How to run a university careers service in difficult times

In the current financial crisis facing UK higher education, careers service leaders often find themselves managing an increasingly challenging balancing act.

In recent years, employability has grown in prominence in institutional agendas and many careers services have grown in influence and expanded their remit to cover a broader teaching and learning and student success brief. This is fundamentally a hugely positive development.

However, with mounting financial pressures and limited resources, often compounded by recruitment freezes and delayed budget confirmations, some overstretched careers services are inevitably struggling to deliver on these expanded expectations.

Not in the plan

One of the key challenges is the loss of the ability to plan effectively, due to many unknowns around resourcing, budgets and shifting institutional agendas. In many cases, plans are constantly evolving or hastily being rewritten during the carnage of the first semester, at a critical time for student engagement when a huge number of major careers events are taking place on campus. This year careers services are also having to contend with the added complexity of an increasing wave of protests from students regarding specific employers and industries ethical standards usually linked to climate change or the ongoing conflict in the middle east.

While all this is going on, we are also seeing at many universities that, although well-intentioned, institutional senior leadership decision-making has become reactive to the tumultuous external environment. In some cases careers services are being continually pulled towards initiatives that, while tenuously aligned with broader institutional goals, may not be the most efficient or effective use of their scarce resources. This creates a challenge for careers service leaders who must balance the need to maintain team morale, particularly with colleagues leaving and not being replaced, and still deliver on core responsibilities; whilst also managing this increasingly complex web of institutional expectations.

This was illustrated by a brilliant Head of Careers who is currently wrestling with this challenge:

Keeping a focus on institution wide careers and employability related strategic objectives, and continuing to make progress towards embedding employability and growing game-changing internship and work based learning experience programmes, has become challenging when priorities at the senior level are pivoting almost overnight towards saving and making money. Focus on growth of activities such as TNE partnerships has shifted attention away from areas like employability which remain a vital part of the higher education package and is a key element to the student recruitment offer. Divestment in these areas in the short term risks a slowing down or reversal of all the good progress being made which will eventually impact on Graduate Outcomes, but the lag in these impacts playing out in the league tables means careers leaders need to be vocal now about the importance of continuing to evolve our provision

Goals and limitations

One of the first steps in navigating this situation is often to seek to realign the careers service’s core priorities with the expectations of leadership. Often, senior leaders have a broad strategic view of the institution’s goals, but they may not fully understand the nuanced operational limitations of careers services. They don’t always have the expert understanding the granular intricacies of what drives Graduate Outcomes success or fully appreciate what is lost if the employer engagement function largely disappears from the service.

It is crucial to engage leadership in open dialogue, clarifying their objectives and ensuring they understand the resource constraints the careers service faces. At the same time, educating leadership on the value and impact of core projects and functions, such as embedded employability provision and strategic employer engagement activity, can gradually help shift the conversation.

Presenting data and evidence that show the success of these initiatives, and the negative impact of diverting resources, can help but the reality is that unfortunately that it can become politically difficult to consistently push back. Careers service leaders are obviously cognizant of the fact that similar challenges are manifesting across all areas of the institution and that everyone has to take some of the pain.

Instead of outright rejecting initiatives, sometimes proposing more efficient ways to achieve similar goals can create a balance between meeting leadership expectations and preserving limited resources. Offering compromises, such as phasing in new projects or running carefully targeted pilot initiatives at limited scale with clear measures of success, can demonstrate a willingness to collaborate while keeping the careers service’s core mission and focus intact.

As one hugely respected leader in the sector commented:

As careers service leaders, we constantly balance responding to external pressures with staying aligned to our core mission. In difficult times, it’s vital we don’t lose sight of our expertise or long-term goals. By leveraging real-time data, such as career readiness, we can demonstrate that our strategies are on the right track, while also refining and iterating to meet evolving demands. Communicating decisions clearly to our teams, when we can, helps ensure they remain engaged, understand their value, and are working towards our shared objective.

But let’s be honest, it is often an imperfect science. Sometimes the political context requires you to just get on board regardless of the strength of your rationale for pushing back on a specific idea or initiative. That is a hard line to judge for experienced leaders but can often feel like an opaque, counter-intuitive, and conflicting approach to leadership for values-led colleagues stepping into these roles. Your team won’t always understand certain decisions and in some cases, you aren’t even at liberty to full transparently explain them.

This will never feel great.

Externalities

In these challenging times when internal funding is being cut, being able to access external sources of funding to deliver large-scale projects can be an enticing prospect. These projects can potentially catalyse Graduate Outcomes success by allowing you to grow opportunities in your region or provide intensive support for specific disadvantaged groups.

There can also be significant profile and influence gains for you and your service by bringing in external funding and leading on these high-profile projects, but there are also often significant risks. Some of the questions facing leaders include:

• Could the project become a distraction?
• Will it divert, already constrained, resource from core delivery?
• What are the reputational and financial risks if the project doesn’t deliver on targets?
• Are we inventing a project just to fit a funding call or is this something we would potentially seek to pursue if internal funding was available?

Deciding what not to do and what potential opportunities to leave on the table is important in order to carefully guide your careers service through the current storm.

Now more than ever, protecting the team from burnout, frustration and low morale is crucial and requires careful empathetic leadership. It is incredibly rough out there and there doesn’t seem to be a policy solution coming anytime soon to alleviate the sector’s financial woes.

The truism has always been that leadership can be a lonely place. Careers service leaders operating at the sharp end of often brutal decision making processes are carrying a huge load. Keeping the show on the road in such circumstances requires huge skill, flexibility, vision and resilience. Many of the leaders we have in the sector are demonstrating this in spades, better times will come.