start your career somewhere.
Unfortunately, I don’t get the impression anybody has really sat down with them and asked WHY they have their heart set on this course of action. Of course, i’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that many of the university careers services receive huge sums from the big graduate employers for taking stands at (and sponsoring) their careers fairs etc… ; )
Indeed. Don’t disagree. Challenging folk re their understanding in relation to grad schemes/other options is pretty much bread and butter, I’d say!
The vast majority of careers services don’t charge for fairs or charge comparatively little. The ‘huge sums’ go to ad agencies and so on. Where university careers services actually manage to gain some sponsorship it goes to support their services as a whole.
(And, yes, The Careers Group charges employers a commercially competitive rate for the recruitment fairs we run with the Guardian but our individual college services either charge token amounts or not at all, depending on the event.)
@Michael –
Thanks for clarifying this. So there’s no conflict of interest at all for careers advisers? I would have thought that the KPMGs of this world wouldn’t be too thrilled if they heard that careers advisers at the universities where they advertised / sponsored events were starting to talk potential applicants out of applying to them?
Actually, Tanya, the KPMGs of this world would be thrilled to receive fewer applications from students who are completely inappropriate. They want to attract candidates who have thought very carefully about their suitability and commitment to both the role and the organisation – that’s why they ask so many questions about it on forms and at interviews. That’s true of all sensible employers.
Having, hopefully, prevented you from going off on another misguided search for controversy, I’d like to agree with you wholeheartedly again. (I know, what’s wrong with me?)
I think it should be a vital responsibility of careers services to try to switch students from being ‘passive passengers’ to ‘proactive participants’ (Notice how I corrected your failure to follow through on the aliteration thingy. Don’t say it out loud, you’ll get spit on your computer screen.)
And I disagree (partially) with Christopher. I agree that we’re under-resourced. However, expecting careers advisers to have ‘specific, targeted and up-to-date knowledge, contacts and know-how with regards to the job market for students on degrees in [non-vocational] departments’ is frankly unrealistic. That is precisely because there is ‘a vast range of career options which are open to students who study non-vocational degree subjects’. And because it’s not just a matter of having that knowledge and those contacts, it’s a matter of acquiring them, updating them and maintaining them in a constantly changing world. That’s a full time job in itself – we wouldn’t have time to actually see any students as well.
More importantly though, if we are doing all the acquring, updating and maintaining, then we are encouraging students to continue to be passive passengers relying on us to do all the work for them. If that’s what they want and they are prepared to pay for it – fine. But what happens when they’re out in the real world and have to face changes. Who will they get to do all the hard work for them then? Well, I suppose they could pay a careers consultant a lot of money. (And I see plenty of career changers myself at C2 who still haven’t learnt how to do things for themselves.)
It’s when we try to collude with students’ desire to remain passive passengers and believe that the answer is information-giving rather than challenging mindsets and teaching skills, that we set ourselves up to fail.
Wouldn’t it be better if students had learnt how to acquire the knowledge and the contacts, to generate the options for themselves? Wouldn’t it be better if someone had stood up earlier and said ‘You know what, there isn’t a quick fix or an easy answer. We can’t do it for you or wave a magic wand to make the difficulty go away. However, we can show you how to do it for yourself. We can teach you the know how. We can help you to tackle these difficult tasks that you are going to face throughout your life.’
That’s what I try to do in my careers work. The students don’t like it, at first. They want the easy answer and the quick fix, but I try to find ways of teaching them methods and approaches that make the difficult tasks a bit more manageable. In the process, I hope that I am turning them into ‘proactive participants’ in their own lives. That’s what I try to focus on; not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’. And I don’t believe that I’m the only one out there who’s doing that.
I’ve just spent my lunchtime discussing with my boss a project for integrating the development of academic and employability skills across departmental teaching, extra-curricular activities and work experience. I know that there are lots of other projects like that out there, making connections, challenging mindsets, developing life-skills.
That’s why, Tanya, that I’ve been so passionate to challenge your ill-informed dissing of HE careers services. You can’t fix a problem just by shouting at it.
I didn’t say these candidates were necessarily inappropriate for KPMG – i think KPMG won’t be much fun for them! And I know a huge number of people who manage to get on these schemes without caring at all about the job or the company, so i suggest these employers don’t get it right every time.
Congratulations – you’ve successfully irritated me here David. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn’t meant to come across as quite so patronising? Because believe me, as on outsider i can tell you that there is PLENTY of controversy in the sleepy world of careers advice – i don’t need to ‘search’ for it at all! There are a lot of parties with a lot to lose if the status quo is shaken up. Perhaps you’ve just been working in this industry for so long that you don’t even notice the controversy any more? You clearly didn’t realise that what you said about uni marketing depts putting pressure on you to sell postgrad courses to students was shocking – or you wouldn’t have said it…
I agree with your approach David…
But i don’t agree with this! If so many careers advisers are getting this so right, who are all the lost souls on the jobs forums??
So you admit that there’s a problem?
; )
And by the way, i’m not trying to ‘fix’ the problem really, i think that’s your job. Which you are paid to do. I’m just drawing attention to the huge failings in the current system. Which is why i’m going go keep shouting!
Have a nice weekend xx
: )
The problem with careers advice is that it is not suited to young graduates and young students. I think careers advice is designed for 40 year old graduates. There are inmprovements in the last few years but it is not enough because careers advisors should know about neuro – diversity (dyspraxia, dyslexia, AD(H)D, autism, asperger syndrome, Tourettes) as an example. I think a person has to come from an excusive background to withstand or understand careers advice. A graduate of Pakistani descent who is the first in the family to go university, lives in Oldham and has no contacts is going to have much more difficulties than other graduates.
I have been following this debate with interest and feel it’s time that I step in and defend my profession against what I think is quite unjustified and ill informed criticism. Firstly your suggestion seems to be based on hearsay; a few comments from a small number of unhappy students/graduates and does not appear to be based on any kind of solid research (you said you don’t have time to do this research). As David has pointed out it is relatively easy to set up a site that invites comments from unhappy customers and what concerns me is that students who come across your site may be put off using the careers service altogether without even giving us the chance to show them the wide range of support that we can offer them.
Interestingly you seem to think that careers advisers are trying to match students to jobs that will keep them happy for the next 40 years, however nothing could be further from the truth and where we do get complaints or students venting their frustrations, it’s often because we don’t do this! I can often see students becoming visibly frustrated when I don’t give them this quick fix solution.
It’s also interesting that you posted this in response to the Scotsman article, the main focus of which was actually school careers advice and not university careers advice, which is a different ball game altogether. I absolutely agree that there are issues in some areas in young people getting access to good quality impartial careers advice in schools, however, I believe these issues related to the quantity of advice and guidance available, rather than the quality of advice when it is present (and yes, I do feel I am suitably able to comment on this given that I worked as a school careers adviser for a number of years before moving to the HE sector last year!).
Careers advice and guidance in schools, particularly in England has been given such a low priority in recent years that many young people are unable to access it at all and end up seeking advice from other perhaps less well informed and qualified individuals; perhaps a teacher who has been given careers as part of their remit without them actually needing to possess any kind of specialist knowledge or expertise. To back this up with an example, the last school where I worked had a careers co-ordinator who knew virtually nothing about the subject. At a year 11 careers event he came to me and said “Rebecca, can you tell me what an apprenticeship is? I have parents asking me about this but I have no idea”. Because so many young people are unable to access support from suitably qualified guidance professionals they end up seeking advice from people such as this teacher. Young people however will not make the distinction between someone who isn’t suitably qualified/knowledgeable but happens t6 have “careers” in their job title and someone who is. The result becomes “my careers adviser said…” when in actual fact it may have not been a careers adviser at all! I hope that makes my point.
Last year I moved to the HE sector because I thought there would be much more scope for creativity and innovation in delivery of my work. I have not been disappointed. At my service we are constantly looking to improve what we do and we consult the students in this process. We are technology savvy and use a range of ways to reach students. On a personal level I am also in the process of completing an MA in Guidance Studies and as part of this I have been working with colleagues to look at how we can incorporate new and emerging theories of career development and guidance into our practice. However looking at the previous comments on this page, like the deluded scientist who cannot see that their theory is no longer valid, you seem intent on dismissing the examples of good practice posted here as exceptions to the rule. I really don’t think that you can seriously do this when you have not even bothered to look at careers provision in any sensible or valid way.
One final point, in your not-so-charmingly entitled “message to cheapskate careers advisers” you make mention of our fat pay cheque at the end of the month. Not so. Very many of us are actually on quite modest salaries, often considerably lower than those of teachers and lecturers, despite the fact that the profession requires the same level of training and qualifications. Let me illustrate my point with an example; a careers adviser and friend of mine has recently had her job re-named from “Careers Adviser” to “Careers Officer” so that her institution can pay her less for doing the same job. No fat pay cheque there then.
@Rebecca
Thanks for your comment – you’re more than welcome to defend your profession of course! However, I’m going to have to challenge you on a few things you’ve said…
Oh really?! Setting up this site has taken an awful lot of work actually – and I’ve done it all completely unpaid. And I only did it because i know these ‘unhappy customers’ exist in huge numbers. That’s why I wrote the book too. Why would I do that if I thought there were only a handful of people that Dude? and Graduate Fog would chime with? I have sold 3,000 copies of the book and this site has had more than 7,000 visits since its launch three months ago. If this problem exists on such a teeny tiny scale, who are all these people buying my book and visiting this website?
If this is top of your list of things to worry about, I’m even more concerned than I was before. Sorry, but I’m not going to keep quiet about my views just because it might make your job a little bit harder. Perhaps it will make you step up to the plate? And, if you’re worried that my website will make it difficult for you to sell your service properly, I’m afraid I have to ask the question – is it possible that your service isn’t very good?
Again, it ASTOUNDS me that you think you have so few ‘unhappy customers’. Honestly Rebecca, I’m just in shock… how can i convince you that this problem exists on a MASSIVE scale?? Since writing my book, i have had HUNDREDS of emails from graduates who found their university careers centre unhelpful or irrelevant. I ran the Guardian’s graduate forum for 10 months last year and answered HUNDREDS more queries from graduates who were making terrible decisions about their careers because they were clearly not getting good advice.
You and your colleagues claim you are constantly innovating – but from where I’m sitting the situation at the coal face hasn’t improved in the slightest. If you visit any online graduate forum yesterday, today or tomorrow you will find HUNDREDS more of these people all scrabbling around trying to make decisions when they don’t know what on earth they’re doing. It’s a mess. WHY??
Likewise, if you go to any graduate recruitment fair and actually TALK to the grads wandering around and ask them what they’re looking for and why, you will realise how horrifically ill-informed most of them are. Believe me, they are there in HUGE NUMBERS. I don’t have any firm stats, but recent TotalJobs survey found that 60% of graduates who had engaged with their careers service said it had failed them. No doubt you’ll blame the students for having unrealistic expectations about how you could help them – that’s another line I hear a lot… but if they have these expectations, WHY do they have them and WHY can’t you do better at setting them straight without them feeling that you’ve ‘failed’ them? The fact that you seem to have such little understanding of the scale of this problem chills me to my very core – and illustrates exactly the point I’m trying to make.
This is also something I hear a lot. I don’t know about your particular institution but often when I probe further it turns out this just means that the careers service has simply set up a Facebook page and bough a few new computers. It takes more than this to make a uni careers service ‘modern’. If the whole ethos is out-of-step with today’s reality, a few minor ‘nods’ towards the fact that the Internet now exists aren’t anywhere near enough.
I don’t mean to be rude – and of course this is only my ‘ill-informed’ opinion – but I’m afraid I have limited patience for ‘theories of career development and guidance’ when 675,000 students are just about to hit a seriously depressed jobs market and nobody is giving them practical, useful advice that they can use NOW.
They don’t want theories, they want to know how they can get a job.
Instead, because you are not connecting with them (for whatever reason) they are about to start making all manner of terrible decisions about their futures (signing up to random postgrad courses for no reason other than to avoid the recession etc). While you are studying theories of career development, hundreds of thousands of graduates are facing unemployment. I know the recession isn’t your fault (!) but don’t you think you’ve got your priorities a little mixed up if this is what you’re spending your time doing?
I’m afraid I seriously can and I seriously will. My opinion is that university careers advice is not working. Sorry.
Ok, I take your point about paycheques for junior careers staff, but remember my comment was coming from the point of view of someone earning zero right now : ( so frankly ANY paycheque looks fat to me! ; ) Also, I don’t believe that the more senior advisers are earning less than £30,000. Are they? For this money, what real value are they bringing to the students and graduates who most need their help?
I’m sorry if you feel my reply to your comment is tough on you, but as you can see I really do believe that this current situation isn’t working – and there is no point in me being polite about this when the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of young people is at stake. If I were any softer on you, I would be failing Graduate Fog’s users.
@David
I agree wholeheartedly that it is essential that careers advisers assist young people in becoming more, pro-active and independent in their search for career information and ultimately in finding a job. I honestly couldn’t agree more. This is a very serious issue in Great Britain- throughout our education system we are spoon-fed, taken by the hand and encouraged to be passive in our own decision making. However my point is that, if a careers adviser, funded by the university I am attending, who is professionally responsible for providing guidance SPECIFICALLY to students on my degree programme and from my school is completely and utterly failing in giving me anything other than generic information that I could quite easily find online myself, then we have a serious problem and questions need to be asked. And my belief that this is occurring on a massive scale (at least within the humanities/arts/non-vocational degree subjects) is based on fact; as I have already mentioned, I had access to many hundreds of feedback comments from students who had met with careers advisers and were let down by the advice provided. As I said before, I acknowledge that things are evolving and improving in the world of careers advice (as they should be!) but the pace at which this is occurring is much, much too slow and while these changes are happening, a whole generation of young, educated, intelligent and capable people are losing out, struggling to find work and are left feeling useless, disillusioned and depressed. University level careers advice is not, of course, the only problem but, the more people enter higher education, the more we need to think about why they are doing so (in most cases to secure a job at a higher level than they would be able to without a degree) and whether they are getting what they deserve at the end of it, after putting in a tremendous amount of time, money and effort.
@Rebecca
I absolutely agree with you that careers guidance (both in schools and higher education) has not been taken seriously enough in recent years. The “careers adviser” in my school was not in any way qualified to dispense careers advice and it was quite clearly decided bestow this title upon him done in order that the school have a “careers adviser” at all. However, the issue with higher education is different. The vast majority of universities have a dedicated careers department with staff who are specifically trained in the area. Certainly, they may be underfunded and overstretched, but at the end of the day, they are being paid to fulfill a role that, in many cases, they are simply not fulfilling adequately. Again, I remind you hat I am speaking from personal experience and regarding non-vocational degree subjects. Of course it is essential and important that professionals working in this field constantly update and improve on their knowledge however, in my role in a university careers department, I also had access to lists of courses,seminars and conferences which careers advisers had been paid to attend as part of their continuing professional education. And I was greatly angered that whilst a careers adviser responsible for providing advice and assistance to students on non-vocational programmes is being paid a salary to fulfill this role, and being funded to study courses on the theory of career guidance and other non-practical, theoretical subjects they simply could provide me (and many, many others who spoke to them, both with and without specific careers/industries in mind) with suitable, useful, practical and up-to-date information on the opportunities available. I don’t believe at all that your role as a careers adviser is to set people up for life with one job. Nor do I believe that it is to push the few graduate schemes which may (or may not, in the vast majority of cases) be of interest of (or open to) “graduates of any discipline”. My point is that the advice provided at present is chronically insufficient. This is, of course, not the case in every university and with each adviser but as a whole I believe that the careers advice sector is failing students and graduates. I should also add that I am not a disgruntled unemployed graduate (not that it would render my viewpoint any less valid if I was) but rather a successful small business owner, who graduated from an undergraduate degree two years ago and was extremely disillusioned and disappointed by the advice provided to me (as a student in the three different universities I attended) and the advice I saw being provided to other students (as a staff member in two universities).
All I seemed to find in terms of career advice was a vague list of the jobs graduates could eventually end up in depending on their degree. There was rarely any detail on how they went from being new gradutes to being in a high flying graduate job, how long it took, what other steps they needed to take, which makes this kind of advice pretty useless.
What would have been more helpful would have been an up to date list of the type of jobs that an inexperienced graduate has a realistic chance of getting into or up to date advice on how to get the necessary experience. There is no point of having a vague dream career and no idea of where to start. I never asked anyone to plan my career for me but some advice on where to start would have really helped.
@Catherine – thanks for your comment.
Unfortunately your experience is all too common – that’s exactly why I’m pressing on with this campaign, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes the ‘established’ careers community!
When I attended universities, there was a lot of emphasis on graduate training programmes. I think careers adive is directed towards people getting into senior management. Careers advice was ambiguous. There seems to be one career path for everyone regardless of occupation, background, persobality, location, abilities , experinces, etc.
Excellent advice there, everyone should be focusing more on their career when the recession puts such strains on the labour market. Start with the bottom up I say, you can’t command respect from others until you have respect from yourself, that sort of motto. Do you know your cv well? career development is all about retrospective learning and self awareness.
http://www.tobiasbishop.blogspot.com for my upcoming career blog.
Surely we have to grow up and take initiative ourselves at some point?
Can we seriously rely on Universities to spoon feed us tailored advice for everything in life?
Maybe they should help us find partners too? I feel let down that university hasn’t told me how many children to have or what sort of woman is right for me.
Uni didn’t even help me find the correct car, or find me a house- swine!
Tanya – you’re incessant use of ‘smileys’ and ‘kisses’ comes across as extremely unprofessional. I have yet to experience ‘journalism’ quite like yours before, thank goodness!!
@Siobhan, thanks for your feedback – and of course you are entitled to your opinion. But Graduate Fog is my website and I’ll express myself however I like thanks! : ) And since I’m not being paid, I wasn’t aware I had to be ‘professional’? xxx
Hello I am now nearly 35 but was a new graduate myself many moons ago. I got zero help looking for a job.
I am now starting a business and contacted the careers service at Manchester-now I am initially offering marketing work on a commission basis with the view to a full time salary as the business grows and can afford it.
Manchester University refused to assist and said I was exploiting graduates. From my viewpoint, as I said to the obnoxious jobsworth, is yes I know it’s not a graduate’s dream job but it would give them real world experience that after 1 or 2 years they can then take to their dream employer-didn’t want to know.
Surely what I was offering was better than your parents paying for you to be used by a multinational to stuff envelopes and then be thrown back on the scrap heap-because that’s the reality of most internships. What I was offering was genuine. But you see its all a charade my friends… I AM SURE YOU HaVE HEArD ALL ABOUT THE BANKERS WELL IF You believe universities and public sector institutions are any different -think again they are very often even worse.
Uh oh, second Michael! :O
More to the point, graduates careers service was a joke. I get more help from strangers enquiring (having passionately done religious studies) would I ‘like to be a vicar?’ No? Considered teaching?’
So really I get no help, but you get the point.
@rebecca
‘a small number of unhappy students/graduates’
Are you this deluded? However, I think Tanya’s got you on this point and everything else wrong with your essay. C-
Furthermore
@Maximilian
It’s called careers advice for a reason, we’re not asking for spoon feeding, just advice. We don’t (or shouldn’t) expect to be told what to do, but rather equipped with tools and a mindset to navigate an otherwise treacherous and mine invested battlefield.
lol the world is full of people who give advice. There is an old saying – those that can do those that can’t teach. Whilst its unwise to suggets sucha thing whilst a student – its very very very true.
The problem with the UK is there are so many people doing bull jobs -doing naff all and getting remunerated very well. Whilst those with genuine ability get shat on. Go to a job interview and be seen as good and you wont get it. being “part of the team” is put ahead of everything-it really is no wonder the UK is in the mess it’s in.
being part of the team usually mean being a binge drinking x factor watching idiot.
@Michael
Whilst I agree ‘fitting in with the team’ is probably more essential than we realise; careful with your stereotypes! I watch X factor and binge drink and I’m still awesome 😀
Yawn – sorry but your being naive.
This fitting in with the team is pure HR bullshit- have you ever noticed how job applications never get a response or if you get an interview and ask for feedback 9 times out of ten you’ll get none or the standard email.
as for everyone who watches the x factor well that’s part of the bigger problem where that’s all 90% of the population aspire to. As for binge drinking no it doe not make a person “awseome” its why eastern europe and spain hate the British because its not enough people have to get drunk fight and smash everywhere up in this country they do it in other people’s as well.
Retruning to being one of the team what they mean is dont worck teh boat,agree with everything even if its clearly a bad decision, if everyone else is a tit you have to be a tit-don’t appear to be too good at interviews either -very often the person interviewing -this applies more for when you have a few years experience will be less relevantly experienced or qualified but they kissed the correct backside. The number of brilliant CVS that don’t get an interview for that reason would shock you.
As for stereotypes they are usually true.
@Michael
I’ll (try to) ignore how you’ve misunderstood my comment and made random statistics:
‘90% of the population aspire to [be an Xfactor contestant?]’
However the real issue Michael is whether applying for jobs really is an audition in itself. I agree that businesses don’t want someone who will ‘worck teh boat’ but we know that every company has its own culture and values anyway.
I don’t believe that ‘backside kissing’ is particularly effective either; rather a well thought out and precise application. This must be the true art of job seeking.