Careers at HE level
Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF)
One of the measures used to gauge the quality of higher education courses is the TEF, where Petroc currently holds a Silver award.
The TEF framework looks at a range of factors in relation to the quality of a degree course, but regarding employability, the following are the key areas:
Students achieve their educational and professional goals, in particular progression to further study or highly skilled employment
Students acquire knowledge, skills and attributes that are valued by employers and that enhance their personal and/or professional lives
Extent, nature and impact of employer engagement in course design and/or delivery, including degree apprenticeships
Evidence and impact of initiatives aimed at graduate employability
Employment/destination outcomes using DLHE data (Destinations of Leavers Survey from Higher Education)
There's more information on this at the TEF website.
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA)
Another quality requirement for HE student comes from The UK Quality Code for Higher Education, this states that holders of qualifications at levels 4, 5 and 6 will have developed, through their studies, the following:
Level 4: the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring the exercise of some personal responsibility.
Level 5: the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring the exercise of personal responsibility and decision-making.
Level 6: the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring:
the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility
decision-making in complex and unpredictable contexts
the learning ability needed to undertake appropriate further training of a professional or equivalent nature.
developed analytical techniques and problem-solving skills that can be applied in many types of employment.
Careers Programme Design
So as you can see from the above, degree programmes need to meet certain employability requirements.
To help- with this, there are a number of careers frameworks that can be followed to develop careers/employability education within the curriculum. Following these frameworks will make a significant contribution to meeting TEF and QAA standards. Two that you may find useful are:
The Gatsby Benchmarks - you will have read about this already, and although they are aimed at FE students, provide a useful guide as to the careers/employability activities that could be embedded into degree programmes.
DOTS - this is a theory of careers education widely used by most UK universities, and was developed from extensive research by Bill Law and Tony Watts.
The theory proposes that career/employability development is a developmental process using four stages, each successive stage building on research, learning, reflection and experience developed by the previous stage.
To make the theory functional, the DOTS letters are re-arranged into SODT and are described below:
Self-awareness (what are my skills, what do I want in a job, what is my personality)
Opportunity-awareness (industry knowledge, local and national labour market information, career pathways)
Decision-making learning (how to make a decision using a variety of techniques)
Transition learning (CV writing, interview skills, application form writing)
Liverpool University provides a very good guide to how to use DOTS to develop a careers and employability programme.
