The impact of shortening career guidance appointments

As financial funding models have changed in the higher education (HE) sector, careers services are increasingly pressured to prove that they 'add value'. Guidance appointments have been made shorter to accommodate the increase in need and demand for the services.

However, there is a distinct lack of research in existing literature that explores or testifies the impact this is having on practice on students.

Key findings

• Shortening appointment lengths leads to fewer guidance benefits for students.
• Students unequivocally would value more time in guidance appointments (specifically for 'wrapping up' the appointment/action planning).
• Guidance practitioners state that with additional time, they could have met 'underlying needs' rather than merely the 'presenting issues'.
• Students want guidance. They strongly value it and receive benefits from it.
• Guidance has a range of 'immediate, intermediate and more long-term outcomes'.
• Guidance is 'unexpectedly' useful - students have low or ill-defined expectations about what 'career guidance' is. This lack of expectations could impact on their perception of effectiveness.
• Guidance practitioners' perceptions of effectiveness rely on their perception of students 'being satisfied' - this research finds that guidance practitioners are highly skilled 'experts' who are qualified to make judgements on student needs, yet still judge their own effectiveness by how 'satisfied' students are rather than their own perceived ability.

What's inside

This research report captures:

1. students and guidance practitioner's perceptions of appointment length
2. effectiveness of guidance (over merely capturing student 'satisfaction') by what students did three months after their appointment
3. what 'career guidance' and 'effectiveness' are
4. the impact of guidance, and 'outcomes' from guidance
5. the voice of guidance practitioners, relating to student 'wants' and 'needs'
6. why students use careers services and what they feel they gain from it.

This research report recommends that:

• services continue to invest in career guidance provision
• professional bodies provide guidance on the standard length of guidance appointments
• further research is conducted into the 'expectations' of service-users, and consideration given to how developing these might inform practice at local and national levels
• guidance practitioners and services consider more pre-contracting work (micro and macro scales) to help in clarifying 'wants' and 'needs', with pre-work having been done before the guidance intervention
• better profiling of the profession and the work we do (a joint effort).

About the report

Length Matters: The impact of the shortening of guidance appointments on practice was supported by the HECSU research fund.

Emily Róisín Reid is the senior careers consultant at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick. She is also a part-time practitioner researcher, who passionately believes in upholding the endeavour to use research to inform her practice and vice versa.

Abstract

Until now there has been a lack of research exploring the impact on students of shortening guidance appointments to accommodate increasing demand

In the present climate, the corridors of higher education institutions (HEI) seem to reverberate to cries of: 'Office for Students', 'TEF', 'graduate outcomes', 'tuition fees', 'industrial strategy' etc. The employability narrative derives from these massive shifts, meaning a focus on graduate outcomes that has (at strategic level anyway) never been so great. For students however, 'employability' has always hung like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Careers and employability services are under the spotlight. Career guidance remains one intervention (of many in our repertoire) for which there is a mountain of evidence to support not only its substantial impact (in terms of long-term outcomes), but also the claim that it directly champions the autonomy of the individual and advances the cause of social justice.

A paradox exists: despite this 'employability' narrative, and talk of how important direct labour market outcomes are (for the economy, not necessarily the individual), career guidance remains under-resourced (in HE and beyond). Moreover, guidance appointments have been made shorter to accommodate the increase in need and demand for the services.1 Until now, there has been a distinct lack of research that explores or testifies the impact this is having on practice and on students.

Length affects the 'value' of outcomes

This research finds that:

• Time impacts the perceived 'benefits' of guidance, and what is possible to discuss within and gain from an appointment.
• Guidance practitioners state that, with additional time, they could have met 'underlying needs' rather than merely the 'presenting issues'.
• Students unequivocally value more time in guidance appointments (specifically for 'wrapping up' the appointment/action planning).
• Guidance has a range of 'immediate, intermediate' outcomes (and points at 'longer-term' outcomes too).
• Students want guidance. They strongly value it and receive benefits from it (even with time constraints).

Importantly, this research heard the voice of guidance practitioners. In the research, they identified that time prohibited them from meeting students' underlying needs as well as 'presenting issues'. When first asked about their perception of appointment length, students on the whole reported that it was 'about right'. However, when probed, this quickly unraveled into students unequivocally stating they would value more time. They found it harder to account for exactly what they would use the time for (which was the opposite of guidance practitioners), but pointed to 'wrapping up/action-planning'.

To make sense of this, it is important to acknowledge that a student's perception of time is limited to their standpoint (i.e. that of a non-expert) when compared directly to perceptions of guidance practitioners (i.e. the qualified expert). Guidance skillfully helps students become aware of some of the things that lie beyond their immediate awareness, and therefore, asking them to identify whether they had explored everything within the allocated time is counterproductive for things that remain in their 'blind spot'.

Guidance was consistently identified as a diverse exposition of practitioner skill, and students were able to identify a range of techniques and skills used by practitioners. Guidance was also found to have 'outcomes' and 'impact', which was tested for after a three-month period. This attempted to capture the 'impact' over and above 'student satisfaction'.

The service ramifications are explored within the full research report, but fundamentally this research highlights that the shortening of guidance appointments might be driving a false economy if it encourages 'repeat custom' due to running out of time.

Guidance is 'unexpectedly' useful

Students have low or ill-defined expectations about what 'career guidance' is. This lack of expectations could impact on their perception of effectiveness.

The extent to which students found guidance to be 'unexpectedly' useful was (ironically) not expected. When explored, this sense of unexpectedness reveals a distinct lack of understanding as to what career guidance is, which when extrapolated is indicative of a wider problem that plagues career guidance as a profession: a poor social contract that defines the work that we do.

The implication here is that, if the student 'bar' for 'effective guidance' is so low, or non-existent, then hypothetically any help & support they receive would exceed their expectations. It is suggested that further study investigates this area, but also that we all have a role to play in establishing this social contract, and absolutely need to invest in it at national level.

How practitioners judge effectiveness

Guidance practitioners are highly skilled 'experts' who are qualified to make a judgement on student needs and yet still judge their own effectiveness by how 'satisfied' students are, rather than their own perceived ability.

This research found that guidance practitioners' perceptions of how effective their appointments had been rested almost entirely on whether they believed students were 'satisfied' (or otherwise). While satisfaction is one measure of effectiveness, it is interesting that this is the overriding measure, as opposed to the experts' opinion of how effective their appointment was. It is hoped that guidance practitioners can reflect on this finding, and how this might interact with the previous findings (and the 'professionalism' of guidance).

Next steps

This research report recommends that:

• services continue to invest in career guidance provision
• professional bodies provide guidance on the standard length of guidance appointments
• further research is conducted into the 'expectations' of service users, and consideration is given to how developing these expectations might inform practice at local and national levels
• guidance practitioners and services consider more pre-contracting work (micro and macro scales) to help in clarifying 'wants' and 'needs', with pre-work having been done before the guidance intervention
• better profiling of the profession and the work we do (a joint effort).

Recommendations are made that more research is conducted into this area, with a view to informing a recommended or standard 'length' for guidance appointments to be set by our professional bodies, which is considered useful to the wider effort when looking at 'professionalising' careers work.

More needs to be done around developing the 'expectations' of those accessing our services, both at micro and macro level, in order to establish a new 'social contract' of what one might expect from careers work. This absolutely needs to be a 'joint effort' and everyone has a role to play: individual practitioners, colleagues, services, institutions, professional bodies and the government.

Above all, guidance needs to be successfully resourced properly in order to deliver the higher-end outcomes that it is capable of achieving.

Notes

1. Frigerio, 2010; Nijjar, 2009.

Written by

Emily Róisín Reid

Senior careers consultant

Warwick Medical School