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FINDING THE BALANCE IN RESEARCH
Mary Macfarlane, School Careers Consultant at Leeds Beckett University, describes the personal and strategic aims of her ongoing HECSU-funded research project. Here, she outlines her approach to balancing the core aims of the research with institutional drivers and value to the wider community of practice, and the incentives and disincentives that external funding creates.
Early in 2019, our team discussed a number of challenges, which we condensed down to one question: how do we influence conversations about career development that happen when we’re not in the room? As part of the answer, I developed an employability model which we have started to call the 4Cs. In late spring, we discussed how to road-test the model, and a colleague suggested the HECSU research fund. With exactly three weeks until the application deadline, it was just long enough to develop a project and write a bid.
PROFILE RAISING Taking part in research as a practitioner wasn’t a specific personal goal (although it was certainly something I was interested in), but taking a more active role in the wider community of practice was. Beyond personal development, I thought about my strategic aims within the institution. There was undoubtedly a need to raise the profile of employability within the institution, and to strive for a degree of consistency in the ways that teaching staff, senior leaders, and students themselves understood and talked about careers and work-based learning. We also lacked employability infrastructure: we have no cross-institutional employability forum or network, and our approach to embedding employability is somewhat uncoordinated.
The challenge was to balance these internal drivers with the need to make an original contribution to the wider community. One clear example of this was whether the project should centre on focus groups with students, or with staff. From the institution’s point of view, it made more sense to discover whether the model resonated with students, who are after all the end-users. I felt, however, that testing the model with staff – asking whether it could improve the sophistication of employability content in the curriculum, or the way that employability was discussed at strategic level — was a more original and compelling research topic. I reasoned that if testing the model with students was necessary to the university, then it didn’t require external funding: the point of funding was to do work that wouldn’t otherwise be done. My proposal therefore focused on staff.
REFLECTION: TEN MONTHS IN Surprisingly, the psychological effects of receiving funding have been more significant than receipt of the actual money. Firstly, it created accountability for me. The research timetable and deadlines I set as part of my application provided just enough pressure to prioritise the project. I did not foresee the flipside, however: I haven’t run any focus groups with students. Not including them in my research plan effectively deprioritised them.
Secondly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, being able to state that work undertaken is for an externally-funded research project can be a powerful charm in a university setting. This has given me the confidence and authority to ask academics for their time, and to approach senior leadership teams and members of the university executive. I have networked well outside my usual path and discovered who talks about employability at a strategic level, and with what degree of sophistication. I have found new allies and developed contacts that might help us create a more robust infrastructure for embedding career development learning across the university.
Over the next few weeks, as I gather my transcripts and data, I will find out whether I have succeeded in answering my research question. I can say, however, that I have met many of my personal and strategic aims. My recommendation to anyone considering a research project is that you should clarify all your different aims at the research design stage, and remember that what you propose will become your priorities.
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