Embedding employability, a
subject perspective
Paper 140
HEA STEM Conference, Edinburgh
30 April – 1 May 2014
Peter Reddy, Aston University
Caprice Lantz, University of York
Julie Hulme, Discipline Lead: Psychology, HEA
Why a Guide for Departments on Employability
in Psychology?
• Employability - major theme across UK HE
– importance is clear in the 2011 report on The future of
undergraduate Psychology education in the United Kingdom
– key issue for applicants, students, parents and advisors
• Semi-vocational position of psychology makes it particularly
important for our discipline
Why is employability important for Psychology?
• Growth – there are a lot of psychology graduates
• BSc is non-vocational, professional selection at 22+, not 18+
• Students may
– identify with ‘their’ discipline
– overestimate vocational opportunities
– fail to respond to wider opportunities
• We have a responsibility to our students, and to psychology
• Employability is a psychological concept – this is our territory
Growth
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Psychology f/t undergraduate numbers increased
– 25,847 in 1998/9
– 44,945 in 2008/9
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More broadly
– 50,000 university students in 1939,
– just over twice that in 1961,
– 300,000 in 1980 and
– about 2,500,000 now
– large increases in women, postgraduate and part-time students.
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Two thirds of current universities did not exist 20 years ago and in
1981 nearly half of the 46 degree awarding universities were less
than 20 years old.
What do we mean by employability?
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The USEM model (Yorke and Knight, 2004)
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Yorke (2006) employability - the achievements of the graduate and potential
to obtain a ‘graduate job’.
Understanding, of disciplinary material and, how the world works
Skilful practices in context, whether discipline based or more generic
Efficacy beliefs, including a range of personal attributes and qualities
Metacognition, including the capacity for reflection and self-regulation
– ‘… skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates
more likely to gain employment and be successful … benefits
themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’
Yorke (2004)
….defining employability
• Harvey (2004) - on-going developmental process, about
developing critical, empowered learners.
• Lowden, Hall, Elliot and Lewin (2011) distinguish
– narrow focus on skills and attributes
– broader approach (including skills and attributes) based on
values, intellectual rigor and engagement
What do our students have to offer?
• The QAA (2010) subject benchmark statement for psychology
– “…due to the wide range of generic skills, and the rigour with which
they are taught, training in psychology is widely accepted as
providing an excellent preparation for many careers. In addition to
subject skills and knowledge, graduates also develop skills in
numeracy, teamwork, critical thinking, computing, independent
learning and many others, all of which are highly valued by
employers” (p.2).
– “psychology is distinctive in the rich and diverse range of attributes
it develops – skills that are associated with the humanities (e.g.
critical thinking and essay writing) and the sciences (hypothesistesting and numeracy)” (p.5).
Generic skills: Psychology graduates
should be able to:
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Communicate
Comprehend and use data.
Be computer literate.
Retrieve and organise information
Handle primary source material critically
Teamwork
Problem solve and reason scientifically
Make critical judgements and evaluations
Be sensitive to contextual and interpersonal factors
Use effectively personal learning and project management skills, becoming
more independent and pragmatic as learners
– a mix of people skills and intellectual skills
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As Trapp, Banister, Ellis et al (2011) point out, these are not exclusive to
psychology but the full set has a remarkable reach and scope
Is teaching for employability a betrayal of the
university tradition?
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The idea of liberal education is notoriously ambiguous but Newman
defended it in the 19th Century from the kind of utilitarianism satirised
by Dickens in Hard Times
– Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything
else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing
else will ever be of any service to them.
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Includes the idea that the pursuit of knowledge brings liberation from
dogma and illusion, and develops epistemic virtues
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Barnett (2009) suggests that we talk now of skills rather than
knowledge but that learning and understanding (making knowledge
your own) has implications for being
Fitting employability into the university
mission 1
• Employability broadly defined is an ally of scholarship and an
integral part of educating the mind and cultivating
understanding.
• University is about
– ways that assumptions can be questioned,
– problems solved and
– boundaries extended
– as well as the transmission of established knowledge and
skills.
Fitting employability into the university
mission 2
• Student interest in careers is really about their own being and
becoming, not just about getting a job
• Employability embraces
– self-knowledge and awareness,
– skills in research & analysis,
– construction of adult professional identity
– development of sophisticated epistemological awareness
– aims at the development of reflective, critically aware and
ethically informed global citizens.
Definitions of learning
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Biggs (1999).
– ‘As we learn, our conceptions of phenomena change and we see
the world differently. The acquisition of information in itself does
not bring about such change, but the way we structure that
information and think with it does. Thus education is about
conceptual change, not just the acquisition of information.’
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Barnett (1990).
– ‘The learning that goes on in higher education justifies the label
“higher” precisely because it refers to a state of mind over and
above the conventional recipe or factual learning.’
• Cited in Brockbank and McGill (2007) pps 17-18
How can we support employability?
• See case studies – lots of ideas and examples
• This is not prescriptive – we hope it will stimulate creativity in
psychology education and move the debate about aims, content
and method onwards
• Work experience for example
– There is a sandwich placement tradition….
– Most students also work part-time…
– …there is emerging practice in getting students to use, apply
and reflect on psychology in their workplaces
Teaching for employability
• Promote deep engagement with subject
– An intention to understand, interest in a subject and a desire
to achieve competence, read widely and relate new learning
to previous knowledge, intrinsic motivation, use of evidence,
inter-relating ideas.
• Meaning is generated through conversation, student activity &
interaction (Gibbs, 2002)
• The teacher is critical in creating the ‘object of study’ for the
student, needs to empathise so as to frame material in a way
that can be understood.
Psychology is at the heart of employability
• It is the academic heart of work and organisational behaviour
and informs human resource management, careers guidance,
coaching and consultancy.
• Psychologist, know thyself
– We address the individual and are concerned with selfawareness, growth and development, social behaviour and
cognition.
• We are a strongly research-focused discipline and employability
emphasises being able to bring research and critical thinking
skills to bear.
Content 1 - Personal Development Planning
• To help students “plan, integrate & take responsibility for their
personal, career & academic development, identifying learning
opportunities within their academic programmes & extra-curricular
activities”
• Uses personal profiles, skills audits, action plans, progress files,
academic and personal records, learning portfolios and reflective
logs to capture activity, reflection on activity and evidence of
development.
• Can be part of a structured tutorial programme, a work or
placement preparation or a psychology in practice module
– needs to be included early, be mandatory and credit bearing.
Curriculum content for employability 2
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Psychology of undergraduate and early adult development.
– Teaching students about their own development can help them
reflect on their changing thinking and reasoning
– Lifespan development - Erikson (1978), Levinson (1996)
– Late adolescent / early adult cognitive development / development
of epistemological reasoning. Perry (1970) - evolution of male
student reasoning from thinking dualistically, to taking multiple
perspectives and using relativistic terms, and finally, to making a
commitment to what they value.
– Baxter Magolda (1992) development of epistemological reasoning
in female students
– Piaget, Vygotsky and Kohlberg - cognitive development and moral
judgement in later childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.
Curriculum content for employability 3
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Cognitive psychology - meta cognition, meta-cognitive development
and implications for study
Social psychology – relationships, their formation and dissolution
Personality psychology - occupational choice in the context of e.g.
locus of control
Individual differences and career psychology
– the ‘matching’ model - self-knowledge in relation to occupational
information (e.g. Holland, 1985).
– early adult move from idealism and exploration to greater realism
taking account of life roles & context (e.g. Super,1979)
– constructivist theory (Savickas, 2005) - vocational personality, life
themes, and career adaptability
• encourages individuals to go beyond objective understanding
of types and traits to query their subjective experiences of
themselves and the world around them.
Employability and the psychology professions
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BSc Psychology vocational aspects are largely illusory – only 20%
enter professional psychology, BSc only gets you to the start line
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Students easily underestimate how difficult it is to enter the psychology
professions
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We all want our student to have the best shot at the psychology
professions but needs a sensitive touch – see next slide
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We must show our students
– the breadth of opportunity they have as well as the routes into
professional psychology
– how a grounding in psychology (psychological literacy) has value
and applicability in work and life
Clinical psychology
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Risks dominating career aspirations –
positioned as the best career, and for
the best
a red rag to the able, committed,
focused and successful
placement year seen as a unique
opportunity to short-cut the intense
competition for graduate assistant
posts
is it what students mean by
psychology?
staff want all to be ambitious and to
have opportunities
exposes poverty of students’ careers
thinking; we need wider models
“I think we have been really pushed
into (it)… a careers talk … that’s
when it started … very, very early on
in my degree.
…when you do your placement, and
you see people who are in that
career … and they’re telling you, you
know, we’ve done it, you can do it,
and it’s having those people telling
you that, that really pushes you...
It definitely… was put on a pedestal
as… this is one of the big jobs you
can do… …one of those jobs that it’s
so rewarding. …it can grow into you
that clinical is the best of the best
and if you achieve that you really
have made it.