graduate employability 2.0

Learning and working through social networks: Still a (mostly) untapped opportunity for higher education

January 14, 2021January 14, 2021 by Ruth Bridgstock

TLDR: My Australian National Senior Teaching Fellowship report is now out and available for download. My fellowship explores the roles that social networks play in graduate employability, and how universities can foster social network capability through interventions at curricular, pedagogic, and organisational levels.

My fellowship findings and resources will be of interest to Australian university leaders who are developing strategies in response to the National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund, and to educators who are designing or reviewing degree programs.

Readers can access the connectedness reflection tool for educators for free. I also offer facilitated sessions to support educators with curriculum development and review, and strategic industry partnership development. Please get touch if you’d like to find out more.

Full article:

As many of you know, I’m interested in how education can ensure that learners are prepared for the future (and increasingly the now!) of life and work. Some of my research is about the capabilities that individuals can develop – so-called ’21st century’ skills, and the learning & teaching approaches that foster these. But I am also interested in other factors involved in future-capability, beyond individual skills.

For the last five years, through my Australian National Senior Teaching Fellowship Graduate Employability 2.0, along with a range of other research grants, I have been exploring how individuals, educators and educational institutions can enhance and make the most of social networks for learning and career success. I’ve discovered this goes far beyond ‘networking’ and having a polished LinkedIn profile.

How can individuals benefit from social networks?

My research suggests that there are at least three ways in which individuals can benefit from social connectedness in 21st century careers. They are:

(1) networks for career development (the one we usually think of) – activating social networks for career development through mentorship, access to resources or opportunities

(2) networks for learning – learning new skills by collaborating with others, or by sourcing information, knowledge or capabilities from others

(3) networks for innovation and problem-solving – solving problems or creating new knowledge by collaborating with, or sourcing information, knowledge or capabilities from, others, particularly those from a different discipline or context

Developing and using networks for learning and innovation / problem solving are centrally important to how 21st century society works.

What does higher education need to do?

Both the capabilities needed for social networks and the social networks themselves can, and should, be developed through higher education. The good news is that over the last few years universities have started to appreciate the roles that networks play in student career development and graduate employability. More and more students are learning the basics of networking for career development while they are undergraduates, which sets a good foundation for social network development over time.

However, learning, problem solving and innovation through social networks are still much less likely to be included in curricula. Since last year much teaching has moved online, but students are still being allocated into teams of 4 with their same-discipline course peers (in a break-out room in Zoom or Teams) to engage in learning. This approach is useful for some outcomes, but it doesn’t get at the real scenarios, processes and outcomes through which graduates will end up adding value.

There are some great exemplars of authentic and ‘free-range’, interdisciplinary and socially networked learning out there — e.g., some kinds of work integrated learning, enterprise and entrepreneurship learning, and research-based learning experiences. I cheer internally every time I hear about one. But this learning is by no means ubiquitous.

The main reasons seem to be that while valuable, it can be more resource-intensive and risky to deliver than classroom-based learning, challenging to arrange logistically and financially, and difficult to assess.

What next steps can educators take?

For social network-based learning to occur effectively and consistently, certain educational elements relating to curriculum, pedagogy and layers of institutional connectedness need to line up. You can access the connectedness reflection tool for educators for free to start to characterise the strengths and opportunities of your program, School, or institution.

More broadly, educational programs and institutions need to be well-connected with their communities and social ecosystems, something which many universities still struggle with. My research interviewees described the university either as a ‘walled garden’ or a series of siloes – neither of which support social network-based learning. My book Higher Education and the Future of Graduate Employability – A Connectedness Learning Approach deals with these issues in more detail, including some case studies from different institutions.

For more information

I encourage readers to check out my fellowship resources:

Final Fellowship Report – Graduate Employability 2.0: Enhancing the Connectedness of Learners, Programs and Higher Education Institutions
The Graduate Employability 2.0 model and framework
Connectedness Reflection Tool for Educators
Fact Sheets

I also offer facilitated sessions to support educators with curriculum development and review, and strategic industry partnership development. Please get touch if you’d like to find out more.

Graduate Employability 2.0: Fostering university connectedness

August 7, 2016 by Ruth Bridgstock

Some of the most interesting findings from my fellowship interviews are actually about university stakeholder engagement and networks (or lack thereof), rather than student professional connectedness.

University approaches to external and internal stakeholder engagement are underdeveloped across the sector. Universities are still mostly taking short-term, ad hoc and often transactional approaches to working with our industry and community partners. While some universities do have stakeholder engagement strategies, these are often focussed on research and knowledge transfer, and they aren’t optimised for the mass teaching partnerships we are starting to embark upon.

In my interviews I heard many stories of great attempts to partner with industry for teaching that were thwarted by university systems and processes, or that only worked because they involved ‘guerrilla teaching practice’ outside our systems (you know what I’m talking about), and that may therefore be limited in scale and sustainability.

I heard about the challenges of working productively with partners across multiple organisational areas with multiple contact points and multiple different organisational processes. I heard variously about the risk of one person having all the contacts, the risk of sharing contacts with those who may not treat them sensitively, and the risk of the ubiquitous generic ‘contact us’ email address.

Perhaps most commonly, I heard about how we need to learn to value our partners in building long-term professional relationships for learning and teaching.

Listen_to_your_stakeholders_Shimer_College_2

Some key questions for educators, program and university leaders in thinking about fostering our connectedness:

– who do we want our key industry and community partners to be, and what are we offering them in the long term? What value do we add?

– how are we valuing partner input in co-creating learning experiences for and with students?

– how can we ‘get out of our own way’, reduce institutional barriers to connectedness and improve engagement?

– who are our key contact points in the university for industry and community engagement? What kinds of resourcing and support do they need?

– how do we join up our engagement strategies and points of contact to improve consistency and quality of engagement?

– How do we manage the risk of engaging external partnerships at scale?

Some questions for educators:

I’m keen to know what your experiences have been with building your program / organisational area’s professional networks.

1. what does your university do well / not do well in supporting the development of your industry contacts and relationships for learning and teaching?

2. what motivations do industry and community partners bring to their partnerships with you, and what types of value does your program / university offer them?

3. how are your intra-university connections? How well connected are you with others within your university that are doing similar work / might have similar partners? How often do you experience the ‘left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ phenomenon with partners or partnership processes in your unversity? How do you navigate these challenges?

Send me an email if you like, or comment below if you dare… also I encourage those interested to join the GE2.0 community of practice, where there’s more info and discussion about these topics.

Graduate employability 2.0: Learning for professional connectedness

August 7, 2016 by Ruth Bridgstock

July was a busy month for me. I interviewed 43 people in different roles from a total of 26 Australian universities, to build a national picture of higher education engagement with learning and teaching for professional connectedness. The team have also profiled a number of humanities, arts and social sciences graduates and industry / community representatives across Australia to explore how professional connections and networks are important for success in 21^st century work and life (more on these findings later).

Key findings of the higher education interviews

Australia wide, universities are stepping up to the challenge of fostering graduate employability through industry and community engagement. There is a national movement towards the development of university-wide employability strategies and infusion of employability skills and career development learning into all levels of the curriculum and elements of the university experience.

We are using a range of broad pedagogic approaches that support support the university-wide strategies, including: new models of WIL, alumni engagement, direct industry teaching, co-curricular facilitation and recognition, social media and professional identity building online, and connected learning.

We continue to struggle with the resource-intensiveness of effective industry engagement, and the scalability of our programs. The ad hoc approaches that used to work with a small number of students across a few programs and a few industry partners are proving less effective as we move into an era where 100% of our students will experience learning that is integrated with, related to, and/or otherwise connected with the world of work.

Some specific thoughts about students’ professional connectedness capabilities

learning for professional connectedness remains tacit and undervalued. Students are increasingly working with industry and community within and outside the curriculum, but often do not realise the importance of the connections they are making, or how to value, foster and extend those connections for future employability
we need to go beyond Linkedin profiles. Development of student professional identities online is key to employability, but employers are looking for more than simple Linkedin profiles and ePortfolios. How are students actively engaged with their online professional networks? Do they have industry authentic blogs, portfolios, social media presences? Are they interacting with the professional community in meaningful ways?
how are we supporting student networking? Many of our industry-engaged pedagogic strategies build a few strong professional connections. On average, students know only 1 employer when they graduate (often a WIL employer). How are we supporting our students to ‘network’ and grow their wider professional connections?
professionals use their social networks to learn, but universities tend not to promote this type of learning. There are substantial opportunities for students, universities and industry in ‘connected learning’, building learning communities and communities of enquiry around mutual areas of interest and practice. How can we start to build these broader communities and networks and learn from each other?

If you want to know more about what I’ve been finding in my interviews, head on over to the Graduate Employability 2.0 community of practice.

Introducing ‘Graduate Employability 2.0’

April 5, 2016April 5, 2016 by Ruth Bridgstock

Did you know that Linkedin now has 300 million users, which is about 1 in 3 professionals worldwide? And that 35% of those users log in every day?

And did you know that about 60% of jobs are estimated to be obtained through ‘who you know’ rather than direct application? Did you also know that between 80 and 90% of university graduates only apply for jobs using direct application methods?

70% of learning in the workplace happens informally, much of it problem-based and self-directed, and about 90% of that involves social interaction – either face to face, online or both.

One recent study found that 86% of professionals use online social networks for professional purposes in the workplace. What do they use them for? networking within and outside the organisation, research and learning, and sharing resources and project information with colleagues.

Graduate Employability 2.0 is about all of these things. It explores a different way of engaging with learning and teaching for life and career post-university. Graduate Employability 1.0 was about skills, knowledge, and attributes that individual students can learn in order to be able to obtain or create work and perform well in work situations. In the Graduate Employability 2.0 era, individual skills, knowledge and attributes are still important, but so are the individual’s professional relationships and networks, and what they do with them. The ‘2.0’ signifies the central importance of the social, digitally networked world in which we now all live.

My 2015-2016 Australian Office of Learning and Teaching National Senior Teaching Fellowship seeks to identify the best ways to develop students’ capabilities to build and use professional connections, both online and face-to-face, for career development, creativity and problem-solving, and professional learning, all of which are essential to employability in the digital age.

Career development

Professional relationships, networks and social capital are vital to career development:

by increasing access to career resources, information about opportunities, and career sponsorship
through the individual’s online presence – their personal ‘brand’, ePortfolio, use of social media as an advertising / recruitment screening tool
through distributed, networked options for employment generation e.g., Airtasker, Upwork, crowdsourcing resources

Innovation, creativity and problem solving

Innovation and problem solving thrive on complex collaborative contexts:

by fostering new ideas through exposure to new people and new ideas (especially trans-disciplinarity)
by ensuring that new ideas are integrated, implemented and brought to fruition through teamwork;
by finding opportunities for enterprise – for example, new markets, collaborators and resources

Professional learning

Social connections facilitate the reciprocal transmission of skills and knowledge for professional learning:

through communities of practice and informal social learning
digitally through distributed learning networks (social media, crowdsourced learning e.g., wikipedia).

What does the fellowship involve?

Right now I am seeking cases of teaching practice, particularly in humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) disciplines, that engage with these kinds of learning, and also some examples of graduates who are making the most of their social connections for professional purposes. Chosen cases will be included in a graduate employability toolkit and promoted nationally. If you are interested in being a case study, please get in touch.

I will be surveying all of the universities in Australia to find out to what extent and how they are engaging with teaching for the development of students’ professional connections.

Later on this year I’ll be working with four universities to build graduate employability 2.0 capabilities into their undergraduate programs. We’ll be doing some experiments and seeing which are the best ways to build professional networks into the curriculum

There will be a national symposium hosted at QUT, and I will launch an online community of practice for sharing, discussion and updates very shortly. Watch this space for details!

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