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Integrating quantitative methods with the employability agenda

Integrating quantitative methods with the employability agenda. h.snaith@aston.ac.uk. Core claims and structure. What is employability? Why might there be a fit with QM? Reframing QM as employability learning Next steps. The context: the employability agenda.

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Integrating quantitative methods with the employability agenda

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  1. Integrating quantitative methods with the employability agenda h.snaith@aston.ac.uk

  2. Core claims and structure • What is employability? • Why might there be a fit with QM? • Reframing QM as employability learning • Next steps

  3. The context: the employability agenda • Originated in an HEA project with PIs Donna Lee/Emma Foster (Birmingham) • Initial results presented at PSA, full dissemination Summer 2013 • Rooted in low employment rates in politics • Aimed to explore academics’ experience of and attitudes towards employability • Differentiated between ‘elite’ and ‘new’ universities to consider whether the strategies pursued by each showed competitive differentiation

  4. Employability learning • ‘Employability’ a term that is inescapable within academia • Discourse originally about graduate skills, now increasingly about graduate employment – ‘the HEI employability agenda is rather less concerned with developing employable graduates as it is with employedgraduates’ • Employability learning is about giving students tools to manage their own careers • Skills based, experience based, and empowerment based • Of these the first is most commonly used, but the latter are just as important

  5. Why QM? • ‘Graduates need to be able to count to twenty without taking their shoes and socks off’ • One of the few areas of the politics/social science curriculum in which skills training is obvious • Students often don’t like it – partly because they view it as difficult (‘maths’), but partly because they think it is an intrusion into their degree • Numerical ability clearly is useful for employability – both in content terms (e.g. economics employment 90% rather than 60% for politics at Birmingham) and for graduate scheme apps • Also undergoing a pedagogical resurgence of late under pressure from government and private sector

  6. Reframing QM and employability • QM usually framed as skills – but can we shift the discourse towards experience or empowerment? • Considering assessments as reflections of things they would otherwise do • Raising numeracy for future careers – does this increase buy in or enthusiasm? • Making subject integration clear (curricular engagement e.g. Newcastle ESRC scheme) • But issues of resources, responsibility, and interest • Disconnect between what students say they want and what they do (‘I want a degree to get me a job’ ‘I will never use this module’)

  7. Next steps: working with students • Curricular work is often quite displaced from employability initiatives • Study at Loughborough (ESRC CI) – pre and post-testing of undergraduates in sociology, at Aston (linguistics), etc • Ideally follow a longitudinal cohort pre-and post employment engagement (e.g. placements) • Speaking to placements/careers services direct, not just academics

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