A senior member of the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU) has denied suggestions that both students and employers alike are being ill served by the employment advice available at UK universities.
HECSU director of research Jane Artess rejected the findings of a recent study by insurance firm Endsleigh and thinktank Demos, which called for a "radical overhaul" in the provision of university careers services.
"We have been doing some research of our own," she said. "It is suggesting that quite a number of people – about half of the 50,000 respondents – were already going to events organised by the careers service."
Ms Artess acknowledged that awareness of the work of careers services appears to be particularly low among younger students and those from outside Britain, but disagreed with the implication that significant changes are required.
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Posted by Hayley Edwards
“Why plan ahead when (maybe) you’ll be able to muddle through?” seems to be the instinctive default option amongst pragmatic Brits. I think this approach carries through to education and career planning and explains why state careers services are so badly funded.
I believe the state funded careers services need to provide far more help than they do and should also market themselves more actively to academic colleagues, students, etc. However, their ability to do either is constrained by inadequate (and diminishing) funding.
What government doesn’t want to think about is how much it would cost the public purse to provide the level of careers services we all seem to expect.