Dear John (Dean), and dear All
As listowner I have some responsibility for what goes on 'in here' and feel I need to make a couple of points related to John's post from yesterday - though what I have to say is for everyone and not aimed solely at John.
Firstly, I have not yet properly read the message! I have scanned it. It is long and I would encourage list-members to try to give it some time. It is clearly a serious contribution to the debate and that is to be welcomed.
My work situation is, I suspect, similar to many LDHENers, in that I have very little free time to read, write or research. Even the reading of John's message will take me some while to schedule in, simply because most of the hours in every day are spoken for right up to (and beyond) Christmas. For this reason I ask for patience - for us all.
I also need to ask for respect to be shown to anyone who posts to the list, and by message posters to others. I ask that the texts we send treat anyone referred to within them respectfully.
I feel sure that John did not intend offence by his message but, given that this is not face-to-face communication among people who are familiar with each other, we need to take care with our figures of speech and rhetorical devices.
Len is perfectly capable of speaking for himself but, as listowner, I feel the need to share my interpretation that Len was, rather obliquely, referred to in John's message in a way that might have been seen as sarcastic.
This is a complex debate and a valuable one. Let's not rush it nor allow it to run dry too quickly for want of attention by the many to messages from the few! I ask the many to think on and, perhaps send their thoughts or questions to the list. I ask the active contributors to weigh their words - and perhaps reduce their messages to instalments of a manageable (for slow thinkers/readers like me) length.
Finally, thanks again John, for your contribution - I hope you will not be offended by the above. I, for one, will certainly respond once I've had the time to take in your ideas more fully.
All the best
John
John Hilsdon
Co-ordinator, Learning Development
Educational Development
University of Plymouth
Drake Circus
Plymouth
PL4 8AA
01752 232276
[log in to unmask]
www.plymouth.ac.uk/learn
-----Original Message-----
From: John Dean [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 December 2003 12:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Graduate identity and the skills agenda in higher education
(and beyond)
Tell me Mr Dunstone what possible use did you think your degree would be in
the real world?
(excerpt from the AGCAS training video on interview techniques, Tell Me Mr
Dunstone.
I write this with a two-fold interest in the debate on graduate identity. I
am currently a careers adviser at London South Bank University but in the
past I was also a Ph D student engaged in research in the sociology of
scientific knowledge so I feel I have at least a limited grasp of some of
the intellectual roots of the graduate identity approach (Wittgenstein,
Foucault, Goffman et al).
Perhaps I am still trying to square those two aspects of my own past but
what I find hard to understand is whether the graduate identity model
actually has any practical implications for how the employers I work with
could (or should) go about recruiting graduates. At the moment it seems to
me graduate recruiters use four main methods of recruitment all four of
which are steeped in what might be called the skills model.
Graduate recruitment will normally have a first stage where applicants are
asked to submit an application form Typically this form has questions of two
kinds, the first being about biographical data of various kinds (how old are
you? which university did you attend? what degree subject did you study?
etc). The second are longer questions that examine competences or
motivations. To use an actual example the Standard Application Form has a
series such questions each with its own box for a reply. In the first box
students are asked to describe a when they have had to use skills in
planning and implementation. A second box covers teamwork, communication and
influencing while a third box seeks evidence of analysis, problem solving
and creative thinking. Over page there is then two more boxes asking for
specific skills (languages, IT etc) and the reasons the candidate wants to
work in the career area they have chosen.
Statistics suggest that for a typical graduate post about 80% of candidates
will be eliminated on the basis of the application form. One of the dangers
of telling employers that transferable skills don t exist is that employers
then may be tempted to rely even more than they currently do on the
biographical data. In practice this can mean recruit the candidate if their
face fits in terms of school or university attended, age, A-level grades
etc. Is this really what the proponents of the graduate identity approach
want to advocate? I am tempted to say that if transferable skills do not
exist perhaps we should have to invent them. Perhaps they exist for all
practical purposes as it were. After all, even if they don t exist in the
sense that, say, the table I am writing this on exists, they exist as text
, don t they? From a philosophical perspective, I guess, a lot hinges on
what you mean by the term exist.
Overcome the paper sift and selection at the second stage usually involves
an interview. Again I m told by employers these now revolve mostly around
what might be called a competency agenda i.e. candidates will be asked to
evidence the various skills and competencies (teamwork, leadership, problem
solving etc.) that the employer has identified as part of the person
specification for the job being offered.
Some companies use a third selection stage called an assessment centre.
Typically this assessment centre involves students engaging in management
games and exercises that involve teamwork. Additionally there might be
things such as giving a presentation (communication skills) and in-tray
exercises (organisation, prioritising information).
The fourth main method of recruitment used is psychometric testing of one
kind or another. Psychometric tests are currently the wild cards of the
graduate selection process in the sense that they may turn up at any stage
from replacing the application form as the first sift to part of an
assessment centre. Most of these tests claim to measure an aptitude of some
kind verbal, numerical and diagrammatic reasoning are the three most
commonly used. A few employers also test for other more-or-less innate
characteristics of the human psyche, extroversion and introversion , for
example. Of course, employers don t make these tests up themselves. They buy
them (or to be more exact they buy the right to use them) from firms of
occupational psychologists.
An important aspect of these four methodologies is that no one involved in
graduate recruitment would claim that any of these methods were perfect or
fallible. As an ethnomethodologist might put it no doubt a lot of hidden
work goes into, say, assessing an application form or judging an interview.
Employers are trying to predict future behaviour here and mistakes can and
do get made. Some graduates recruited in this way will fail to make out
when they start working for the company. It is also common for a graduate
applying to company X to get a rejection at the initial application but to
get a job offer from company Y, even though the two companies needs of
graduates and ways of recruiting them appear almost identical on paper.
Why on earth do employers use these methods, which are expensive and time
consuming, if they are so prone to error? I think employers would probably
respond to this question in two ways. The first would be to say that because
something is not perfect does not mean it doesn t work at all. Some
graduates recruited by these techniques do not make out but equally many
do. It is also not uncommon for the most sought after graduates with the
best aptitudes and skills to end up with multiple job offers. The second
point employers would want to know is what, if anything, are the
alternatives to these methods?
In an ideal world employers might try out graduates first to see how they
operate in the real work place. Actually something like this does happen
through sandwich placements , summer internships , mentoring schemes and
so on. However, this doesn t remove the need for selection because these
schemes themselves quickly become oversubscribed.
Other techniques might be considered. Graphology, for example, is used in
parts of continental Europe but it is not currently judged very reliable by
UK employers.
One way of limiting numbers applying would be to restrict the kinds of
graduate allowed to even make an application. The vacancies might only be
advertised say to applicants of one gender or race. Thankfully the law now
proscribes some of these methods although it is still not uncommon for some
employers to restrict their recruitment activities to a few carefully
selected campuses. In the trade this is known as institutional targeting.
It probably does keep numbers of applications down to manageable levels but
its controversial because you may miss very good applicants who are not in
one of your chosen institutions. It s not a practice I would like to see
become any more widespread than it already is, nor I suspect would those who
advocate, graduate identity as a model.
At the opposite pole from the above might be a recruitment scheme where all
undergraduates are encouraged to apply and then the lucky winners chosen by
some kind of random selection. In some ways this is, of course, the fairest
system. It eliminates at a stroke, for example, any hint of cultural bias,
because the computer generating the random numbers will not be influenced by
whether the candidates name is, say, Smith or Shah. There is though one
large problem. Convincing employers that they should hire such important
staff by random is going to be, well, tricky.
We could use Astrology or Tarot Cards. We could use Azande chicken oracles.
There is probably even some sense in which these things would work.
However, before anyone starts buying shares in the poultry industry my
advice would be don t count your chickens before they are hatched (sorry).
We could use nepotism (the Murdoch solution). We could institute a caste
system of some kind but I can t see that idea making the next Labour Party
manifesto. No, it would seem to me for all their acknowledged imperfections
for now and the foreseeable future employers are likely to continue using
application forms, interviews, psychometric tests and assessment centres to
recruit graduates. We are, like Tracy Emin s critics, stuck, stuck, stuck.
And that prompts some interesting questions.
Five questions for the new paradigm
1. Do the proponents of the graduate identity model believe employers should
go on using applications forms in their graduate recruitment? Do forms need
to contain different questions from those described above?
2. Are interviews a good thing and has the new approach anything to tell us
about the kinds of questions it is good to ask?
3. Will there still be assessment centres in this brave new world and will
employers at them still measure things like leadership potential and team
working skills , because that is what happens at the moment?
4. Are psychometric tests ok as a recruitment tool? Some of them appear to
me to measure something rather like Len s Homonunculus, albeit without its
tool kit in this instance.
5. It is possible that all the current recruitment methods described above
will have to be abandoned tainted as they are with the loose talk of
transferable skills, aptitudes competencies and so on. That s cool. But,
what is going to replace them?
By way of a conclusion of what has become a very lng e-mail, let me say I
have no quarrel with graduate identity as a model for understanding aspects
of the graduate transition from study to work. Moreover, such sociological
analyses seem to me to be a wholly legitimate academic pursuit. At its best
such approaches may serve as a salutary reminder of the problematic and
contingent nature of all human endeavour. However, something larger is being
claimed here. We are told that the new approach represents a paradigm
shift. We are told that this new paradigm is both superior to, and a
replacement of the old paradigm with its long confusing lists and loose talk
of skills and so on. Presumably the analogy here is with Thomas Kuhn s now
classic account of paradigm change as a mechanism for scientific revolutions
in the natural sciences.
Well revolutions are ok by me I grew up in the sixties myself. However, if
there really has been a revolution in our understanding of this subject
somebody had better come down from the barricades and explain its
implications (if any) to employers because they are still using the old
paradigm. If that doesn t change, then those who, like myself, are involved
in careers education and guidance are going to go on using the language of
skills as well, no matter how problematic such discourse might seem to
some academic purists. The philosophical debate between realists and
conventionalists (or instrumentalists and contextualists if you prefer) has
been going on a long time and seems set to continue for the indefinite
future. The question is can that debate really inform either employers or
people like myself how we can actually do our jobs better out here in the
real world and if it can, what, in concrete terms, are people actually
trying to tell us?
Dr. John Dean
Careers Adviser
London South Bank University
December 2003
John Dean (Dr)
Careers Adviser
London South Bank University
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