Careers support should help students decide, not just compete

Universities put a great deal of effort into making students employable – that’s no bad thing.

There are CV sessions, mock interviews, employer fairs and placements. Students are shown how to make a LinkedIn profile look as though every step since secondary school was carefully planned. Then comes the exercise of turning a group presentation into evidence of leadership, resilience, and conflict resolution. Occasionally, that account is even accurate.

This support matters. Finding work is difficult, and students should not be expected to understand recruitment processes without guidance. The trouble is that employability support often begins once a direction has been chosen.

We are generally much better at helping students work out how to get somewhere than helping them understand why they want to go there in the first place. It helps students compete for an opportunity, but not necessarily decide whether that opportunity is one they want.

Option overload

I notice this most in conversations with students considering PhDs, graduate positions, or whether to remain in academia.

These sound like requests for information. What is the salary? How competitive is the field? What happens after the PhD?

And sometimes the answers are enough. Often, however, students already know the headline facts. They can usually find those online before they come to see us. What they cannot decide is which facts matter most. The question underneath is not simply “what should I do” but “what am I trying to achieve by doing it?”

The real difficulty is usually personal and far more uncomfortable to answer. How much uncertainty can I tolerate? Do I need to remain in a particular city? Do I want financial stability or simply a job that lets me finish the day without checking my email again? What am I prepared to give up, and for how long? And perhaps most awkwardly: do I actually want this, or have I invested too much in the idea to let it go?

Good careers professionals already help students reflect on their values, motivations and priorities, as well as providing information about sectors and recruitment. But this kind of decision support is not always embedded in the wider university experience. A supervisor can give an honest account of academic life, while a careers adviser can help a student examine the options. Neither can decide whether the compromises involved are acceptable to somebody else.

A student may secure several good opportunities and still have no idea which one to pursue. One route may offer freedom but little security. Another may provide stability while taking them away from work they care about. Every plausible option asks for something in return.

At this point, somebody usually suggests a sheet of paper divided into “pros” and “cons.” That can help. It gathers salary, location, progression and job security in one place. But it still leaves the student to decide what deserves the most weight. “Better pension” and “I would have to live apart from my partner” may each take up one line. No real conversation would treat them as equal.

Before the application stage

Before students compare options, they need some basis for deciding what counts as important.

That is why career decision-making has to begin before the application stage. By the time a student is polishing a CV for a particular route, some of the most important questions may already have gone unasked.

We could start by changing the questions we ask. When a student asks whether they should do a PhD, we tend to begin with the advantages and disadvantages. We might get further by asking: “what are you hoping a PhD will give you?”

For one student, it may mean learning to conduct research independently. For another, it may offer status, or a few more years before the job market becomes unavoidable. In fact, the problem each student is trying to solve may be completely different.

We should also stop pretending that every good choice can satisfy every preference. Career guidance can sound as though the ideal role should be interesting, secure, flexible, well paid, socially useful and within walking distance of the student’s current flat.

Such jobs presumably exist. They simply appear to have been filled before most of us started looking.

Real career decisions involve accepting a package. Greater autonomy may come with less security. A prestigious opportunity may require relocation. Meaningful work may offer slower financial progression. Those compromises will always be there, and we need to make them visible and ask which ones the student can live with.

Students also need help separating what they know from what they assume. Someone may reject a sector because they imagine the work will be repetitive. Another may pursue academia because they believe it offers complete intellectual freedom, which will come as news to anyone who has recently completed a grant application.

Before making the larger decision, students can test some of these beliefs. They can speak to people at different career stages, complete a short project or ask what the job actually involves on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

The useful question is not “what else can I find out” but “what assumption, if proven wrong, would change my decision?”

There is something recognisably scientific in that approach: break a large problem into smaller questions, investigate what can be tested and be honest about what remains uncertain.

Guiding to a decision

None of this means universities should tell students what to value. Careers advisers do not need to become therapists, and supervisors should be wary of offering their own careers as model answers.

The adviser’s role is to ask the questions the student has not yet considered and to notice when salary, status or familiarity is quietly making the whole decision.

Plans change. So do relationships, priorities and the economy. A careful choice can still turn out badly, while a hasty one may work. Outcomes are never entirely under our control.

Universities can improve the reasoning before the choice. Does the student understand what they are trying to achieve, rather than simply how to achieve it? Do they know which compromises they are accepting? Have they tested the assumptions that matter most?

That could translate into relatively modest changes in practice. Careers services could make questions about motivations, trade-offs and assumptions a more explicit part of career planning, while courses could build structured career reflection into placements, projects or personal tutoring rather than leaving it until graduation approaches. Universities might also think more broadly about how they evaluate career support, looking not only at whether graduates secure good destinations, but at whether students feel equipped to make informed choices about which destinations make sense for them.

Universities rightly want graduates who can navigate a changing labour market. But navigation is not just the ability to keep moving. At some point, somebody has to choose a direction.

Teaching students how to secure a job matters. We should also help them work out why they are choosing that job in the first place.