An English degree is clearly not a directly vocational course: this is self evident in its content, but also reflected in the career destinations of our graduates, who regularly enter professions as widely diverse as journalism and accountancy. Although some universities include what might be thought of as vocational modules in their English degree courses (modules such as journalism or media and cultural studies), many English departments prefer a more purely academic module profile, focusing on literature for its own sake rather than leaning towards more vocational modules. This is, in my opinion, no bad thing: an English undergraduate at Reading might be expected to have chosen this degree course on just that basis, expecting to be guided along the fascinating pathways within the realms of English literature.
The problem for Schools of English such as ours is that in our enthusiasm to celebrate literature with our students, we might overlook the inherent vocational aspects of our course: we do, in fact, offer our students the chance to develop an impressive array of transferable skills and marketable personal qualities, we just have to hunt a bit harder to find them. I have lost count of the number of students who have approached me over the years to discuss their career options and, on being asked about their transferable skills base, earnestly assure me that they have absolutely no skills at all! Of course they have developed skills and personal qualities which would be attractive to an employer, they are simply unaware of them.
The Career Conundrum for Schools of English
For a School of English the challenge in teaching Career Management Skills (CMS) is how to package the qualities that our students have to offer, and how to encourage our students to remain idealistic and ambitious about their career choices whilst ensuring that they are ready to enter the career market effectively once they graduate. We need to protect our students from the nagging anxiety that they really should be work ready almost before they reach us: this could potentially undermine the whole point of an enlightening and intellectually invigorating degree course. Increased debt and a highly competitive graduate career marketplace inevitably bring pressures to bear on our students, but we naturally want the best for them, and this means allowing them to take time to consider what career would be most satisfying for them, which career path would most closely fit their life goals and aspirations.
If we are to do this effectively, any career management training must incorporate these ideals. A generic teaching model will form no more than the basis of our teaching activities: it must be adapted to suit the particular needs of our students.
For those working with English undergraduates the challenge is clear: students must learn to package themselves to perfection for the career market, whilst giving themselves time to consider every possible career choice, safe in the knowledge that this is, for most of them, the right way to approach the task ahead of them. We do have one advantage here over more vocational courses: most of our students can expect to undertake some form of training once they graduate if they are to succeed in their chosen careers. This training might take the form of a PGCE, one traditional route for English graduates, but we have found over the years that our graduates are equally attractive employees for a plethora of other professions. If an undergraduate is able to accept that further training might be necessary, then training within marketing, journalism, law or accountancy are equally possible, and might be more appealing for many of our students. A recent database created for the use of our current students focused on the career destinations of our most recent graduates, and it came as no surprise to find that a good proportion of those who responded to our request for information were happily embroiled in the most unexpected careers.
Teaching Career Management Skills
The destinations of some of our recent graduates is no great shock because we know, as educators, that our graduates leave us with a broad range of skills, most particularly skills of analytical criticism, effective communication and the ability to present ideas and evidence coherently and persuasively. What is more shocking is the spectacle of a group of students who can be effortlessly persuasive in a seminar setting being struck dumb at the thought of persuading employers at interview that they would be successful and productive employees. Students who can produce elegant essays frequently struggle to write an effective curriculum vitae; those who have no problem with a tight essay word count seem, initially, to be incapable of completing a succinct and well written application form.
Our key responsibility to our students is undoubtedly to provide them with an appreciation of English Literature by developing their analytical and communication skills: this is a lifelong gift that we offer our students. However, alongside this we also have a responsibility to prepare our students for their working lives: this is another lifelong gift, and one that we are well placed to offer.
For us, the answer has been to follow the CMS Module offered throughout the University of Reading, whilst adapting it to fit our needs. In the past the issue of career management has been left largely to students; they were encouraged to attend centrally organised careers fairs, and were made aware of the services provided by our Careers Advisory Service. The problem with this approach was that students often approached these resources too late (if at all) and so were not in the best position to profit from them. In this, career management is perhaps not so very different from other aspects of English teaching: it is not my experience that every student fully appreciates the need to grasp the intricacies of Shakespearean blank verse, and they may not, therefore, relish the hour we will spend together poring over twenty lines of blank verse from an obscure scene, but I know that they will bless me when it comes to exam time, and even (in my fondest hopes) when it comes to appreciating Shakespeare when they rediscover him in ten years’ time.
Students who can produce elegant essays frequently struggle to write an effective curriculum vitae
With this ideal in mind, Reading University instigated, five years ago, a generic, university-wide module entitled Career Management Skills. The module is compulsory for all undergraduates and has, from the outset, relied on contact teaching from each department (sometimes delivered by, or with the help of, our careers advisors), internet based learning materials (the vast majority of learning hours allocated to the module are self-directed, web-based learning) and the back up of our Careers Advisory Service. Despite an understandable caution about the introduction of the module (from academics and students alike), it has become an increasingly accepted, and acceptable, part of our undergraduates’ university experience.
The current module is still principally internet based, with students having the opportunity to access a range of materials on our university’s central CMS website. During this process they are encouraged to undertake personality and career preference tests; they can also access the latest information regarding the careers market and work through the advice offered on effective applications. The contact teaching time for the course (six hours for all of our students in the Autumn Term of their second year) is reserved for interactive aspects of the course. Students learn in a workshop style, exchanging ideas and working in small groups to analyse their transferable skills and personal qualities, to plan for effective applications and to improve their interview techniques. Assessment takes the form of three assignments: a personal profile essay (which includes an analysis of the personality preference tests and an assessment of the career market as it relates to their career goals), a CV and a career action plan.
Embedding the CMS Module
The assessment model outlined above reflects the way in which we have adapted the generic CMS module to suit our needs as a School of English. In particular, we have departed from the generic model by including a career action plan in our assessment. The personal profile and CV take the form of summative assessment of the 5-credit module; the action plan is formatively assessed as part of the ongoing process of career management and preparation by our students. We have taken this step partly in response to a perceived problem with the delivery of a generic CMS module throughout the university, and partly as a way of embedding the module within our normal teaching and pastoral programmes.
There is, inevitably, a temptation for our students to see the CMS module as simply another course to be completed before they move on to the next challenge. This is not an ideal way to approach the module: our hope is that we can guide our students towards a different approach, that of seeing the CMS assignments as a springboard from which they can continue to plan their careers throughout their time at university. Students often need an effective CV quickly if they are to be successful in applying for the most lucrative and satisfying vacation jobs; they also need to make an audit of their skills, experience and marketable qualities at this relatively early stage in their undergraduate course. In addition to this, we would like to encourage them to devote some time and energy to working towards long term career planning.
If we get this right, there are two huge advantages to implementing career action plans. Firstly, students can plan some of their activities around the targets they have outlined within their actions plans. Those with few presentation skills, for example, might choose to become more involved in seminar presentations, or join the debating society; those with poor IT skills might take advantage of our IT training courses. By constructing the action plan template in such a way that it can be continued throughout their course, students have the opportunity to make plans well in advance, gaining in confidence as they progress and thus both reducing their anxiety about their future career and boosting their ambition.
The Future of CMS
The second advantage is less obvious, but equally important. It is to be expected that academics will feel some reluctance to become directly involved in career management training for their students. This is perfectly understandable: lecturers pride themselves on the quality of their teaching, and would not wish to compromise this by attempting to teach a subject area in which they have no qualifications and, sometimes, very little experience. However, our lecturers do undertake to mark the assignments on this course, and feed back the results to their personal tutees as part of their programme of supporting the personal development of our students. For specialist help, such as detailed careers advice or interview training, they will send a student to our Careers Advisory Service. What academics do have to offer is a wealth of life experience, and we are often best placed, knowing our personal tutees so well, to discuss a student’s aspirations, fears and anxieties. With this in mind, the career action plan has been designed to be used as a discussion document, allowing personal tutors to extend their pastoral role by encouraging and guiding students through the process of change. This takes up no more of the academic’s time; it is simply a way of allowing a more structured discussion to take place.
It is perhaps this aspect of CMS training that is most vital to its future success. Academics are not necessarily in a position to offer more time to their students in order to help them to develop their career management skills, they do not necessarily want to undertake training in this area, but they do have the life experience and mature common sense to be of great service to their students, if only CMS is embedded in the curriculum – and in their timeframe – in a way that makes it no more of a burden, but does ensure that it is of the greatest relevance and value to both personal tutors and their tutees. Having worked through the implementation of a generic CMS teaching model we have moved some considerable way towards adapting and developing the model to suit the needs of our School. In future all English Schools and Departments will be in a position to do the same, and are likely to do so in order to engage their students, add value to the course and ensure that no precious research time is wasted on a less than perfect system.
In the future we anticipate continuing the development of an embedded CMS module within our normal teaching and pastoral activities. We have the facility to hyperlink any of our internet based learning websites to the university’s central CMS site, and we hope to use this feature to help our students to view career management as an everyday part of their university experience, rather than a discrete module: students who are preparing for a presentation, or analysing primary material, or planning their dissertations, will be able to see how these skills could help them to succeed in the career market. It will also allow students to value activities which fall outside the more traditional remit of Schools of English such as ours: creative writing is just one of these. In our School we have, for many years, welcomed a professional writer into our department, usually during the Spring Term, and in this way offered our students the chance to develop their creative writing skills. Student numbers on these optional courses vary from year to year, but we have signalled our enthusiasm for this mode of study by incorporating creative writing within our final year dissertation options.
The challenge with creative writing is therefore not necessarily one of asking students to engage with this form of intellectual and creative development, but of allowing them to see its benefit in terms of both their academic development and their long term career aspirations. As Mimi Thebo points out in her article ‘Employability and Creative Writing’, (English Subject Centre Newsletter 11, November 2006), we are caught here in a further conundrum. We know that courses such as creative writing can benefit our students enormously, but the measures used to quantify success in the area of employability are often too crude to recognise this. Entry into the Creative Industries may still be low paid or unpaid; as academics (many of whom will have entered their career in an ad hoc and relatively low paid position) we are still able to see the intrinsic value of these careers and the undergraduate training which led to them: sadly, the current statistical analysis model is unlikely to reflect this value.
However, a combination of creative writing (or other similar activities) and an effective CMS programme could help to overcome this problem to some extent. If we are, as Mimi Thebo suggests, to incorporate ideas of enterprise into our employability measures, and we were to trace, through CMS, the transferable skills base gained from such courses, then reason might prevail. We know that English undergraduates may take time to settle into a career (despite the anxiety of statistical compilers, this is, in my opinion, a good thing in many cases); we also know that they are likely to enter a plethora of careers (my two 2006 English graduates who are now investment bankers could testify to that). This being the case, an inspiring CMS programme, which allows students to identify their transferable skills and value their spirit of adventurous enterprise, can only be a good thing, for both the students and the institution.
Most importantly, the development of the CMS module will increase further the involvement of academics with this facet of our undergraduates’ lives. In this way it is hoped that all of us – student, academics and careers advisors – can become involved in our students’ career planning in the most efficient and productive way. Our students deserve to succeed in their chosen careers: we are determined to help them in every way that we can
