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What do employers want? A study of three professional pathways. Helena Knapton, Learning and Teaching Development Lead (@HKnapton) Alice Diver, PL for LLB Law & Criminology, Year 1 Lead for Law Richard Kitt, Senior Lecturer Mental Health Nursing. knaptonp@edgehill.ac.uk. Background.
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What do employers want? A study of three professional pathways • Helena Knapton, Learning and Teaching Development Lead (@HKnapton) • Alice Diver, PL for LLB Law & Criminology, Year 1 Lead for Law • Richard Kitt, Senior Lecturer Mental Health Nursing knaptonp@edgehill.ac.uk
Background • Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework TE(SO)F • Higher Education Academy (now Advance HE) ‘What Works Project’ – concluded in 2017, retention and progression • Social mobility linking higher education with economic success (Nussbaum, 1997, Wolf, 2002; Goddard, 2009)
how do employers define graduateness? • Students having faced the ‘right level of challenge’ as undergraduates? (Eraut, 2007: 418) • Including perhaps some useful degree of …ongoing reflection upon why a particular career or learning pathway was chosen? (Jones and Higson, 2012) • …or some other means of embedding preparedness for professional practice? (Fry, Ketteridge, & Marshall, 2009)
research Methodology and methods • Exploratory qualitative methodology as a new area of research • Semi-structured interviews to allow participants to explain and investigate their own viewpoints • Purposive Sampling: using professional contacts to start the investigation
Prompt Questions for the Semi-structured interviews • What do you look for in a new-to-the-profession employee? • How and where did you acquire these skills/ attributes? • When/where/how do you expect your new employee to have developed these skills/ attributes? • What does an employer get from a student who studies law/ nursing/ teaching but chooses not to pursue that profession? • To what extent do you think that you exhibited these skills/ attributes at the start of your employment after university?
Initial findings: comparison with the literature • ‘Belongingness’ (Yorke, 2016) • Profession-relevant tasks and assessments; • The ‘right level of challenge’ (Eraut, 2007: 418) • Reflective practice • The role of the employer
Where to next? • Re-engagement with health professionals • Use of grounded theory to investigate responses more fully • Work with employers in the North West of England and University colleagues • Investigation of those students who having completed a professional degree choose not to pursue those