5 Action Points to Improve Graduate Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students
Differential employment outcomes are a critical area of concern for widening participation practitioners. Research has consistently shown that disadvantaged students are less likely to attain higher skilled employment opportunities.
Tailoring your careers service provision to students from widening participation groups can maximise their prospects as they enter the graduate labour market.
This blog post outlines 5 practical ways you can modify your careers service provision to support students from widening participation backgrounds. It includes examples from across the sector that demonstrate how careers professionals are successfully supporting underrepresented students in their service provision.
Collaborating Across the Institution
For your careers service to serve widening participation students, employability and access professionals must work together to identify challenges and solutions.
You might do this by sharing data. As a widening participation practitioner, it might be helpful to learn the demographics of students seeking careers advice and have access to their student feedback. Your careers service may also benefit from understanding the differential employment outcomes for students from target groups.
By sharing data, you can collaboratively identify barriers and challenges faced by students from underrepresented backgrounds in accessing careers advice and pursuing positive graduate outcomes.
Over time, you should work towards embedding your careers service provision into your institution’s Access and Participation Plan (APP). This could be through the allocation of funding; for example, the University of Sussex’s Connector Programme, which sees students and staff work together to improve student experience, is funded with resources allocated by their APP.
Alternatively, your APP can be used to design your careers service provision. King’s College London recruits Inclusive Student Careers Ambassadors using the characteristics set out in their APP. As part of this programme, ambassadors are paid to co-create and deliver careers education to their peers with support and training from the Careers & Employability Team.
Engaging Students as Co-Creators
Understanding and incorporating student voice is important in any initiative that seeks to widen participation. Your careers service provision is no exception.
Many institutions have reported positive outcomes from engaging students from underrepresented groups in the creation and design of their programme.
Some successful examples include:
Providing a virtual environment in which students and graduates can connect to share experience and insight, such as the University of Liverpool’s Careers Studio.
Developing modules that help students to translate the experiences gained from their studies into CV language. Solent University’s Living CV programme is tailored to the level of study and experience of the different students who access it, to ensure the service is relevant, helpful and worthwhile.
Employing student ambassadors on a part-time basis to support with the development and delivery of careers services. A project at the University of Birmingham and Liverpool John Moores University saw the recruitment of Autistic Careers Consultants to build a programme that addressed the challenges neurodiverse students face in the graduate job market.
How you include the students in the design of your service provision will depend on the specific demographic groups you are hoping to target. Use available data and the objectives outlined in your APP to design the best approach for your institution.
The student co-creation approach has a number of beneficial outcomes for widening participation:
Students build networks and communities as part of the co-creation process.
Students feel that their input and voice is valued and important.
Students gain valuable experience that they might expect to gain on an internship, such as organising events and working as part of a team, that can bolster their CV.
Targeting Specific Groups
Widening participation practitioners know that the students they support are not a homogenous, easily-defined group. Rather, students face multiple axes of exclusion that can be shaped by different factors, such as their socioeconomic background, ethnicity or disability.
Recognising this in the provision of careers advice is crucial. Communicating the needs of different students to your careers service providers is the first step to ensuring that those needs are met.
Consider organising events, activities and resources targeting specific groups. Some examples include:
The University of Cambridge have a playlist of YouTube videos addressing experiences and concerns black students might face accessing the graduate job market.
Imperial College London run a series of events and opportunities throughout the year targeted at different widening participation students, including LGBTQ+ students and those from racialised communities.
The University of Kent offers an Access Hour as part of their careers fair, which allows disabled and neurodiverse students to attend the fair earlier in quieter, less crowded conditions.
You should also aim to make your careers advice as accessible as possible, with an understanding of the needs of disabled students in mind. Advance HE provide a helpful list of suggested changes you can implement to make your service provision more inclusive and accessible.
Share student feedback with careers advisors make them aware of the barriers different students face and can design events accordingly. Offering one-to-one mentoring or support will help you to understand the complex limitations individual students face in their careers journey.
Addressing Different Experience Levels
Underrepresented groups may not have access to networks or advice that allows them to attain valuable work experience. Those who are financially disadvantaged can't feasibly take on unpaid work experience opportunities that might enhance their career prospects.
This unequal access leads to differentials in work experience. Understanding this and modifying your approach accordingly will ensure students get the best out your service.
The University of London Careers Service implements an approach that attempts to ‘meet students where they are in their employability journey’: they’ve developed a Careers Stage Framework that divides students into different categories determined by their level of experience.
Developing a framework like this enables you to run events and activities that cater to specific levels of experience. This guarantees that the support students receive is relevant and worthwhile.
It’s also important to note that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach can be overwhelming for students with limited work experience. Running events based on experience levels brings students facing similar prospects together, allowing them to create networks.
You may also encourage collaboration between students from different categories. For example, you could connect those at the beginning of their employability journey with more experienced students through a mentoring scheme.
Knowing what students access your careers service is key to this, so make sure to refer to relevant data when designing your framework.
Partnering with Employers
Students from disadvantaged groups don’t cease to experience inequality after graduation. They also face barriers when they enter the job market.
It’s important to understand what employers are doing to reduce these limitations. You can speak to the employers who advertise job vacancies with you and attend your events to learn more about the work that they are doing to widen participation.
Your approach will depend on the specific group you are hoping to address. For example, you might ask an employer about how are going beyond their legal requirement to provide reasonable adjustments for disabled employees to support universal design in the workplace. If the employer is in an industry in which certain groups are underrepresented, such as women in technology, you might ask them how they support those employees in their career journeys.
Recent graduates will have crucial insights to this, so it’s important to stay in touch with them after they leave the institution and gather their feedback. You might do this by:
Considering data such as the Graduate Outcomes Survey, paying particular attention to the outcomes of disadvantaged students.
Using an online networking platform that allows alumni and current students to connect.
Organising a mentorship scheme that connects students and graduates, such as the University of St Andrew’s Work Shadowing programme. You may wish to prioritise applications from widening participation students.
If you organise work placements as part of your provision, share student feedback with the employer. This will help them to understand the challenges faced by disadvantaged students on these placements and adapt their approach in subsequent programmes.
The feedback you gather should also inform your decisions about the employers you choose to collaborate with in the future.
Next Steps
This blog post has outlined 5 practical ways that careers service provision can be adapted to help widen participation in universities.
Some key questions practitioners might ask themselves going forward are:
What do outcomes look like for our disadvantaged or underrepresented students after graduation?
What barriers might be in place that stop them accessing relevant, helpful careers guidance?
How can we amend our services to ensure we are supporting the needs of these students?
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