Adventures in Student Development

The Wilson Review

stujohnson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:37:55 +0000

If you’re part of a Careers Service and you still haven’t read Sir Tim Wilson’s Review of Business-University Collaboration, you should. Here’s a quick list of some of the relevant recommendations.

Reference	Substantive recommendation
Rec 3, para 4.5.1	Sandwich degrees should be encouraged through a new compact between students, universities, government and employers, reflecting the benefits to all parties from the enhanced employment outcomes arising from them
Rec 4, para 4.5.1	Ideally, every full‐time undergraduate student should have the opportunity to experience a structured, university‐approved undergraduate internship during their period of study
Rec 5, para 4.5.2	The government‐supported graduate internship programme should be continued
Rec 11, para 4.8	Universities should publish the job destinations of recent full‐time postgraduate taught students, by department as soon as possible
Rec 20, para 5.9.2	To inform prospective doctoral students of potential career opportunities, universities should publish the job destinations of recently completed doctoral students, where possible by department, at the earliest opportunity
Rec 21, para 5.9.3	All full‐time PhD students should have an opportunity to experience at least one 8 to 12 week internship during their period of study and should be encouraged to attend a short intensive enterprise skills programme alongside research students from other departments of the university.
Rec 24, para 6.4.1	Graduate recruiters using filtering mechanisms should undertake a systematic and frequent review of screening algorithms in the light of the qualities of the graduates that the company has recruited and the diversity objectives of the company
Rec 26, para 6.4.3	University careers services and their local enterprise partnership (LEP) should collaborate to establish a skills supply chain between universities and local business, integrating placements, internships and employment services

Reference	Reflective recommendation
Rec 3, para 3.5	Universities that do not regularly review the effectiveness of their enquiry management systems should undertake an audit to ensure efficient first‐level responsiveness; an ineffective relationship management system carries significant reputational risks
Rec 4, para 4.3.1	Universities should decide whether to introduce formal skills diagnostics for their students and, if they do so, whether they are discretionary or mandatory. Such practice should feature in promotional literature available to prospective students, covered at open day/applicant day/interviews and initiated early in the first year of the undergraduate programme of studies.
Rec 5, para 4.3.2	Universities should reflect on the opportunities that are provided for students to develop employability skills through the formal learning methodologies used within the university and ensure that students are able to articulate the skills that they have developed through their learning experiences. It is for universities to ensure that their staff have the appropriate skills to support students in this process
Rec 6, para 4.3.3	Universities should reflect on the strategies they use to ensure that students have the opportunity to develop enterprise skills both through the formal curriculum and through optional study or practice, and reflect on the integration of enterprise education in the professional development programmes for academic staff
Rec 12, para 4.9	In the context of encouraging more UK students to study or to take an internship/placement outside the UK, universities, together with the students’ unions, should reflect on mechanisms that promote international internships and placements amongst the student body
Rec 20, para 6.3	To provide students with information about career prospects, universities may wish to establish a four‐year career projection from a sample of their graduates as supplementary information for use in parallel to the KIS. To provide a common framework, universities may wish to ask UUK to commission preliminary design work in this field
Rec 21, para 6.4	Large companies represent only a fraction of the opportunities available for graduate employment, yet are disproportionately popular in terms of graduate application. Universities should reflect on how students’ perceptions of employment with small and medium‐sized companies could be improved
Rec 22, para 6.5	Given the changing nature of careers services in the sector, universities may wish to review the physical and organisational position of their careers service and the level of interaction it has with the students, employers and the academic community
Rec 23, para 6.5	Careers and employability support will become a recognised part of the ongoing student experience, rather than an aspect that only captures the attention of students in the final year of a degree study

Employability summit

stujohnson — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:38:22 +0000

We’re running an employability summit here at Leicester on 2 July for all staff with an interest in/responsibility for employability. I’ve just put the website together. It’s going to be great! If you’re a University of Leicester member of staff then book here.

Tagginganna at Lilly West

stujohnson — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:00:05 +0000

Here are the slides Mark and I will be using at the workshop at Lilly West (#lillywest12) and, thanks to Alex, by the time we get there they should even be finished! The guts of the workshop though will be two activities centred around 2 printed out texts to simulate the online environment before we introduce it. You can find out more on the dissemination part of the Google site that I’ve put together. Thanks to Zara, Marta, Carol and Zoe for test running this for us.

Lilly West

stujohnson — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:16:52 +0000

Next week Mark and I are going to the Lilly West conference in California to present our (and Alex’s) #tagginganna project. I’ve been blogging about it as we’ve been going along but I thought it would make it easier to showcase the project if I made a sepearate site. I’ve been tinkering with Google sites for a while (easy, free and getting better) so I thought I’d make a Google site for the project. I’ve previously used Google sites for making sites for the local cub and scout groups (I might put these up as templates on Google sites when I get the chance) but they were never used in the end, so it’s nice to have an opportunity to use it for real. The site isn’t finished yet but it should give you the general idea. Feedback and suggestions very welcome.

And while I’m here, things that were handy for making it:

a colour picker – I used this chrome Eye Dropper (free)
a photo editor – I used pixlr.com (free)
a drawing tool – Kathy did the tagginganna tag on Brushes for iPad (costs but Skitch would have done it for free)

Pomona here we come!

A few more careers tweeters

stujohnson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:14:22 +0000

Further to I’m looking for more careers tweeters, after attending the AGCAS Heads of Service Conference last week I’ve found a few more. Coming from a background in learning development and learning technology I’m increasingly finding that I need more careers people in my professional network (it could be just me but there seem to be far fewer careers people on twitter?). So I’m making lists. I have two:

Heads of Careers (HE)
Careers & employability

Who have I missed?

AGCAS Heads of Service conference 2012

stujohnson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:27:14 +0000

I spent the second half of last week at AGCAS‘s new heads of service training and then the AGCAS Heads of Service conference in Dublin. This is an annual event for heads of higher education careers services. Just like last year it was an enjoyable conference. It was good to meet people, some of whom I had met last year but most of whom were new to me. I found a few more heads of service on twitter this year, but most seem to use LinkedIn so I’ve connected with them on their instead.

The opening address from Kate Dodd was a useful starting point, in particular her challenge for careers services to develop universal provision, i.e. engaging all students not just the keen or desperate few (I’m exaggerating slightly there). Also her summary of what senior managers expect from their Careers Service, that the service will:

help enhance the institution’s reputation
make a positive impact on DLHE (she also made the point here that whilst we might be uncomfortable with the 6 month deadline it would be a time frame that students would think reasonable)
demonstrate how what they do is value for money

I attended a really useful workshop on ‘Is the virtual careers service inevitable?’ with Michael Clark and Marc Lintern (I’m hopping their slides will be available somewhere soon?). I also attended a less than useful workshop on ‘Is the career guidance interview a necessity or a luxury we can no longer afford?’, which I thought would be really interesting but unfortunately the panel was made up only of people in the necessity camp so wasn’t very useful (IMHO).

It was also a good chance to catch up with Bob Athwal, who was there in his AGR capacity but starts with us on 16 January :)

I’m looking for more careers tweeters

stujohnson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:52:43 +0000

January 2011 was the first time I attended the AGCAS Heads of Service conference. I was very new to careers stuff then (still am!) and it was a really useful chance to meet people. I’m looking forward to the conference this January, not least because I’m attending an additional day on 4 January for deputies and new heads. Our soon-to-be Director of Careers, Bob Athwal (you’ll need to scroll down a bit) will also be there so it will be a good opportunity to spend some time with him too. What I’d also really like is to find some other careers tweeters. My network is mostly made up of learning development and e-learning people (which I love!), but I need to find some good careers tweeters too. Last year on the conference there were only 4 of us tweeting (to my knowledge) but only 2 of us are still current (on careers stuff at least. So, does anyone know any more? They don’t have to be heads of service, or even in HE, just people who say useful stuff about careers and employability on twitter.

(Couldn’t leave that hot water post at the top of the list for long).

I’m getting into hot water

stujohnson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:00:25 +0000

Since Easter I’ve been drinking hot water instead of tea (never liked coffee), and I’ve rather taken to it. So here are a list of reasons why:

it’s healthier than tea/coffee
it’s quicker than tea/coffee
you still get the to walk to the kitchen to ‘make’ it (complete with the little bit of sociability that that involves)
you don’t have to pay into the tea/coffee kitty
it begins to have the same lift as tea (eventually!)
you can still drink it when it’s gone cold
you never have to wash your mug

Another interesting post from me there.

Oh, and happy Christmas :)

Keeping sane

stujohnson — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:00:20 +0000

I’ve had a busy 16 months. Maria left for sunny Bangor in August 2010 and then Paul left in April 2011. This left all of the Head of Student Development role and most of the Director of SSDS role to be covered (whilst still doing bits of my old job). I’ve not covered the roles perfectly but I have been able to keep relatively on top of things (all things considered). There have been a number of things that have kept me sane; my wife, my kids, my faith, my daily cycle, supportive colleagues, but the one that this post is about is my task management system (exciting, eh?), which is getting things done using remember the milk.

A while back I explained how I set up the system, and after nearly 2 years of use I can say that it’s still working. I’ve not changed it much other than adding meetings tags (e.g. m_teamleaders), which strictly speaking are really contexts but I was finding I was having so many meetings it was useful to give them a prefix of their own. The tags I use the most are:

people contexts, e.g. c_susan is for things I need to discuss with my boss – these context tags are very handy because even if a task isn’t due today (most task management systems seem to focus on dates rather than tags) if I’m sitting in front of Susan I can see everything I need to discuss with her, even if it’s not due that day;
project tags are also useful, e.g. p_bootcamp, so if I have an hour to work on the boot camp project I can bring up all the related tasks;
status tags, which I use less but s_waiting is handy when I’m waiting to hear back from someone on something;
reference tags, e.g. r_insurance (I use it for home as well as work) are really useful too.

These combined with Remember the milk’s smart lists, e.g. “NOT(due:never OR due:today) AND NOT (list:zzz)” for my ‘tickler list’ ((if this isn’t making any sense you need to read that previous post) make it a really powerful and scalable system.

I try and have a review each week where I try to cover this kind of stuff. It’s often difficult to keep up but the great thing about the system is that it doesn’t take long to get back on the wagon once you’ve fallen off. It’s not a perfect system (despite what the GTD publicity might say) but it is a good system. And being able to access Remember the milk from phone, iPad or Desktop (and all these other services) means that it’s easy to capture everything and then process it accordingly (see below – NOT creative commons).

What a dull post that was.

Does anyone want any data?

stujohnson — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:03:19 +0000

Years ago (when I did a different job) I developed these plagiarism tutorials. There are now 17 of them and between them they’ve had tens of thousands of views. A while back I made them creative commons so that other people could make their own. Over time I’ve collected more than 1,000 responses to the questions that formed a survey at the end of the tutorial (the survey is currently bust and I need to fix it, but that’s another story). The questions I asked were:

Which version of the tutorial did you do?
I found this tutorial interesting (1 = strongly agree, 4 = strongly disagree)
I found this tutorial easy to use (1 = strongly agree, 4 = strongly disagree)
I found this tutorial informative (1 = strongly agree, 4 = strongly disagree)
The best bit about the tutorial was…
The tutorial could be improved by…

Is this data of use to anyone? I don’t have time to analyse it but there might be some interesting stuff in it. Let me know if you want it.