Employer Engagement for Employability

1. Employer Engagement for Employability

2. Programme 10.00 Arrival with coffee 10.15 Welcomes, introductions, overview, scope 10.30 – 11.15 Policy Overview 11.15 – 11.30 Coffee and comment 11.30 – 1.00 Keynote presentation and workshop 1.00-1.30 Lunch 1.30-2.15 Case Studies 2.15 – 2.45 Coffee and comment 2.45 – 4.00 Workshops

3. Welcome! Brief introductions.

4. ASHPIT – What and Why • ASHPIT is a think tank which will enhance the ability of researcher developers to deliver innovative discipline-appropriate support to researchers in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (ASH). • ASHPIT makes best use of limited resources and funding and is a way to: • embed and sustain best practice; • bring together good practice that has evolved during the period of Roberts funding and to disseminate it to the widest possible audience; • support capacity-building: sharing the resources and commitment means that institutions will be able to retain more than just the core functions that the current funding climate might otherwise dictate; • complement the existing Vitae regional hub model • support Vitae in responding to the recommendations of the Hodge Review

5. ASHPIT’s focus Our principle areas of investigation will be: Becoming a focus for ideas generation in targeted areas (public engagement, entrepreneurship, and employer engagement in year 1, impact and evaluation, researcher-led initiatives and TBC in year 2); Developing an implementation framework by ensuring training resources are evidence-based and reflect changes in policy (such as the move from the JSS to the RDF, the Concordat, and other policy initiatives as they arise); Coordinating the design and delivery of five innovative training courses to feed into the VITAE Database of Resources and the national VITAE training programme. This will include a review of existing resources/practice, a collaborative gap analysis, and a ‘policy-first’ approach to shaping new content. In pipeline: Public Engagement masterclass November 2011 and Youtube ‘100 stories’ initiative.

6. Why Policy Matters • Policy is important because…. • it shows us how we fit into the bigger picture (in terms of national policy and institutional policy); • it informs evidence-based practice (helps us keep up with trends and ensures on-going relevance to researchers and employers); • it gives us the information we need to write successful funding bids; • We need to read policy for: • Trends (alumni, entrepreneurship, widening participation, employer-led curricula); • Themes (discipline-sensitivity; STEM bias); • Funding opportunities and/or opportunities for collaborative practice (ASHPIT; AHRC/ESRC, Vitae, LEPs?)

7. Learning Outcomes for this session • By the end of this session you will have: • been introduced to key policy documents on employer engagement and employability as it relates to researchers • What is said about it? What are the implications for us? • been introduced to some examples of good practice in employer engagement and employability; What is it? How is it being done? • considered some of the challenges in engaging employers with ASH researchers and ASH researchers with employers; How can we do it well? • worked collaboratively to think about innovative ways of addressing the following three skills gaps identified by (some) employers as missing in (some) researchers: leadership skills, work experience and an ability to explain the value of their postgraduate degree • How can we develop good, sustainable practice?

8. What we are going to look at • 3 types of documents that can be helpful (and how they fit together); • Tracing themes; • What can we learn from what’s already been written; • What does this mean for ASSH researchers/researcher developers?; • Case Studies;

9. What policy and how does it fit together? Government Policy & Activity Particularly BIS Affected by change in govt; broader economic picture Impact Advisory & Representative Groups CIHE, EEUK, SSCs, HEA, UKCGE Surveys Related directly to skills development Leitch Review of Future Skills Needs in the UK (2006) HEA Exchange Magazine, Focus on the Postgraduate Student Experience (2009) The Value of Graduates and Postgraduates (Nov. 2009) Talent Fishing, What businesses want from postgraduates (2010) Research Councils AHRC & ESRC in particular, plus policy documents from RCUK Hidden Connections: Knowledge exchange between the arts and humanities and the private, public and third sectors (2011) RCUK Delivery Plan (2012-15) and respective training frameworks from AHRC and ESRC Universities Including UUK Vitae Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice (2009) Doctoral graduate destinations and impact three years on (2010) Hodge Review of Researcher Skills Development (2010) Smith Review - One Step Beyond: Making the most of the postgraduate education sector (2010) Researcher Developers The Concordat and the RDF/ RDS Researchers!

10. Employer engagement in Policy

11. Major Themes in Employer Engagement for Employability: From Dearing to Hodge and beyond • easy and coordinated access for SMEs to find out about services; • need for knowledge exchange between HEIs and business; • demand-led rather than centrally planned; • better engagement between employers and universities; • making postgraduate provision more responsive to the needs of employers and to prepare postgraduates for a range of careers; • systematic and frequent interactions; • the focus on employment needs is the driver for future developments of transferable skills training.

12. Employer Surveys

13. More recent recommendations from employer surveys • Engaging them how? • Not transactional but collaborative and relational. • Valuing the Views of Employers (Richard Brown [CIHE]) • Engaging them why? • Market-driven HE environment where employer- needs drive curriculum design and where employability is as important as technical skill; • Need for up-to-date information on skills needs; • More business experience opportunities for researchers; • Inform employers about misconceptions about skills of PG cohort and policy developments in PG training; • Mechanism for feedback. • The Value of Graduates and Postgraduates (Connor & Brown)

14. Why is it difficult to get businesses to engage with ASH (or at least AH)? • It is often notrelevant to their business and is not a factor in their competitiveness; • There is no information on the benefits of interactions; • There is no information on how to interact. • Hidden Connections • Increasingly under-resourced and lack time for anything beyond the essential. • AGC CE project preliminary findings

15. What do we want to get out of employer engagement ? • employability - “an individual's ability to gain initial employment, maintain employment, move between roles within the same organisation, obtain new employment if required and (ideally) secure suitable and sufficiently fulfilling work, in other words- their employability, more important than the simple state of being employed.” (Hillage and Pollard 1998 in What is Employability? Simon McGrath, UNESCO Centre for Comparative Education Research, School of Education, University of Nottingham, 2009). • An understanding of the skills needs of employers; • Hosts for placements; • Possible start of a longer-term relationship that might lead to a CDA or equivalent (via the BDE?); • Impact.

16. What are the challenges? • All employers want different things; Can we translate the global needs of employers into the individualised researcher training provision required by the research councils? • Expectation that HEI will do the leg-work on getting researchers ready for the workplace. Should businesses be more willing to take on some of this training/ acclimatisation?; • The skills most often-cited as lacking are not ‘teachable’: leadership, work experience, confidence; • Retaining a value to HE that goes beyond its use value to business.

17. What does employability mean for ASH researchers? • The picture is different for ASH in terms of destination, recruitment: • A higher proportion of ASH researchers stay in HE. But if they don’t, their destinations are very diverse with 10.3% going into ‘other’; • They are not necessarily a desirable commodity and this makes employer engagement challenging.

18. When we talk about employer-needs, are we asking enough about the changing skills needs of academia? Can seem ‘skills-free’. What are the skills needs of ‘other’?

21. Challenges To complete once presentation finished. Might not need a new approach to training. Might need a new approach to articulating skills via reflective practice – getting more out of less. On-going skills gaps: work experience, leadership, articulation of skills (plus ability to work in a team, confidence, interpersonal skills). Why do they continue to be ‘hard-to-reach’?

22. Examples of existing employer engagement activity Sarah Kerr & Rebekah Smith McGloin – University of Nottingham ResearcherCurator – employer engagement with a creative industry partner – challenges and……challenges! Elizabeth Wilkinson – University of Manchester The challenges of encouraging ASH engagement, both from postgrads and from ASH employers and alumni. Richard Carruthers – University of Southampton Southampton City Council Case Study for Humanities students.

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25. ResearcherCurator Group Researcher Placements in the Creative Industry: Challenges and….challenges! What was the original project? Why did we scale it down? Difficulties of working with the CIs – time and communications What skills did the students learn? How will they maximise the outcomes (reflective practice)

26. Action Reflection Action Reflection Action Reflection Emotions Internal experience Intention to learn Work place environment • Review • Goals • Frame • Goal-setting • Introduction to reflective practice • Careers context • Implement • Writing skills section of CV • Use newly-developed skills in research • Apply for other placements/ jobs • Reframe • Re-set goals • re-evaluate context Peer Support Other Grad School provision Careers Service Supervisor Support = Evaluation Point The Arts Graduate Centre Reflective Practice Model for Researcher Placements

27. Workshop • 45 minutes: Using some of the DoP headings in groups of 4 mind map an idea for a researcher development activity based around leadership/ articulating skills/ work experience. This might build on one of the case studies or might be an original idea. • 15 minutes: Report back to room. Peer feedback. • Are you interested in working with us to progress one of these ideas and transform it into an entry on the Vitae Database of Resources?

28. Headings from the Database of Practice Title Outline (the lift sell!) What (RDF-benchmarked) skills will this practice develop? Who is the audience? What are the aims & expected outcomes (short-term, medium-term, long-term)? Are there prerequisites for participation? How many can participate? How will you monitor effectiveness? What are the challenges (risk management)? What are the next steps?