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.