Peter Reddy & Liz Bland

The BSc Career Fallacy: Checking reality without dashing dreams Peter Reddy & Liz Bland Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice and School of Life and Health Sciences. Aston University Careers Service

Aims • To suggest that undergraduate development and the purpose of university education is poorly understood by students and their parents • To argue that academic staff have credibility and contact with students so are in a strong position to work with careers advisors to influence students and improve employability and scholarship • To argue that self awareness and reflection supports academic development, scholarship and employability • Not to tell you what you don’t already know – but what we think students need to know

The BSc Career Fallacy: Checking reality without dashing dreams • The BSc career fallacy is the expectation held by many students and parents that a degree in psychology will lead to a career as a psychologist. • With only 20% of UK psychology graduates becoming psychologists, clearly a reality check is needed in order to help students prepare for alternative realities. • This in turn requires students to understand what the point of university education is.

If most psychology students don’t become psychologists what is the point of studying it? • Students need to know that undergraduate education is generally non-vocational…. • ….and Psychology aligns with other non-vocational academic subjects such as History rather than with vocational degrees such as medicine or vocationally oriented subjects such as Business Studies. • The point of studying psychology requires thought about the point of undergraduate education as a whole….

Newman - The idea of a UniversityWhat is the point of undergraduate education? • The greatest contribution of universities has been the education of the mind and the cultivation of understanding, not providing technical skills for the workforce or accumulating knowledge for its own sake • Aim is to develop critical faculties so that students can • see things as they are • get right to the point, • discard what is irrelevant • detect sophistry • A student can then • fill any post with credit • approach any subject without fear • So – lifelong learning, how to learn, global citizenship

The non-vocational degree • The all-round thinking skills and bullshit detection promoted by a non-vocational degree prepares the graduate for their professional career. • Content dates and is forgotten but competencies / skills / graduate attributes last • Students may not understand this • (see the Father Guido Sarducci 5 minute university sketch on YouTube) • Psychology graduates go on to a huge range of careers.

So the reasons for studying a non vocational degree, such as psychology are …. • High level general education, training of the mind, development of mature judgment and reflection, employability. • The pleasure and enjoyment of the subject • Humboldt’s (1810) idea of shared staff and student scholarship. Schools offer accepted and established knowledge, but • “the appropriate stance for a university is to treat scholarship in terms of not yet completely solved problems, whether in research or teaching” (Elton, 2008)

Assumptions about vocational HE seem deeply embedded • Students may assume that because only medics can practice medicine only business graduates can have a business career. • The reality is far more interesting and diverse. • At Aston, psychology staff include people with degrees in physics, medicine, biology and the social sciences • Aston Business School has more academics with psychology degrees, including the Executive Dean, than the psychology department.

Portfolio careers • Not a single ‘right’ career, but a raft of employment experiences according to circumstances, interests, opportunities and personal development. • Important to have a diversity of career patterns and choices available • for those anticipating families (most of our students are women) mature students and those from WP backgrounds. • Examples give students pause to reflect and permission to experiment • Real examples are often wackier than created ones - see BPS PsyPag and SMG

A career needs to treated as a personal business project. • Graduates need to take responsibility • for their career, personal and professional development • for initiating, monitoring and recording continuing professional development (CPD) • Strengths must be reinforced, weaknesses managed, knowledge, competencies, skills and experience reviewed and developed, change and new opportunities monitored and evaluated.

The media plays a part in constructing students’ perceptions of careers and professions. • In the 1990s TV series ‘Cracker,’ Robbie Coltrane played Fitz, a dysfunctional clinical psychologist antihero with brilliant insights into the minds of criminals • The flawed but glamorous Fitz fuelled the boom in psychology and popularised criminal profiling • A psychology graduate, Tim Campbell was the winner of the first series of ‘The Apprentice’ • This is good to know for psychology students as it undermines the subject silo mentality that psychology students must stay in psychology and cannot go into business

Optimism (psychology degree = psychology career)replaced by pessimism (not enough psychology jobs) • If only 20% have psychology careers, students may think that • psychology professions are too competitive and oversubscribed • and that qualification is too long and uncertain • Students may not aim for their first choice, especially from less prominent universities and from WP backgrounds. • They fear that only those with the best degrees from the best known universities get in, graduates of low rent Poppleton and Uttoxeter don’t - certainly some truth in this.

Clarifying the route to the professions • Full professional status before late 20s is rare - from medicine to law to banking, accountancy and psychology, graduate level professional training and supervision is essential. • A mix of apprentice level work as a psychology assistant, further training, and supervised professional experience. Early career experience in business or teaching not dissimilar? • Much will be paid for or financially supported – do students understand this? Favours those with confidence and the backing to take risks.

What makes a student a credible candidate for a psychology profession? • Not just the best grade and the best university • Degree class alone is not a reliable job performance predictor (Barber et al 2005). A level grade does not strongly predict academic (Huws et al 2006) or job performance. • Academic performance (AP) at one point in time is not a final judgement on a student – it may not translate into success at another time or in comparison with other students • See literature on intelligence, personality and academic performance (e.g. Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2008, O'Connor & Paunonen, 2007)

Competencies • Employers use competency-based recruitment to find graduates who will be able to grow with the organisation, manage change, and confer competitive advantage • The Psychology Student Employability Guide (Lantz, 2008) lists 28 competencies under six headings • The competencies that make up graduate employability are the obverse of graduate scholarship - the two are alike in many ways

Can we persuade students of this? • Sixth forms are now very focussed on getting students the best grades for university entry • Students bring this focus with them and behave as if only grades matter. • They may have little patience for anything that is not part of their study of psychology, and may be reluctant to work for anything that does not have a grade attached. • In a psychology degree, psychology is what they expect to study, not study skills, not developing employability, not personal development planning.

A narrow focus on grade…. • ….may help a student to get to their first choice of university, it may not get them into the career they want • Degree grades may not discriminate, about 70% get the ubiquitous 2.i • Being able to offer evidence of competencies based on work experience, especially at a professional placement level, voluntary activity, involvement in student sport, politics or a society, and scholarly activity such as research, is extremely important

To be able to find and use evidence students need to be reflective and self aware …. • …. about what they have learned about themselves and their developing competencies • This will maximise their academic trajectory, their employability and their personal development • This is often difficult for students; reflection and self awareness does not necessarily come easily or quickly. Some students defend themselves from it, others seem unable to grasp it at all • Perhaps developing reflection and self awareness is one of the developmental tasks of early adulthood that come with more sophisticated epistemological reasoning and cognitive development?

We need to persuade students to factor in reflection and self awareness • This is not easy, students may resist anything not directly to do with their subject, may not be ready developmentally or may resent intrusion into their personal domain. PDP may be part of the solution, but simply asking students to keep a PDP portfolio may run up against these problems. • How can we integrate / embed this kind of material into a psychology programme? • There may be scope to use students’ interest in understanding other people and themselves to turn some of the psychology curriculum towards reflection and self-awareness.

Certificate in Personal and Professional Development (CPPD) • An additional university qualification in parallel with their degree • Three modules: • CPPD 1 (preparation for placement and employment) in the second year • CPPD 2 (on-placement) in the placement year • CPPD 3 (post-placement) in the final year • Students are all enrolled in CPPD 1 (but may opt out). • Passing CPPD 1 is a pre-requisite to enroll on CPPD 2. • Passing CPPD 2 is a pre-requisite to enroll on CPPD 3. • Passing CPPD 3 triggers the award

CPPD content • CPPD 1 - prepare for your placement year • training on interviews, writing job applications and CVs • using psychometric measures to learn about your competencies, strengths, weaknesses, career interests and job preferences • keep a reflective log and portfolio which is assessed at the end of the year. • CPPD 2 – on placement • keep a reflective log and write a report and a poster about your placement work and learning. • CPPD 3 – post placement • in the first semester of the final year; reflect on and action your learning and career plans, present your poster to 2nd. years.

First year psychology of undergraduate development: Personally relevant and different to A level • Erikson - developmental tasks of adolescence & early adulthood • Piaget, Vygotsky & Kohlberg - cognitive & moral development • Perry, Baxter-Magolda - epistemological reasoning and undergraduate cognitive development • Biggs and others - approach to study & meta-learning • Attraction and relationship formation • Psychometrics, individual differences and the self • Personal interests, preferences, individual differences • Career development theory • PDP, preparation for placement and career

Embedding PDP and material on reflection & self awareness means that it is assessed and taken seriously • HE challenges students to learn in different ways with less support – helps trigger more sophisticated conceptions of learning and knowledge (Säljö 1982) • Students’ sense of their progress effects their sense of worth as students (Snyder 1971) - information about development also informs about progress • Teaching about undergraduate & early adulthood development helps to contextualise the challenge of university with sensitivity and support

For students psychology is framed by their conceptions of knowledge, reflecting their development & epistemological reasoning • Perry (1970), Baxter Magolda (1992, 1999) - important cognitive developments in later adolescence and early adulthood • Conception of knowledge moves from an absolute to a more relativist position, eventually with commitment to a reasoned and evidence-based personal position. • Initially knowledge may be seen as fixed and absolute. From this point of view a good teacher and a good textbook lay out the facts and the student’s role is to learn them. The textbook especially is reverenced as the ultimate source of knowledge, the ultimate authority.

Undergraduates need help and support to manage the transitions that they face . • Transitions from • college or sixth form to university, • undergraduate first to second year, • second year to final year or sandwich placement • and then out of the university. • There is much literature on the first (Tinto, 1975) and student concern about entering the final year and leaving university. • Some of my students to have found the transition from first to second year the most difficult as they felt that much more was demanded of them academically.

Summary: Undergraduate development and employability – a road map for students • There is much that is mysterious to students about undergraduate study, their own intellectual growth and development, careers and the transition to adulthood. • Lecturers, in partnership with careers advisors, are the primary agents of challenge and support • Students may find it very helpful to have it laid out for them in a sort of road map - a module on the psychology of undergraduate and early adulthood development may help.

Peter Reddy & Liz Bland