I’ve been researching what Stanford calls the ‘Connections Model’ of career services, for an upcoming article in AGCAS Phoenix magazine and a talk at the next AGCAS Annual Conference. I wanted to share the main influences here, and my interpretation of the connection model, and how it fits in with the evolution of career services in UK higher education.
A quick summary of Stanford’s new model is here; ‘Vision 2020’ (punny!) is all about creating career communities, and I really like this how this integrating theoretical standpoints (role modelling, community interaction theory, social learning theory, self-efficacy outcomes) and strategic opportunities (internal and external engagement through increased partnership working). While we’re doing ‘background reading’, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re in the mood for big thinking, check out Wake Forest’s Andy Chan talking about why ‘Career Services Must Die’ for a similar, but slightly different argument on moving away from a ‘dispensary’ service.
Farouk Dey from Stanford University used the idea of a connections model as the basis for an article posted on LinkedIn recently, theorising ‘Future Trends in [University] Career Services’, which incorporated a diagram which caught my eye:
On top of my scepticism that pretty much everything career services appears to happen in neat 20 year cycles, I think there’s another reason that this doesn’t feel right to me. It’s those end dates.
Many career professionals, I expect, will look at that diagram and think ‘we’re just getting good at our placement model’, or ‘our career counselling gets more effective each year’. The end dates imply that we don’t need any of these things any more. I’m not sure that that’s the case; I see connections and communities work as a way of growing what we can offer.
The other issue is that I don’t think this accurately represents the careers service models in the UK, which have focused much more on careers education and embedding employability in the curriculum than US services, as far as I can tell.
I’ve always liked the analogy of career services ‘teaching students how to fish’ [for jobs, to be clear, just in case this gets anachronistically reblogged by Angling Times].
- Job placement – “Here’s a fish for you!”
- Careers information – “Here’s a list of inspiring fishing websites”
- Careers advice – “You might have more luck fishing if you…”
- Career counselling – “You say you can’t/won’t/shouldn’t fish… Tell me more about that”
- Careers education – “This course will teach you how to fish”
- “Professional networking – “Use this service to talk to those who’ve fished lots”
- Connections model – Student looks up. He’s in his normal routine, but there’s a whole load of peers, staff and alumni talking about fishing. Right there.
I think we need all these aspects to make a careers service work well. If you’ve never heard of a fish before, you won’t go fishing! If you can’t/won’t fish, sometimes a community around can help, but only if it was a lack of them and their influence that was the problem.
I’ve sketched out how I think of the evolution of career services in the UK Higher Education world, and how I think career connections and communities fits in. I think ideas of the connections model are big, and important, but we don’t want to lose sight of the great work already built. Not everyone learns to be an angler, just because everyone in their university ecosystem knows how to fish. But that’s got to help.
A proposed model of the evolution of UK career services
careerslucy.wordpress.com 
August 12, 2014 at 7:47 pm
Hi Lucy, a really thought provoking post. Have to say, I find myself nodding in agreement at your views around connectivity and community, especially in terms of theory triangulation and its real meaning to guidance professionals and services. The idea of an ecosystem really sits well with embedding careers services into the curriculum and it is an approach that I think UK HE institutions have/are adopting (hence the AGCAS conference theme I suppose!). I agree entirely on your point on the cycle end dates much in the same way as people talk of generation x,y etc. In practice things are not that delineated. Anyway it has certainly got me thinking of our place in the community model in that are we moving from producers to facilitators.
August 13, 2014 at 12:46 pm
Thanks Leigh, I really appreciate the feedback. I like your last point about producer moving to a facilitator.
I think that this is a bigger shift in how professionals seek to work in general – less of a dispensary (from experts to consumers) and more looking at building a shared environment. For evidence, look at the NHS Foundation Trusts seeking local community governors, or the amount of services developing ‘peer supporters’, ‘client steering groups’ and alumni mentoring networks.
It influences universities more broadly too. In an age when the internet will dispense information at low/no cost, the USP for a physical university course is the community element.
I think those clients who arrive with that mentality are the ones really fuelling student-generated, facilitated, elements of what we do. I worry about those who just want to be dispensed to, though – we need to make sure we bring them with us, or risk even more unequal patterns of student engagement.
August 13, 2014 at 2:56 pm
This is really interesting, Lucy! Building a shared environment and using student-generated knowledge are positive shifts and things we should be embracing. I get what you are saying about bringing others with you, but we risk more by not changing. Plus I’m not against packaging information in different ways for different people.
I came across Oxford’s Career Lounges a while ago. That seems like a really interesting idea to develop discussion around a topic, use careers advisers as facilitators and get positive student involvement. How have they worked?
August 12, 2014 at 9:59 pm
Really liked the article, very interesting, especially liked the bit about fishing.
August 13, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Thanks Tom! The fishing is definitely a hit!
August 14, 2014 at 12:11 pm
Just as an extra thought (I went back and gave the article a second read) I have a question around your pyramid. It has a Bloom like feel to it which to me, alongside the use of the idea of evolution, implies that networking is in some way a progression from counselling and education etc. I can see that it is less directive, more based around the students own network and experiences than us telling what to do/ think. But my big question is about what careers services “do” in this model. Do we just encourage networking opportunities, facilitate volunteering and placements, give seminars on Linked In etc? How especially do we encourage critical thinking in a networking model? Me fear is that some people push networking at the expense of traditional self awareness/ opportunity awareness. The theory is that if you find someone to support you then you get the output you need (a graduate level job?) with less actual thought. Does networking represent evolution or a down playing of critical thinking in careers development?
October 15, 2014 at 11:03 am
Hi Tom, sorry not to spot your reply until now. I appreciate the comment – it’s an interesting one, as I didn’t really think about the idea of the blocks adding to the top of the pyramid being necessarily ‘better’ or at the expense of what had laid a foundation for them. It was more thinking about what’s been added to the whole picture of ‘what we can do’ – what’s the ‘next level added’ to a structure that still relies on the levels below.
I think the idea on teaching or guiding towards that concept of ‘metacognition’, critical thinking and self-awareness is most visible in the ‘careers education’ and ‘counselling’ layers, but having these as part of the structure allow us to ‘do’ placement or networking with that in our toolkit. This is why the idea of discrete phases didn’t seem right – we don’t just build on what’s gone before, new ‘trends’ shed new light on old skills, and new elements we adopt are illuminated by prior knowledge.
I hope that shares my thoughts in a way that does your thoughful comment justice!