3 Solutions to Increase Student Engagement with Careers and Employability Services
As Prospects Luminate’s 2023 Early Careers Survey found, engagement with university careers and employability dropped by about 10% across the board in 2023. This is despite the fact that, as the survey also shows, students find industry and careers professionals to be the most helpful sources of information when it comes to navigating their career journeys.
There are plenty of challenges facing careers professionals looking to engage students with their services. Right now, the cost-of-living crisis is making students increasingly time poor, with other commitments such as paid employment to help keep them afloat in trying financial times. Other barriers include low confidence and poor mental health among young people in the UK, which have been exacerbated significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result, students who might benefit most from employability support – that is, those who have a limited sense of what career they would like to pursue or lack the skills to navigate the graduate market – remain frustratingly out of reach. Meanwhile, those who likely already have these attributes are more likely to seek out help from careers professionals.
In this context, we explore 3 potential solutions for increasing student engagement with university careers services. These range from jumping on social media trends, responding to the current political and economic climate and supporting students who don’t have a clear idea of what they want to do in the future.
1. Meeting Students Where They Are: Impactful Communications
2. Designing Activities for to Today’s Students
3. Supporting Students to Explore Career Pathways
Meeting Students Where They’re At: Impactful Communications
In order to get students to engage, it’s crucial to communicate effectively with them. This means making sure your services are present and well signposted in the right places.
Social media is a good place to start. While many careers and employability services do have some kind of presence on social media, it’s doubtful whether that is truly having the impact that it could. Especially when platforms like TikTok have a whole host of extremely popular job-themed content, it seems like careers services are missing a trick by not making their presence known on these sites.
Some universities, such as the University of East London, have started to do this by featuring their employability professionals dishing out careers advice for students. We would encourage you to take this one step further and analyse the content that’s popular on the site – you’ll quickly find that a lot of it is user-generated, DIY-style and ‘authentic’.
User-generated content (UGC) is not new to the HE sector; plenty of universities are now working with students to create authentic content for their recruitment and marketing campaigns. So, why not use the lessons learned by admissions professionals in the employability agenda? This kind of content can also be carried over to Instagram or translated into different formats: for example, as a thread of tweets on Twitter/X.
By producing this kind of authentic, student-led, short-form content, you can engage students – and young people more broadly – in a place they are often found and a format they understand.
However, it’s not only social media where careers services can effectively engage students. You might also consider:
Collaborating with student organisations
Sending targeted communications; for example, by segmenting your audience by year of study or subject
Offering helpful virtual resources – if students find these useful, they are more likely to seek out further support from your service
Working with already engaged students to offer a peer or student ambassador scheme
These strategies can make sure you’re really meeting students where their at when it comes to their career needs and aspirations.
Designing Interventions for Today’s Students
As the most recent iteration of the Early Careers Survey made clear, today’s students are increasingly concerned with the cost of living. This impacting their student journey, how they make decisions about their future and whether or not they engage with extra-curricular activities.
While there has been plenty of focus on integrating employability into the curriculum itself, you should also deliver supplementary careers activities that are relevant to the specific issues today’s cohort of graduates is facing.
For example, a recent survey conducted by HEPI found that more students are working part-time to support themselves as the cost-of-living skyrockets. This means they have limited time to engage with extra-curricular activities and may even have a negative impact on their academic experience. So, why not run a careers event that supports students in part-time work to articulate the skills they’ve accumulated from the experience for future employers?
To run such an event, you would have to consider accessibility. Perhaps it would run online and be available to stream on demand, so that students can fit it around their commitments. Engaging with students and encouraging them to share feedback will be key to tailoring these interventions to their needs.
Similarly, rather than offering generalist careers advice, you could adapt the kind of events you run and advice you deliver based on the current economic climate. For instance, running a session or creating resources that can support students who are job hunting during a recession may be more relevant or useful for upcoming cohorts of graduates. Imperial College London collaborated with alumni to produce a blog article that covered this very topic.
Other activities to engage students could also include:
Interactive careers activities or initiatives – for example, a Careers Bingo card, which encourages students to complete activities such as attending a CV building workshop or an employer event.
More opportunities for students to engage directly with employers or alumni. This could include a ‘speed dating’-esque event, facilitating informal chats between students and alumni or employers or industry challenges.
Events that help them to use all the tools available to them, such as LinkedIn makeover workshops.
When designing these interventions, make sure to always begin by considering what your students really need. Using data you have at your disposal is key, as well as considering the unique challenges and opportunities students face in your particular institution. Similarly, It's crucial for employability professionals to keep a keen eye on trends in the graduate labour market, using insight to design agile and responsive interventions. Great resources include the official government statistics, Prospects Luminate’s labour market updates and Jisc’s ‘Discover graduate outcomes’ dashboard.
Supporting Students to Explore Career Pathways
Students’ engagement with careers service can depend on the aspirations or preconceptions they have about career pathways.
However, students’ ambitions and interests are certainly not set in stone. A 2023 study funded by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (HECSU) found that, from a sample of 663 graduating students, over half (61%) reported that their career interests had changed during their time at university.
To support student make informed choices, it’s important that careers services are able to respond to this changeability. Careers activities should be oriented around enabling students to explore options, rather than give the sense that they’re designed for students who are certain they want to explore a certain industry or type of role.
Language is key here. City, University of London run a series of events entitled ‘Discover Options’, that encourages students from different disciplines to explore potential career pathways. By indicating from the outset that the event will present a series of different options, you can appeal to a broader range of students and hopefully engage those students who aren’t sure what they want to do after they graduate.
Similarly, by running activities and interventions that allow students to explore options, you can also help them to build the soft skills that will allow them to navigate professional pathways throughout their future, such as the confidence to change career and negotiate promotion.
If students feel their indecision and uncertainty will be support, you can help them to feel confident to engage with careers support.
From Engagement to Effective Support
In this article, we’ve suggested a few ways that careers professionals can encourage students to engage with their services: delivering impactful communications, designing interactive and needs-based employability activities and supporting students to experiment and explore career pathways. When delivering these kinds of services, it’s key to make sure that you’re monitoring progress and evaluating impact, so that you can improve your services continuously and understand what works.
As employability professionals know, getting students engaged with services and support is just one part of the puzzle. To explore how you can maximise impact and delivery, explore what a HE Professional membership can do for you. Our members receive priority access to events across the year at no extra cost, as well as access to all premium content on our site, which includes case studies written by practitioners across the sector. Click below to find out more.
