THE RESEARCH ISSUE
sending the lift back down – DEVELOPING A SCHOLARSHIP TEAM WITHIN A UNIVERSITY CAREERS SERVICE
Lynne Johnson, Learning and Professional Development Manager at The Open University (OU), describes the journey the service took in developing a scholarship team and shares the lessons learnt, from the challenge of getting practitioners on board to developing protocols for pitching ideas to the management team.
THE BIGGEST BARRIER WAS PSYCHOLOGICAL:
AN INTERNAL VOICE
HOLDING MANY OF US BACK AND TELLING US
WE WEREN’T CLEVER ENOUGH
OR THAT RESEARCH WAS NOT FOR US 18
PHOENIX JUNE 2020
S
tand up if you: consider yourself to be a curious person; have knowledge of students’ career motivations and barriers that academics may not be aware of; often find yourself asking why students think or behave in a certain way and whether things would be better if you did them this way or that. Sit down if you feel that research, for whatever reason, is not for you. This is how I launched our Scholarship Team at The Open University Careers and Employability Services (CES) conference in May 2019. We saw nearly all the 50+ people in the room launch themselves to their feet, only to sit back down again. I asked those interested in joining a scholarship group in CES to add their name to the flip chart as they left the room. I left with just two names.
NEW BEGINNINGS A year later we have a CES Scholarship Team comprising 12 members, most of whom are currently active in some sort of employability-related scholarship. If you already have an active and thriving scholarship team within your careers service, you may be interested to see if any of the
challenges we faced resonate with you, or whether you approached it in a different way. On the other hand, if your service is not involved in research, you might be interested in why we felt we needed a scholarship team and how we grew it from such tentative beginnings.
WHY DID WE BOTHER? The increased focus on student employability has encouraged academics to undertake research on students’ employability needs, employer engagement and skills development. At the OU, an Employability Scholarship Network was established to encourage this type of exploration. We noticed, however, that the voice of the careers professional was absent, even though our bread and butter work involved speaking to students about exactly this. Our insight was not being sought or shared; we needed to claim our professional expertise and take our place at the scholarship table.
WHAT WAS STOPPING US? As an operational team, our focus is on delivery and there is no time allocation or budget in our roles for research. There was no protocol of how to move to a more research-focused culture – no road map to
