Free downloadable guide for HE staff to use with You’re Hired! Graduate Career Handbook

I wrote yesterday about our new book You’re Hired! Graduate Career Handbook. This book is going to be released the start of next week, but you can of course pre-order now.

In the meantime I’d like to share with you the free guide that we’ve made for HE staff. If you follow this blog you are probably more likely to be a careers person or an academic than a current student (although I welcome all readers). We wrote the actual book for students, but we thought that it would be useful to think about how academics and careers educators might make use of it as part of their delivery of careers and employability modules and programmes.

The guide covers how to use the Graduate Career Handbook in the following situations.

• To support career conversations and as part of careers advice and guidance
• To support students when they are networking with employers and undertaking placements and other kinds of extra-curricular experiences.
• To run employability workshops.
• To design employability modules and programmes.

We ‘ve included a load of workshop plans, draft module specifications with learning outcomes and an extensive reading list to support modules.

Hopefully you will find it useful.

Publication of You’re Hired! Graduate Career Handbook brought forwards!

I’ve got a new book coming out next week called You’re Hired! Graduate Career Handbook. The book was originally supposed to be released at the start of next term, but there has been a lot of interest in it and so we managed to persuade the publishers to push it out a bit quicker to allow people to get hold of a copy over the summer.

The book offers a comprehensive guide to career planning and job hunting for students and graduates. I think that what is different about this book in comparison to some of the other volumes out there is that we take a holistic view of career rather than just talking about how to beat your way through recruitment processes.

The book covers thinking about what to do with your life, how to make the most of your time at university, building up experience and networks, making the transition to further learning and work and perhaps most importantly being prepared to make a plan B and deal with setbacks. So we think that it should be essential reading for everyone from those who are about to start at university to those who are currently a couple of years into their graduate career and wondering where it all went wrong. Your career is something that you build everyday and it is never too late (or too early) to take action.

So (pre-)order your copy today!

Citation update

I like to keep people up to date with my latest citation counts. I’ve just seen my h-index rise to 14 which pleases me greatly. In essence this is an empty statistic which I check obsessively and derive some self-worth from.

The new paper that has made it into the charmed circle is Evaluating the impact of career management skills module and internship programme within a university business school in which we evaluated a HE career management skills programme and internship and found that it made a difference to students employability.

In order to get my H-index up again people will have to cite that paper again as well as starting to cite one of the following more often.

• Teachers and careers
• A career postcode lottery? Local authority provision of youth and career support following the 2011 Education Act
• Understanding how people choose to pursue taught postgraduate study
• Tackling unemployment, supporting business and developing careers
• The economic benefits of career guidance

So you know what you have to do! Get citing!

 

Career Guidance and Livelihood Planning across the Mediterranean

Ronald Sultana has just edited an important new book looking at career guidance and livelihood planning around the Mediterranean.

This is particularly timely as governments and citizens in the Mediterranean region are very concerned about the mass unemployment of young people, many of who have invested in higher education in the hope that ability and effort lead to fulfilling lives. For this group transitions to independent adulthood are often long, drawn-out and jeopardised by labour markets that are neither youth-friendly nor meritocratic. While such challenges require structural responses at the macro-economic level, career education and guidance have an important role to play in addressing both the public and private good, and in furthering the social justice agenda.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art review of career education and guidance in Southern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa Region, presenting a multi-faceted portrayal of the situation in each country as well as overviews of cross-cutting themes that are especially relevant to context, such as women’s career development in the Arab states, job placement support for refugees, and the impact of faith on livelihood planning.

I have contributed a chapter entitled ‘The Saudi experiment with career guidance‘ which explores the current situation for career guidance in Saudi Arabia.

More information about Career Guidance and Livelihood Planning across the Mediterranean.

Free sample of two chapters from the book.

Moving beyond ‘what works’: Using the evidence base in lifelong guidance to inform policy making

I have recently published an article called ‘Moving beyond ‘what works’: Using the evidence base in lifelong guidance to inform policy making‘.

It is published in a German collection on the evidence base in lifelong guidance. You can buy the book for 35 euro. So hurry and get yourself a copy before Brexit closes the borders for ever!

I’ve also posted a version on the University of Derby archive, but the actual PDF is embargoed until 2019 so you’ll have to buy the book if you want it quickly.

You’re hired! Job hunting online. Careers Matters Review

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, I published a book with Jim Bright and David Winter on job hunting (and career building) online.

You can buy the book on the Trotman website (as well as Amazon and in all good bookshops).

We’ve recently been reviewed in Careers Matters so I’ll let the review do the selling for us.

In essence, it is a no-nonsense guide to showcasing your career credentials in the best possible light and finding the relevant opportunities.

Read the full review in Careers Matters

Employability: A Review of the Literature 2012-2016. Full paper

A few days ago I posted some slides presenting the key findings from this project. I’m now able to share the full paper.

This paper examines 187 pieces of research published between 2012 and 2016.1 It describes how the subject of employability has been addressed during this period and draws out some of the key implications for higher education providers (HEPs), academics and employability practitioners. Employability is notoriously complex to define, but for the purposes of this review we have looked at research that uses the term ‘employability’ and which intersects with one of the key concepts which are contained with the Higher Education Academy’s (HEA’s) Framework for embedding employability . The framework was used both to provide keywords for the literature review, and to help in structuring our report.   Higher education providers are under considerable pressure from policymakers, students and employers to ensure that graduates emerge from higher education ready for the labour market. The imminent implementation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) looks set to increase this pressure.

It is also possible to argue that a focus on employability is a moral duty for higher education providers. Students invest their time and money in accessing higher education with the expectation that it will offer them access to greater life chances than they would have obtained if they had not attended HE. For the most part, this expectation is fulfilled with graduates generally doing better in the labour market than non-graduates. However, it is not simply holding a degree that results in these outcomes (although there is an important signalling effect), rather it is critical that higher education develops students in ways that support them to be successful in the future.

Academic interest in employability appears to be growing. Academics are wrestling with the nature of employability, its political implications, the ways in which it is delivered and the relative efficacy of each of them. Academics approach these questions from a range of political, theoretical, methodological and professional perspectives.

The literature outlines a number of different ideas about how higher education providers can best deliver employability provision. These can provide useful insights about the different approaches that are being used and the relative evidence for each of them. Much of this evidence aligns well with the kinds of themes and approaches identified in the HEA employability framework.

The employability agenda offers huge opportunities for HEPs, academics and students. Employability offers HEPs the opportunity to help individuals to realise their potential, to enhance their, skills, attitudes, attributes and knowledge, to become successful workers and citizens, and through this helps to increase the political legitimacy of higher education. This review has shown that there is a lively and critical academic field that exists around the employability agenda. We believe that the continued growth and maturation of this field is essential to the ongoing development of employability in higher education.