Careers Consultant Dominic Prosser of Henley Business School provides reflections on the 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference that took place in November at WU in Vienna. 

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus died in Vienna in 180 C.E.. The last of the so-called Five Good Roman Emperors his principal legacy is as a Stoic Philosopher, bequeathing us such aphorisms as: “the obstacle is the way”. Business School Careers Professionals gathered in Vienna from places as dispersed as Canada, Singapore, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, the UK and the EU to consider a similar point – as a profession, where are we now, where do we want to/need to go next, and how do we overcome the obstacles in our way?

A view of Business School Careers Services from multiple perspectives set the context:

I. How do employers see us?

A panel of employers drawn from banking (Erste Group), professional services (KPMG), the international not-for-profit sector (Light for the World) and FMCG (Henkel) suggested Careers Services core function is to:

• help students define their future (Dorfinger 2022)
• provide a consultancy approach (Reiter 2022)
• be the link between companies and students (ibid.)
• help employers map and understand emerging expectations and attitudes of students towards the world work data (ibid.)
• bridge the skills gap in partnership with companies (Balmanian 2022)
• facilitate employer interventions in the curriculum (Schwarzinger 2022)
• create opportunities to allow employers to meet their preference for individual interactions with students, as big events are proving less effective. (Reiter 2022)

II. How do students and alumni see us?

As an authoritative, neutral source of information and advice that is more reliable than the internet, well attuned to labour market trends, and who will tailor guidance to your needs and help you navigate failures and take advantage of them.. Careers services should also help students learn how to combine p/t work and study, and provide them with support through later career transitions once they become alumni. (Groeller 2022))

III. How do Business School Senior Leaders see us?

An essential service providing the bridge between students and the world of work. The careers service can enhance the curriculum by supporting the development of soft skills, providing individual career coaching and embedding an understanding of the need for lifelong careers learning. (Badinger 2022)

IV. How do other stakeholders perceive us? (Assistant Professor, Postgraduate Certificate/Diploma/Masters in Careers Education)

Careers professionals bring an objectivity, that academics are not best placed to bring.
At a time when students are at an exciting and for some destabilising point in their lives, careers professional can help students learn about themselves as people, how others (including employers) see them and how they themselves might envisage their future. Careers professionals help students through this often ‘disorientating dilemma‘ and what is and what isn’t possible for them. They also have a key role in helping students navigate change and become changemakers. (Pearson 2022))

V. How do other stakeholders perceive us? (World of Work Researcher)

Career Centres are labour market intermediaries: as such we need to adapt to trends in both the labour market and in recruiting techniques. This requires redefining ourselves and our key client relationships, maintaining our International Career Centre network, and refining our approach to the transitory nature of careers: the new career management competencies, new workplace competencies; the great post-Covid resignation; the dearth of talent and the change in power relations with employees restyling the world of work. (Eggenhofer-Rehart 2022)

The employer panel endorsed Eggenhofer-Rehart’s proposal the current generation of students and graduates are restyling the world of work: demanding e.g. 30 hr working week, 40/60 wfh (minimum), 1 day off per week (Dorfinger 2022).

VI. How do we Business School Careers Professionals see ourselves?

In breakout discussion delegates reflected on their roles and purpose, proposing a range of views including:

• Facilitators between students and professional world
• Being a hub for students, alumni, employers and faculty
• Bridge: we help people understand themselves well enough to identify their future compelling vision and help them fashion the bridge to help them achieve this
• Challengers (students must be ready to hear/face the truth)
• Helping students design their lives: what they want to do, who they are and how to find their way.

(Anon. 2022a)

VII. Fishbowl discussionⁱ: ‘What are the problems we lose sleep over?’: problems suggested included:

• Lack of respect for the profession
• Student survey fatigue
• Functional creep
• Lack of student engagement
• Reducing stress
• Improving team dynamics
• Reducing overload on students
• Minimising admin to maximise student-facing time
• High staff turnover, especially since Covid
• How to improve and modernise our offering and move away from traditional career service offerings
• Colleagues who are resistant to change.

(Anon. 2022a)

VIII. Where next?

Considering how to enhance the quality of their work, the following themes from delegate suggestions:

• Create better synergies with academics
• Negotiate the inclusion of careers education into the curriculum
• Redefine our offer: nurture life skills, soft skills, and career transition skills
• Do less but do it better: refocus on careers work – exclude or stop marketing, finance, HR,
• Extend the remit of Careers services to provide ongoing alumni careers forever support
• Work in partnership with employers to identify and reduce the skills gap between employer needs and what graduates start work with

(Anon. 2022b)

IX. Towards a solution

Bruegel (Pieter the Elder) in his celebrated masterpiece Children’s Games (1560, Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum), depicts children playing games in a civic adult setting – most of the same games that are still being played in playgrounds the world over. Ali Mahlodji (2022a) suggests that we might view children as future adults and adults as children at heart. He encourages us to reprise the fearlessness of children – who learn to walk by controlling falling; their eagerness to evolve their communication skills; their innate instinct to help others.

As a Business School Careers Profession should we not be bolder, be playful, innovative (Anon. 2022c) ( try again with renewed insight when we fail? Should we not start saying no more? Not so we can be less ambitious, but so we can be more ambitious about delivering on a tightly defined core function: to help students find their place in society through a career that fulfils them (Anon. 2022a). In short perhaps we need to simplify the range and depth of what we do and focus on becoming better at it. This might also allow us to throw off our stress suit (Vilkas 2022).

Should we not be pushing back against the measurement of success as finite employment outcomes, when we, our students and employers expect us to nurture student employability and lifelong career transition skills (Axman 2022; Pearson 2022)? Why do some rankings measure salary outcomes but not impact, value, or job satisfaction in the purpose-driven careers our students increasingly tend towards?

Ali challenges us that as ambassadors of change for our students and their futures, careers professionals should also be drivers of change, both in how we continuously improve the quality of our service functions, or how we define and redefine ‘our why’ as we iteratively hone our past and future career narrative. This is the essence of the career learning process that Wendy Pearson (2022) had earlier reminded us we are inexorably bound to.

We too must be attentive to our own career and embrace our own:

• career curiosity
• career agility
• career confidence;

and exert our entitlement to a meaningful career (Eggenhofer-Rehart 2022). In so doing we will derive more joy in our work, and be in a better place to help students achieve the same.

X. Wrapping it upⁱⁱ

At the end of the conference, delegates were invited to define professional goals and needs that had surfaced for them during the conference. The findings from this activity are set out below in figure 1. Figure 2 shows how delegates proposed to take steps towards fulfilling their goals. Figure 3 reflects how delegates could add more joy in their work . Figure 4 is how delegates summed up the key conference takeaways in a ‘single’ word.

A survey of staffing levels in Business School Careers teams revealed an average ratio of 1 FTE member of careers staff to 888 students (n.=56) with a range between 1:20 and 1:5000.

 

XI. Do walls not speak?

Hosted in the heart of the WU Campus at the Library and Learning Centre designed Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (2013), the conference responded to call of this inspiring architectural environment: straight lines giving way to more fluid and curvilinear lines as you (we) moved forward, creating bridges and pathways through the (our) futuristic space. What appears black and white on the outside, on closer internal examination metamorphoses into a myriad shades of optimistic, bright white, with occasional colour pops adding excitement.

Perhaps when conventional approaches are disrupted or adapted to become more fluid, flexible and agile, the future becomes lighter, brighter and more vibrant.

 

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References

Anon. (2022a) What’s the problem that keeps you up all night? [workshop discussion at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Anon. (2022b) Careers as a profession: Spotlight on us [breakout discussion at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Anon. (2022c) Design Thinking Exercise [breakout discussion at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Antoninus, M. A. (167) The Meditation 5:20 http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.5.five.html (accessed 14th December 2022)

Axman, U. (2022) Careers as a profession: Spotlight on us [panel chair at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Badinger, H. (2022) Careers as a profession: Spotlight on us [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Balmanian, N. (2022) Recruiters Panel [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Dalling, H. (2022) Sharing best practices, collaboration with companies [workshop presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Dorfinger, C. (2022) Recruiters Panel [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Eggenhofer-Rehart, P. (2022) Vienna Career Panel Project, ViCaPP [presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Elemans, J. and Autar, S. (2022) Sharing best practices, collaboration with companies [workshop presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Groeller, M. (2022) Careers as a profession: Spotlight on us [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Hadid, Z. and Schumacher, P. (2013) Library and Learning Centre [mixed media building], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna

Hiebl-Nopp, J. (2022) What’s the problem that keeps you up all night? [workshop presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Mahlodji, A. (2022) How to become your own superhero [presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Pearson, W. (2022) Careers as a profession: Spotlight on us [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

Reiter, C. (2022) Recruiters Panel [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Schwarzinger, M. (2022) Recruiters Panel [panel presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 30 November.

Unicef (2015) Fishbowl, https://sites.unicef.org/knowledge-exchange/files/Fishbowl_production.pdf (accessed 14th December 2022).

Vilkas, A. (2022) Stress is contagious – Get out of your stress suit [presentation at 2022 EFMD Career Services Conference], Wirtschaftsuniversität, Vienna. 29 November.

ⁱ Fishbowl group coaching approach
The fishbowl discussion technique expertly facilitated by Johanna Hiebl-Nopp (2022) was itself an inspiring take-away tool from the conference. The fishbowl is a method to structure group discussions that offers the benefits of small group discussions within large group settings. The speakers are seated in the centre of the room in a circle, whilst other participants sit around them in a circle observing their discussion ‘in the fishbowl.’ Other people present become observers, active listeners, and potential participants through a rotation process which sees inner circle members yield their seat when they feel they have made their contribution (Unicef 2015).

ⁱⁱ The original responses that underpin figures 1,2 and 3 were collected via mentimeter. They have been coded following standard ‘grounded theory’ social science research methods using topic codes that emerged from interrogation of the original data.