Challenging assumptions in careers service delivery

Careers Services across UK Higher Education deliver diverse and impactful provision that touches on so many aspects of the student experience but to meet the evolving needs of students and adapt to challenging economic realities, it is crucial to regularly evaluate your offer.

With resources constrained in the current funding landscape, it is likely that many careers services will have to stop or draw back on some elements of provision in order to devote additional focus onto areas where they see evidence of higher potential impact.

This challenging context was expertly summarised by an experienced and highly respected Careers Service Director:

'In the current climate we are witnessing a spike in demand for our services which is driven by policy and regulatory threat – demand from our diverse students remains constant, it is the academic driven demand for our services which is seeing  us navigate unchartered territories and placing us firmly in the space of curriculum development (which is where we want to be!).

Within this environment, it is therefore an unavoidable consequence that we have to become better at prioritising our services, which requires us to critically review what we deliver, assess their impact, scale and reach, and be bold enough to step away from some activities which may be seen as a staple service across our institutions and our teams. The balance is learning how to say no in the right way, and how we maintain support and visibility where we may have to focus our services elsewhere, whilst maintaining impact across the board.'

In careers services, certain initiatives and practice can become entrenched over time without undergoing critical scrutiny. For instance, traditional self-directed skills assessments or placement modules that worked in the past may now be less effective or feasible to resource. By questioning the continued relevance of such initiatives, you can redirect resources to initiatives that better address the current demands of the job market and needs of students, such as efficient and ethical use of AI or delivering industry-specific experiential learning at scale.

You must first seek to avoid the sunk cost fallacy when evaluating your careers service provision. The sunk cost fallacy is a cognitive bias and human behaviour pattern in which people continue with an endeavour as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort) even when abandoning it would be more beneficial.

It can be hard to walk away from an initiative or element of careers service provision if a lot of work, effort and resource has already been invested; you need to be able to draw a line, analyse available data and objectively consider if the current or projected impact justifies further continued investment, or whether this could be invested in potentially more impactful initiatives.

The careers sector is blessed with passionate professionals who are very committed to their work, it is worth recognising decisions can also often be influenced by emotional investments. The more emotionally invested you and your team are, the harder it becomes to objectively evaluate initiatives and potentially abandon some of them to create capacity to deliver the new innovative services that could future-proof your provision.

One simple but powerful question that can drive this evaluation is:

What would happen if we stopped doing that?

Crucially, the question is task focussed and seeks to focus on the impact of existing activities rather than the emotional investments and working preferences of the colleagues involved in delivery. This question can challenge assumptions, encourages innovation, and fosters a more targeted and efficient approach to delivery.

Another interesting approach is to consider how you can reframe the problems you face as a service. A famous example from beyond the sector is that of the tricky and expensive problem of upgrading lifts in buildings to make them quicker and reduce waiting times in order to respond to complaints from tenants.

• The original problem asks: How can we reduce the wait?
• Reframing that problem becomes: How can we make the wait feel shorter?

This opens up new efficient solutions; namely putting mirrors outside and inside lifts. This is painfully and annoyingly effective, because we tend to lose track of time when given something utterly captivating to look at—namely, our own face.

Playing on students’ vanity is unlikely to fully crack the employability conundrum so this specific example is perhaps not directly transferable to university careers services, but I believe the concept of seeking to reframe problems is.

A problem ripe for reframing, and that we need to be approaching from a multitude of angles, is that of student engagement. I would suggest that when we find ourselves wrestling with the unwieldy and thorny problem of how we can change students’ behaviour when it comes to engagement with the careers service offer, then we really should be going into reframing mode.

• How can we design our services to fit students’ lives?
• How can we package our content to be more like things they do currently engage with?
• How can we integrate with curriculum to the point that proactive engagement with our services becomes less important?
• How can we engage students as partners in reframing problems and developing solutions?

We might think we know why students behave the way they do. We might ask them in surveys, focus groups and feedback sessions but we are most likely to predominantly get views of the most engaged students, who typically aren’t the people careers services really need to hear from. This is where having peers working within careers services can be valuable – to test assumptions on an ongoing basis and bring the student voice into the process at the problem analysis stage before you even get to the point of developing potential solutions.

There has been a proliferation of careers influencers on platforms such as TikTok who often appear to have limited experience relating to either careers and employability delivery or recruitment but are capturing the attention of students and graduates online. Instinctively we can find ourselves frustrated as to why students are engaging with this content and not that developed by careers professionals or seasoned recruitment experts, but a better question to consider could be:

What is it they are doing to garner that engagement with students that we could potentially learn from?

It can be difficult to overcome the strong sense of cognitive dissonance that is at play when analysing content, or an overall style or approach, that conflicts with your professional experience. However, taking the time to understand some of the tools and techniques that are working then applying them, aligned with your superior knowledge set, could lead to innovative practice and positive outcomes.

To bring this to life, in an interview with the fantastic Gianina Harvey-Brewin for our Emerging Leaders programme, she shared a brilliant story about how she adapted her approach to engage students. She did some research with their Students’ Union and made the surprising discovery that many of her first year students were getting careers information from articles in Cosmopolitan! Rather than bemoaning this fact, she contacted Cosmopolitan and managed to secure an article sharing some useful job top tips, the article got shared widely by the Student Union and all of a sudden, she, and by association the career service, was more relevant and students were more interested in what they had to offer.

‘Part of growing your influence with students is going to where they are and making yourself relevant to them’ Gianina Harvey-Brewin, Associate Director, Employability & Apprenticeships at University of Greenwich

The power of questioning assumptions lies in its ability to stimulate innovation. By encouraging a mindset in your service that challenges the status quo, you can explore alternative approaches to engage students and deliver impact.

In our work, either as external facilitators of strategic discussions around the employability agenda or as critical friends externally evaluating specific elements of provision, it is impossible not to be struck by the passion of careers professionals to deliver outstanding support for students. To channel this passion to its full potential, what you stop doing is often just as important as what you start doing.

This may involve experimenting with new delivery models, investing in different technology solutions or adopting alternative strategies to better engage students, academics and employers. Often it will involve repositioning your careers team as consultants, empowering colleagues to deliver upon elements of the employability agenda, with the careers service not always retaining responsibility for all aspects of delivery.

It might also involve evidence-based decisions to stop doing some things, this might feel difficult in the moment, but could create the time, space and capacity to take your service in new and exciting directions.

I would be interested in your thoughts and reflections.