Group sessions

Am doing fairly regular ‘Careers Education’ sessions with PhD’s. I will have done 5 half day sessions in February. 1 on writing skills, 2 on assertiveness, 1 on PDP (personal development planning) 1 on Career planning.

At the moment about half the people who sign up, show up. and average atttendance is about 10. They seem to like the content mainly – there are always one or two who do not – and occasionally someone absolutely takes against it.

 

My method is to start with an icebreeaker introductions thing – nothing ‘creative’ just who they are and why are they here -  a sort of informal agenda setting. Then a bit of a lecture from me. I am moving more towards power point as its a good way of assembling diverse material and ensuring the structure is coherent and consistent for when I do repeat sessions.

At some point i will do soemthing practical – it may be a group exercises or presentatation of some kind – just to mix it up, stop them falling asleep and—– I guess I should say —- providing something for the kinetic learners.

There is sometimes an issue about integrating Humanities and Science students – though I think it is a good thing to do. One problem is that the Humanities people often come single and are outnumbered by the scientists. So getting the material right across disciplines  is a challenge.

I had this idea of getting careers colleagues involved so that they could have a go at delivering at least part of these sessions – but the staffing of this is difficult to achieve. And anyway, as soon as I identify likely colleagues they get moved on to different allocations in different colleges.

I would be keen to do more groups doing what we might call ‘Employability’ work. However I still do quite a lot of Guidance: 1-1 stuff. The trend here has been increased numbers of staff – postdocs, research assistants and administrators who come to see me.

What have I been up to?

This is either the reflective practitioner at work or the increasingly geriatric CA trying to remember what he has been doing. So. Went to listen to a King’s alumnus – Simon Scarle now working for Rare a computer ganes company that designs stuff that goes into X-boxes. He showed how the technology he designed with was able to do things like smoke and fire effects as well as model, in 3-d,  heart movements.

Leaving a PhD has been a bit of a theme. A couple of students have been asked to leave and another has decided to. So its a bit of counselling as well as suggested ways forward. All 3 were highly competent people – but not right for the projects they were on.

I did a telephone guidance interview with a part time PhD student who found it easier to talk at home with her baby gurgling in the background. Perhaps should offer this telephone counselling a bit more.

Talke d to a ‘nurse researcher’ who has a Phd  -and as I discovered has been a nursing lecturer. Also worked with PhD students who were working with a variety of disabilities ranging from Aspergers to Dyslexia to ME.

Ran the second of this years Careers Seminars – this one from Mckinsey delivered by a King’s Alumna. One of our last years attendess is now working for Mckinsey and it would be good to ge t a couple more in this year. Have secured a Biotech scientist to come and talk to a group of students in Neurobiology, an editor has agreed to come, and so have a couple of trainee patent agents – all with PhD’s.

Ran a session on ‘Assertiveness’ whch actually had a male student attending. Did a couple of induction talks for the Graduate School.

Have been redoing some takes on Career Management and PDP and have been doing a new talk on CV’s using snippets of real CV’s to illustrate do’s and don’t’s. It takes ages to search my files to get good examples. But I feel that this approach might work better than our standards top-tips approach.

Have been asked to do asession on next years ‘Source Event’ which should be fine – am sure Fiona Denney would be happy with that – flying the flag for King’s – and the Careers Group.

Additionally my review of the London Hub Management Consultancy day was published in the Vitae newsletter ‘London Student’.

The specialist Careers Adviser

I thought I would put the draft of half an article about the growth of specialists in Careers advice – and whether this is a threat to the notion of the generalist. I am slightly stuck with it – but some of the thoughts in the first half may be worth reading. When I complete it I will probably send it to ‘Careers Adviser’ or Phoenix

 

Where is Careers advice going? This agency of the public sector, this adjunct of the education service, or the employment service; this process that perpetually disappoints both government and public and yet to which they both return hungry for solutions they have been unable to find elsewhere.

 

Where is careers advice going? Being neither a strategic, manager nor an academic I look for answers neither in policy nor theory but in my on work as a careers adviser. But I am not going to answer the question ‘where is Careers advice going’ because as Mark Watson the excellent Welsh stand-up would say –that question’s too hard. In stead I am going to ask ‘what have I been doing?’ to see if the answer to that gets me anywhere nearer my bigger question.

 

For 15 years or so my client group has been principally undergraduates, but in the last 3 years I have been working with PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. There is a small group of  Careers advisers scattered around research-led universities who have begun to focus on this group – often in collaboration with academics and with staff trainers. Parallel groups have begun to work with MBA students and with medics. Fancy that.

 

When I began working as a Careers Adviser I would have said that such people would have little need for the skills of the Careers Adviser. They were beyond Careers advice. Careers advice was a phase you went through in an indeterminate zone as you tipped out of the education system into the scary and uncertain world of the adult job market.

 

The careers adviser patrolled this splash down area looking for those in danger of drowning, then pulled them out for a quick lesson in survival tactics. Got them breathing and moving then threw them in again. It was a decent and honourable job.

 

Years later I am working with education’s winners. So successful at the knowledge game, they have stepped into the knowledge business. My clients are doing real research on real big stuff; unpleasant diseases that kill people, how to treat violent psychopaths, how to combat climate change and environmental degradation and the rest.

 

As intractable problems expand so does the knowledge business – more Phd’s are recruited – though the expansion in the UK is coming principally from overseas. However numbers of academic jobs are not expanding at the rate of PhD expansion –and some fields of commercial  research particularly linked to manufacturing are declining. This expansion has brought questions of overproduction of PhD’s. This sense may be more imaginary than real since quite a few London researcher recruiters have reported that it is really difficult to recruit ‘good’ postdocs.