Category: employability

  • Graduate careers and employability are now fundamental to institutional success

    Graduate careers and employability are now fundamental to institutional success

    Higher education institutions are navigating one of the most complex operating environments in their history.

    Financial pressure, demographic change, regulatory scrutiny, political scepticism, and shifting student expectations are no longer episodic challenges, they are structural conditions. One function increasingly sits at the centre of institutional success and risk: careers and employability.

    Graduate outcomes are no longer a background metric; they shape league tables, influence recruitment, inform regulatory judgements, and increasingly underpin public and political confidence in higher education. But their significance goes far beyond compliance. Careers and employability are now where strategy, regulation, and student experience collide.

    From bolt-on to backbone

    For many years, professional careers work in higher education was framed – often unconsciously – as a support service operating at the margins of the academic project. Careers services were unfairly characterised as cardigans and chamomile in a cupboard in a quiet corner of campus. Valuable, certainly, but supplementary. That framing could not be further from the truth today.

    Over the last 15 years we have seen a wide range of regulatory changes in HE (particularly in England) including the Teaching Excellence Framework, the tightening of access and participation regulation, the Graduate Outcomes survey, or the debate around fees. In practice, this has shifted careers and employability from the periphery to the core of institutional performance.

    Careers teams are now the heartbeat of access and participation commitments, facilitating and supporting curriculum design and assessment, driving progression outcomes, and at the intersection of institutional risk and reputation.They are shaping the conditions under which universities can evidence quality, value, and legitimacy.

    More than a metric

    It is understandable that the sector has been wary of graduate outcomes being reduced to a blunt proxy for value. But rejecting the importance of outcomes altogether is neither realistic nor desirable. Graduate outcomes matter because graduates matter, and graduate destinations are not just a metric; they are a test of purpose. Every regulatory data point represents a graduate life shaped by institutional choices about curriculum, opportunity, support, and inclusion.

    Careers and employability professionals work in that space every day, translating learning into identity, helping students navigate uncertainty, and addressing structural inequalities that regulation increasingly demands institutions confront.This is skilled, strategic work. It requires data literacy, policy fluency, pedagogical understanding, and deep employer insight.

    One of the clearest lessons of the regulatory environment is that employability cannot be “fixed” by a single team. No careers service, however strong, can alone address continuation risks, differential outcomes, or progression gaps rooted in curriculum design, assessment practice, or institutional culture. Contemporary careers and employability requires academics embedding employability meaningfully into learning, scalable work-based learning opportunities, aligned systems and student support, senior leadership expectation setting and accountability and employers as partners.

    As Lisa-Dionne Morris put it at our Annual Conference last year: “it takes a village to raise a child, and a whole university to make a student employable.” Careers services remain the engine room of this work, but they are most effective when employability is treated as a strategic, institution-wide endeavour, not a delegated function.

    Public confidence, political scrutiny, and the graduate narrative

    Beyond regulation, careers and employability now sit at the heart of a wider reputational challenge for higher education. Public confidence in universities has been strained by debates about value for money, fairness, and relevance. Graduate outcomes, rightly or wrongly, have become a proxy for these concerns.

    This is why the creation and fulfilling of opportunity features so prominently in the current Universities UK work on HE reputation in society. Careers and employability offer one of the most tangible, human responses to scepticism: evidence that higher education enables social mobility, economic participation, and meaningful contribution.

    This is not about reducing education to salary metrics. It is about demonstrating that universities help people build sustainable lives and purposeful futures. These are outcomes that matter to individuals, communities, and policymakers alike. This is why the vast majority of our members got into this line of work, and what motivates them to succeed.

    A moment of change

    Over the past year, the professional community supporting this work has been reflecting deeply on its future. Through a large-scale listening exercise, careers and employability professionals made their views clear: the work has evolved, expectations have risen, and the structures supporting it need to evolve too. That reflection has led to a significant moment of renewal.

    AGCAS (The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services) is becoming the Graduate Futures Institute. This change reflects a broader shift in how careers and employability are understood and positioned. The new name signals our holistic focus on graduate futures – not just immediate graduate destinations, an inclusive view of who contributes to graduate success and a commitment to impact, leadership and quality.

    It recognises that careers and employability are not ancillary to university success – they are fundamental to it.

    Careers leadership is institutional leadership

    One of the most striking changes in recent years has been the role of careers leaders themselves. They now operate at the intersection of regulation, pedagogy, strategy, and performance. They advise on risk, shape institutional narratives, and increasingly sit at tables where decisions about quality, investment, and accountability are made. This is why leadership development and collective voice matter so much in this space.

    The Graduate Futures Institute exists to support that leadership; equipping practitioners to engage confidently with policy, influence institutional strategy, and articulate the value of their work in a regulatory environment that demands clarity and evidence.

    Universities are unlikely to see regulatory pressure ease in the near future. If anything, expectations around outcomes, value, and accountability will intensify. In that context, careers and employability are a strategic asset to be invested in, not a reputational risk to be managed.

    Graduate Futures Institute members will make that strategic intent a reality. They connect students to opportunity, institutions to purpose, and regulation to lived experience. If universities are serious about success, then they must be serious about careers and employability.

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  • The post-matrix university – trust, relevance, and the politics of plugging back in

    The post-matrix university – trust, relevance, and the politics of plugging back in

    Earlier this year the University of East London’s Child Online Harms Policy Think Tank, launched in the House of Lords. At that launch, I first properly heard a phrase I’d only half-registered before, but which I now can’t stop thinking about: “escaping the matrix.”

    For some young people, especially those immersed in online influencer culture, the phrase signals a rejection of conformity – a desire to think critically about the systems they’ve inherited. In its healthiest form, it’s scepticism. But in darker online spaces – the so-called “manosphere” – that questioning turns toxic. The “matrix” becomes a conspiracy; feminism is blamed for personal hardship; and traditional institutions, universities included, are dismissed as irrelevant or even hostile.

    Here’s the irony: many of the same influencers peddling these anti-institution narratives are running their own “universities” – online courses, masterclasses, mentorships. The hunger to learn hasn’t gone away. What’s being rejected isn’t learning – in fact, more 18-year-olds than ever entered higher education this year – but the institutions seen to control it.

    So, what should universities make of this moment? The answer is not to bend to the whims of misogynist influencers, but to reflect on why so many young people feel alienated from formal education. What is the role of higher education in a world where disaffection is marketed as enlightenment? And how might we create – and communicate – a post-matrix university that feels worth plugging into?

    Build a better matrix

    At UEL, we’ve been challenging ourselves on what “value” really means in a rapidly changing world. For us, that has meant a deep commitment to becoming a careers-first university. Over the last seven years, we’ve redesigned our curriculum and embedded employability into every aspect of the institution, aligning what we teach with the skills and opportunities our students need to thrive.

    By embedding careers throughout study; forging deep, value-adding partnerships with employers; breaking down the barriers between learning, innovation and work; and developing validated, leaner and more predictive-of-success recruitment pipelines, we have lifted graduate employment rates by 25 percentage points in just five years, the fastest rise in England. Our enterprise support tells a similar story, as we have driven the sector’s fastest increase in graduate start-ups, with a 1000 per cent increase in businesses still active after three years.

    This is not the only approach, nor the only vision for value. The government’s recent white paper encourages greater specialisation, and I have always believed that a diverse higher education sector is a strong one. But that diversity only thrives in a healthy ecosystem – not one pulling in all directions and competing for diminishing resources.

    If universities are to prove their continuing value to students, graduates, families, government, businesses, and communities, we must work together. Just not in the same old ways. That is where government can play a smarter role: not by propping up legacy systems or mandating mergers, but by rewarding genuine innovation and collaboration.

    Take employers

    Research launched by UEL and London Economics at this year’s Labour Conference found that 97 per cent of businesses want closer partnerships with universities. Nearly nine in ten back a national digital “front door” – a single online platform connecting graduates and employers, streamlining recruitment, and supporting lifelong professional development.

    Our students tell us they don’t just want a graduate job – they want a graduate career. Students are not just job seekers; they are job creators too. Meeting that ambition means building systemic partnerships that align degrees with the demands of a changing generation; innovative, connected investment in practice-based education; and giving employers confidence that universities are developing the higher skilled and enterprising talent they need.

    Graduate recruitment has become a hall of mirrors: AI-generated applications screened by AI filters, relying on crude, out-dated proxies for talent that do not predict new routes for success. Real, diverse potential is lost in this algorithmic echo chamber and the approach is – at least in part – contributing to a 59 per cent increase in applications per graduate vacancy in just one year. The current model is working for too few: graduates underemployed, employers frustrated, trust eroded.

    By listening to what students and businesses are telling us, even when those truths are uncomfortable, we can respond with something better: an education that is relevant, transformative, and visibly worth the investment of time, trust, and money; together with the collaborative recruitment practices that succeed both for future talent and the businesses that need them.

    That, to me, is the essence of the “post-matrix university”: one that closes the gap between institution and individual, between learning and livelihood, between aspiration and outcome. It’s a university that earns trust not through authority, but through authenticity – proving that education isn’t an escape from reality, but a way to change it.

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  • About to graduate and feeling anxious

    About to graduate and feeling anxious

    Have you just finished your exams and not feeling as good as you had expected? I have been struck by the number of finalists I interview who describe the experience of completing their exams as an anti-climax. Particularly so for those who are still looking for a job or don’t know what to do next. ‘I still don’t know what I want to do and I’m feeling quite anxious about it…’ is a common theme.

    Not having a career aim probably didn’t feel like such an important issue in your first year, with the next 3-4 years of a degree stretched out tantalisingly in front of you. Your approach to choosing a career may have consisted of convincing yourself that, ‘I’ll know when I know…it will just happen…something will turn up.’ These thoughts may have occurred to you if you were struggling to identify a future career path and wanted to put career decisions to the back of your mind. You may now be considering employment for the first time as up to this point, there was a certain inevitability and expectation that you would go to university.

    But now reality has hit, you are about to graduate. If making this transition is unsettling and causing unexpected anxiety, consider the following to adopt a more helpful perspective.

    Recognise your achievement

    Take some time to reflect on your success. There may have been challenges and setbacks which have required determination to overcome. This resilience is an employability skill highly valued by all employers. You have been awarded a degree from the University of Warwick, an institution with an international reputation ranked 69th out of over 1500 universities in the QS world rankings. Warwick is also currently the 6th most targeted university by graduate recruiters in the UK. All of this makes you highly employable

    You will develop a new structure

    If the lack of lectures and assignments has created a void, you will develop a new working pattern in your career. This may be with a high-profile employer where you are on a graduate programme with a workplace mentor to guide and coach you. You will develop a new circle of friends, many of whom may also be recent graduates providing mutual support during the early stages of your career. You can also keep in touch with your university peers by registering as an alumni with the University of Warwick. Linked In can also be useful in this respect. Alumni can become useful business contacts in the future as well as providing advice to help you develop your career

    The anticipation of starting your career

    Finding that first job will be highly motivating. The opportunity to use the skills developed on your degree and perhaps apply your subject knowledge in the workplace will be an exciting challenge. Your learning and intellectual curiosity will not just stop after graduation, just used in a different environment and context.

    If you haven’t got a job or decided what to do next, here are some approaches to consider:

    • Take control The variety of choices you have (the majority of graduate employers do not even specify a degree discipline) may feel overwhelming. It may be tempting to sit and wait for something to happen. This strategy could prove to be frustrating and ultimately ineffective though. Far better to take the initiative, be proactive and you will start to feel like you have a sense of direction. However small or insignificant that first step feels, it may be the beginning of formulating your plan. So set some realistic and manageable targets – create that Linked In profile, apply for some volunteering, enrol on a short course to develop a new skill, join a temping agency, for example. If nothing else research career options with your degree , do any of them motivate you? Reflect on your values and motivations to begin matching yourself to the potential opportunities
    • The first job doesn’t define the rest of your career. Don’t feel under pressure to find that ‘dream’ job immediately. Compromise, be pragmatic and accept that the first step in your career may be an opportunity to learn about yourself and the world of work. Maybe this experience will help you to find that ideal job later in your career as you develop a sense of what really matters to you
    • Could a longer term strategy work for you? Ask yourself if you are ready to commit to your career or would a work placement/graduate internship help you identify where your motivation and passion really lies?
    • Don’t be afraid to take a risk. A creative director in the advertising industry, Paul Arden once said, ‘better to regret what you have done than what you haven’t.’ If the first graduate job isn’t right for you think about how valuable the experience will be in developing your self-awareness. It will also add to your skill set and provide further evidence of your employability to future employers.
    • Seek careers advice Remember that you can use Warwick’s careers service for up to two years after graduation. Impartial careers advice and guidance may help you to make your decision more confidently.

    You are not alone, lots of other finalists are still finding it difficult to choose and find a career. Reflect on what an enjoyable and rewarding experience university has hopefully been. And look forward to the next stage of your career.

    Originally published by Ray Ryan

    Revised by Student Opportunity in 2025

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