RESEARCHER’S DIGEST

DR JULIA YATES, Associate Professor in Organisational Psychology at City, University of London, shares her latest digest of careers-related research.

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EVALUATION OF CAREER INTERVENTIONS

Soares, J., Carvalho, C., & Silva, A. D. (2022). A systematic review on career interventions for university students: Framework, effectiveness, and outcomes. Australian Journal of Career Development, 31(2), 81-92.

Soares and colleagues have been looking for research that evaluates career interventions in higher education (HE) across the world. They found over 500 articles published since 2000 that focused on career support in HE, but when they narrowed it down to studies that offered some empirical evaluation of real interventions, they ended up with just 26 papers, out of which only two were conducted in the UK. As well as highlighting concerns about the total number of evaluations that have been published, Soares et al. ’ s paper also raises some questions about the relevance of these studies. The career interventions that were evaluated ranged from 40 minutes to 480 minutes per session, and not a single one looked at isolated sessions – their interventions ranged from 2 to 36 sessions. Given that many career interventions in HE in the UK are fairly short and often one-off, we could ask whether these evaluative studies are useful in our context at all. More positively, the authors conclusively reported that career interventions work. The studies showed that the interventions had a positive impact on students ’ career self-efficacy, career decisionmaking, career planning, job-hunting skills, career exploration, adaptability, perceived employability and optimism. The message is that yes, career interventions do work and have a wide range of benefits, but we desperately need more real-world evidence that reflects the context and approaches we use.

EMPLOYABILITY ACTIVITIES

Jackson, D., & Tomlinson, M. (2022). The relative importance of work experience, extra-curricular and university-based activities on student employability. Higher Education Research & Development, 41(4), 1119-1135.

This study looked at a group of UK and Australian students to see what kind of activities made them feel more employable. The authors found that the more closely the activity related to their career plans, the more useful the students thought it was. Only a quarter of students engaged in extra-curricular activities at university because they did not see how these activities could benefit their future careers and could not see what value the activities would bring beyond their intrinsic enjoyment. The authors suggest that career practitioners could usefully spend time explaining the importance of extracurricular activities to students and highlighting the transferable skills they offer. 40% of the students surveyed reported that they engaged in career service events (which seems like a pleasing proportion), and nearly half of the students engaged in activities that were explicitly linked to their own career development, most commonly internships. Overall, the activities helped students with their career development through increased confidence in their understanding of the labour market and increased perceptions of their own employability.

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WORKPLACE SKILLS

Bayerlein, L., Hora, M. T., Dean, B. A., & Perkiss, S. (2021). Developing skills in higher education for postpandemic work. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 31(4), 418-429.

This study focused on the kinds of skills that graduates now need to offer in our new post-pandemic, hybrid workplaces. Bayerlein and colleagues discuss the seismic changes that we have seen in the physical work arrangements, the way we define workplace interactions and our engagement with customers, and they explain that these changes are likely to have a long lasting and profound impact on the way we work. Our graduates will need an enhanced set of skills to navigate these new working practices and the article discusses ways to ensure that our graduates are equipped with the technological and remote-working skills that they need, on top of everything else we are supposed to teach them. The authors argue that the best mechanism through which to teach these skills is workintegrated learning within the curriculum, through placement-based experiences or in-class activities that reflect authentic work scenarios. They point out the importance of activities that connect students to current workplace practices and note the increase in digital work-integrated learning opportunities such as virtual internships. The authors explain that because many HE lecturers have limited experience of other workplaces, they are not wellplaced to educate students in the new ways of working and suggest that universities will need to invest substantially in order to find the best ways to ensure that graduates are offered the right balance of skills training.

MODEL OF CAREER REGRET

Budjanovcanin, A., & Woodrow, C. (2022). Regretting your occupation constructively: A qualitative study of career choice and occupational regret. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 103743.

Based on in-depth interviews with 51 regretful workers, Budjanovcanin and Woodrow have developed a model of career regret – the emotion we experience when believing that our current career situation would be better, had we made a different decision earlier on. The authors have identified five career regret profiles:

Early Responders identify their career regret early on, and make a decision to do something about it, changing their occupation before much time has passed. Stagnators are people who have lived with their career regret for some time, but have not done much to address it. They actions are more often focused on mitigating the effects of the regret, so they might focus on taking holidays or retail therapy rather than re-training or changing careers. Crystallisers often start off as Stagnators, but have a moment of clarity in which they fully understand what has happened to them, and realise what it is they need to do to change it. These are likely to respond by changing their occupation. Reconcilers are those who, after a period of regret come to understand what has led to their regret but make their peace with their situation rather than trying to change it. Explorers are pro-actively addressing their career regret, through exploring alternative career options with a career coach, or perhaps taking a course to develop a new skill.

This taxonomy could be useful to those of us working with career changers to help them recognise where they are right now, and what they might need to do next.

julia.yates.1@city.ac.uk

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