Careers Registration: Starting Points and Journeys

What is Careers Registration?

Careers Registration is a widely adopted approach to generating and using data to improve understanding of the career development starting points and journeys of Higher Education students.

I originally devised the approach with a team at the University of Leeds in 2012.  Nalayini Thambar (who was a key player in turning the idea into reality) and I presented the concept at the AGCAS (Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services) Conference in 2013.  The title of our conference presentation was 'Careers Registration: A Data Revolution'. A slightly hyperbolic title perhaps, but it was an attempt to convey the impact of finding a way to generate key data that we needed but had never had before.

The detail of how the process works and examples of the data it generates can be found in 'The Careers Registration Practical Guide' (Cobb, Gilworth and Winter, 2019, Careers Group, University of London).

The data are used by institutions and particularly their Careers Services, to help them to understand student journeys and to provide the most appropriate impactful careers and employability support, to direct scarce resources to where they will make the most difference and to monitor the success of strategies and activities in this area. Put simply, it is the process by which basic but important information about career thinking and employability-related experience is collected from all students, every year through relatively simple self-report additions to institutional enrolment systems.

Why does it matter?

It matters because understanding the starting points and journeys of current students as distinct from knowing something about the destinations of their predecessors (which is useful) is critical to devising, implementing and measuring careers and employability support in Higher Education. Prior to implementing Careers Registration, we had the data on previous graduates from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) surveys (now replaced by the Graduate Outcomes surveys), but we did not have large scale, comprehensive data from current students.

Careers Registration data illustrates the importance of supporting students with career choice and career planning (the map) as well as the acquisition of assets of knowledge, skills, experience and networks (the luggage). https://luminate.prospects.ac.uk/bob-gilworth-on-graduate-employability-and-career-planning 

Research and new insights

Careers Registration generates a large volume of data which was not previously available. It provides a basis for research within and also across institutions, helping to create new insights into Careers and Employability issues.

The most significant Careers Registration-based research project to date was the HEFCE/OfS Learning Gain project which I led in my role as Director of the Careers Group, University of London. The project ran from 2015 to 2018 and involved fifteen partner institutions. Unusually for a HEFCE (subsequently OfS) project, there were partners in every nation in the UK. At its peak, the project had an anonymised data set of 308,000 students and showed remarkably consistent patterns across 15 very different HEIs.

The public outputs from the project have been somewhat constrained by the original brief, which was around whether or not the measures being piloted in the suite of funded projects could be viable measures of 'distance travelled' in numerous aspects of Learning and Teaching and Student Experience, as distinct from the insights to be gained from the data for the specific purpose of informing careers and employability strategy and activity within HEIs and across the sector. However, it was possible to present some elements of the key messages from the project data through conference presentations at AdvanceHE (2017) and at the final OfS national Conference on Learning Gain (2019). 

Changing the conversation

The career thinking element of Careers Registration data is typically analysed into three main categories (with nuanced sub-categories): 

• Deciding (on options to pursue)
• Planning (acquiring the right knowledge, skills, experience and networks) 
• Competing (effectively in preferred areas of the opportunity structure)

Large datasets have so far indicated that on average around a quarter of undergraduates at the beginning of their final year, self-identify as being in the Competing phase, whilst the proportion identifying as Deciding at the same stage is over 40%. Applying this data to the common stereotype of 'careers' (and particularly the role of careers services) as being all about applications and CVs, provides a simple example of a way in which Careers Registration data have helped to change conversations about Careers and Employability in order to benefit students. 

However well intentioned (and they invariably are), the messaging and the design of employability offers which over-emphasise application (Competing) support and downplay or exclude support with career choice and planning could be inadvertently suggesting to a large proportion of the student body that their starting points are not being acknowledged or supported. 

Thinking about strategy

In addition to generating, combining (through an agreed data sharing protocol) and analysing the data, the project was also a vehicle for sharing the lessons of implementation and ongoing innovation, through looking at the experiences of partners at different stages of implementation.

As a member of the Advisory Board of the Employment Observatory at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, I recently attended an event to discuss the first set of data they had collected, and its analysis. 

Going forward, then, one of my main interests is in institutions' strategic approaches to careers and employability, in an environment which places so much emphasis on graduate outcomes. See 'Organisational responses to the employability agenda in English universities' (2018) and Getting on: graduate employment and its influence on UK higher education (Hewitt, 2020)