New Graduate Engagement with 'Professional Development': a Pilot Study

NEW GRADUATE ENGAGEMENT WITH 'PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT': A PILOT STUDY

Rick Holden Human Resource Development Unit Leeds Metropolitan University [email protected]

Victoria Harte Human Resource Development Unit Leeds Metropolitan University [email protected]

Abstract

If a key purpose of higher education is the development of students into 'critical lifelong learners' then first destination employment for graduates choosing professionally oriented careers provides the initial ’testing ground’ for its application/practice through ‘professional development‘. It is the workplace that provides the context in which the graduate must now learn and develop. The paper reports on the development and design of an exploratory study addressing new graduate engagement with initial professional development. It seeks to generate discussion and feedback to assist the further progress of the research project.

Key Words: Graduates; Lifelong Learning; Professional Development

Introduction This is a ‘working paper’. Our interpretation of this much (mis) used ‘label’ is that it provides us with the opportunity to report on the development of a research project prior to the commencement of the main phase of fieldwork. In this sense we wish the paper to ‘work’ to help us reflect on progress to date and to guide the further development of the research project. Hence, feedback on the approach proposed, the emergent research design, and the projected methods of data collection, are welcome. In the context of first destination employment, following three / four years of higher education, the research project seeks to address new graduate engagement with initial and continuing professional development This process is viewed as problematic, even within employment with very strong links to professional bodies and which provide, on the face of it, highly structured professional development pathways for newly qualified graduates to follow. The research is being funded jointly by the University Forum for Human Resource Development and the Higher Education Careers Service Unit. The paper unfolds as follows. Initially, we set the problem in the context. Two issues are important here. First, the somewhat turbulent wider graduate labour market within the UK and the evident tensions which exist in the transition from higher education (HE) into first destination employment. Second, and more specifically, the relationship between HE and ‘professionalism’ and processes of professional development and professional institutionalisation. We then proceed to discuss our research project. Deliberately we have not embarked upon the project with a precise set of research questions / objectives. Rather, our intention is to take an exploratory journey into the field; to map, provisionally and tentatively, the complexity of processes, influences and tensions at work in respect of new graduate engagement with initial professional development. As befits our interpretation of a ’working paper’ we conclude with questions. Questions about our broad approach and the design which we have developed. Questions about the difficulties we have faced to date and our proposals for tackling such difficulties. Questions about our research tactics for the ensuing period of fieldwork which will commence in the late summer.

Higher Education and Employment The graduate labour market in the UK has undergone significant change in the last decade (Purcell, Morley and Rowley, 2002; HESA, 2000; Pearson, Perryman, Connor, Jagger and Aston, 1999). Many more new graduates are available to recruiters and their composition is more diverse. The UK Government’s target of 50% of young people under 30 to participate in higher education by 2010 indicates that such growth is set to continue. In the main, to date, this expansion in graduate supply has been accommodated by the labour market, albeit with some lags in demand in times of recession. There have also been notable changes in the distribution of jobs within the graduate labour market. For example, the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services report vacancies from IT, sales and marketing companies increasing significantly in the late 1990s. Vacancy levels for SMEs have also been increasing (Holden, Jameson and Parsons, 2003). Indeed, the traditional route of new graduates into employment, focused predominantly on the large employer, through an annual intake of young graduates to a dedicated entry route, appears to be in terminal decline. However, the weight of labour market evidence suggests that this is more than counter-balanced by non-traditional opportunities; for example, professional and managerial work outside traditional recruitment channels (Purcell et al, 2002; Pearson et al, 1999) Concerns about the capabilities of new graduates assume a renewed importance against this background of change. There is considerable interest in whether, and to what extent, graduates increasingly require new capabilities; ones which may not traditionally have figured formally in undergraduate programmes. A review (Purcell, Pitcher and Simm, 1999) of graduate early career experiences concluded that traditional academic skills were the least used by recent graduate entrants into the workplace. Harvey, Moon and Geall, 1997, talk of the need for undergraduate programmes to produce analytical, critical, reflective, 'transformative' graduates. Elsewhere, numerous studies have sought to identify the missing skills in new graduates or identify their supposed strengths and weaknesses as they enter first destination employment (e.g. Pettifor and Higgins, 2003; Rajan, Chapple and Battersby, 1998; GET, 1997; Williams and Owen, 1997, AGR, 1995). In sharp contrast Holmes (2001) is critical of this ‘skills agenda‘ and contends that it is more useful to consider the transition and utilisation of a new graduate using what he terms a ’graduate identity’ approach. What is needed, he argues: is a way of framing, in conceptual and theoretical terms, the interactional processes by which a graduate and employer engage with each other, and the outcomes of such interactions. Only when we have a better understanding of this, of graduates getting in and getting on, shall we be able to engage in evidence based curriculum development and devise other modes of support, thus enhancing the quality of higher education in respect of employability (Holmes, 2001, p112)

Accounts of expectation mismatch, ambiguity and tension are not unfamiliar within the literature (see for example, Hesketh, 2000; Stewart and Knowles, 2000; Graham and McKenzie, 1995; Preston, 1994;). What Holmes offers, however, is a potentially more appropriate, realistic approach, to understanding why, for some graduates, the transition from HE to work is often far from smooth.

New Graduates and Professionalism Increasingly we can see evidence (Galloway, 2002; Jones, Woods, Coles and Rein, 2001; Harvey, 2001; O’Reilly, Cunningham and Lester, 1999; CVCP, 1998) of a view of graduate employability which holds that a degree is not the end of learning. Indeed, Harvey argues that a critical purpose of HE is not so much the delivery of employability skills in some generic sense but the development of ‘critical lifelong learners’. This he argues enables students to go beyond the narrow confines of their ‘safe‘ knowledge base of their academic discipline to applying themselves to whatever they encounter in the post-education world. Similarly, O’Reilly et al argue that those involved in higher education and professional development face a challenge to move beyond considerations of ‘knowledge and competence’ to helping people develop as ‘capable practitioners’. In the context of small firms, Jones et al query the extent to which graduates may be able to act as facilitators of lifelong learning. Despite the turbulence in the graduate labour market, noted above, a majority of UK graduates continue to find first destination employment with professional / professionally related occupations. Demand for such jobs is predicted to grow (National Skills Task Force, 2000). It is within such occupations that interest in lifelong learning is at its sharpest. Evetts (1998), for example, argues that ‘lifelong learning is the motivated and planned activity of the individual (engineer) to ensure his/her own professional development’. Whilst formal conferment of professional status may, for some, be a clear staging post in a process of lifelong learning just where and when professional development begins is, universally, more ambiguous. Gold, Rodgers and Smith (2001) drawing on Dietrich and Roberts (1997) describe a complex picture of professionalism. Whilst the acquisition of different types of knowledge is of importance, this is meaningless without a complimentary process of social recognition. Broadly, a distinction can be made between initial professional development and continuous professional development. Livingstone and Robertson (2001) see an undergraduate teaching degree, for example, as ’initial’ professional development (ipd). Our understanding of the extent to which ipd begins during undergraduate degrees varies enormously; clearly dependent on a variety of factors not least the closeness of relationship between the HE curriculum and any associated professional body. However, whatever the level and effectiveness of efforts to address professional development within the HE curriculum, first destination employment for graduates pursuing professionally oriented careers provides an important first ’testing ground’ for their ‘critical lifelong learning skills’. Part of the complexity of professionalism is the development of a sense of professional identity. Echoing the arguments of Holmes in relation to graduate identity research principally, in the areas of education and health, suggest the importance of understanding professional identity in an ’interactionist’ sense (see, for example, Davies, 2002). If a key part of the process of achieving graduate identity is the engagement with ’professional’ work and interaction with new colleagues who are themselves ’professionals’, then a key aspect of this process must be the development of a professional identity through the work, the informal learning that this generates, and any formal (off-job) learning which is supported by the employer. Whist it is legitimate, we would argue, to conceptualise, loosely, the transition from HE to work in this way the processes and the complexities remain un-researched and problematic. The project discussed here will not resolve such problems but hopefully will provide a stepping stone within what is seen as a more fruitful research agenda vis a vis much of graduate labour market research to date. It is through a richer understanding of new graduate engagement with work and with their employer that will help generate useful feedback about the quality of education in relation to employability and how the transition might best be managed to ensure unnecessary trauma on the journey to professionalism is avoided.

The Research Project The aim of our research project, therefore, is to seek a richer understanding of new graduate engagement with professional development in the context of first destination employment. We envisage producing a number of individual case studies; accounts of the graduates’ day-to-day, week by week activities, the developing relationships with colleagues (and significant others), developing practice, significant events and encounters, all of which constitutes the fabric of their new, work based, learning environment. From analysis of such accounts it is proposed to take some further steps towards an outline conceptual framework addressing graduate engagement with professional development within the workplace; a framework that might usefully guide subsequent, more focused, research enquiry.

Methodology and Methods The proposed research is best described as a pilot study. Although the research by Holmes (2001) and Harvey (1999; 2001) from the world of graduate employment and Gold et al, Davies etc in professional development more widely, provide us with some guiding stars, our approach is essentially exploratory. Consistent with this underpinning we were anxious to avoid generating only a 'snap shot' picture. A longitudinal study, we consider, provides a more appropriate strategy to allow the complexities of influences, processes, tensions etc to emerge over time. We propose, therefore, to track between 15 and 20 graduates for up to a period of one year with initial contact being established prior to the start of employment. More specifically, therefore, we propose adopting a case study methodology; an empirical enquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomena within its real-life context (Yin, 1989). It is proposed to interview each graduate on at least four occasions; once prior to the start of employment and subsequently on three occasions over a period of 9 - 12 months. The specific technique to be employed will be the depth interview (Walker, 1985). According to Walker a depth interview is a conversation in which the researcher encourages the informant to relate, in his or her own terms, experiences and attitudes that are relevant to the research problem. It provides a vehicle for the researcher to probe deeply, uncover new clues, open up new dimensions of a problem and to encourage the interviewee to recount in detail 'their story'. Indeed our depth interviews might be thought of as the graduate's ‘developing story‘. Stories can be regarded as expressions of how our graduates 'naturally’ code their expectations, feelings, experiences and so on (Fineman and Gabriel, 1996).

Issues and Questions In this concluding section we highlight a number of issues that have being of concern to us in the development and design phases of this project. These are far from resolved and whilst we remain confident that our proposals will result in interesting and valuable findings we welcome any discussion that this paper may provoke in terms of the rationale and underpinnings of the proposed project, and the details and logistics of our proposed fieldwork. One major concern that has occupied our attention is the extent to which our data will be valid. Clearly we will not be able to make any strong claim that our stories are typical of the first destination graduate population as a whole, nor even of the organisation in which any one of the case studies is based. However, if by validity we mean, crudely, usefulness then two tests might be employed. First, will the data be of use to participants / related stakeholders? If we were one of the graduates, one of their employers, an official in a relevant professional body or someone in a graduate careers type organisation, would we find in the data something practically useful, something to think about in relation to our own practice. Second, will the stories tell us something upon which we can usefully build in terms of the development of our conceptual understanding? A second issue relates to our decision, implicitly evident in the above discussion, to focus exclusively on the graduate. Whilst we share the view of Holmes that it is the very engagement of graduate with their employer that is poorly researched, the focus of this project is, unashamedly, the new graduate. Given limited funding we feel such a focus is legitimate. We should add, of course, that we fully expect employers to feature significantly in our graduate stories. A third issue relates to important choices we must make. In multiple case design replication is being sought not sampling logic. Nevertheless, common-sense suggests we need to be cognisant of the wide range of degree programmes available within our own HE institution and the varying extent to which these are influenced by, and have links with, a range of professional bodies and associations. An unresolved question, therefore, is to what extent we seek to ‘engineer’ some sort of sample. Gold et al (2001) identify three types of professional ‘institutionalisation‘: individuals who claim the status of professional; professional organisations composed of groups of individual professionals; and professional bodies / associations providing a regulatory, informational and educative framework for individual professionals. Intuitively, we feel the need to try and reflect this typology in terms of some 'rough and ready’ equivalent categorisation of graduate first destination employment, so that any sample covers employment in occupations where ipd/cpd is most likely as a requirement and where it may be a much more hot and miss affair. The technicalities of how to contact the students on the courses selected provides a further level of decisions to be addressed. Although our target is 15 - 20 students, whom we can track into employment following graduation, this will require contact to be made with a considerably larger number in the first instance. Hence, we plan to develop a simple database of students from 8 - 10 selected courses and who meet our basic criteria of either having already obtained career related employment or who are seeking career related employment. The co-operation of course / programme leaders will be essential to assist in building this pool of students who are willing to be party to the research project. Contact will need to maintained with the ‘pool’ - potentially difficult once students have completed their final exams/assessments. It may well be necessary to select rather more than 20 in the first instance in order to accommodate last minute drop out. However, assuming a minimum of 20 students can be enlisted the sort of problems affecting any longitudinal study will inevitably ‘kick in’ at some point. Although our proposed project is a relatively ‘short’ longitudinal study, nevertheless, maintaining the momentum over the course of a year may be problematic. We intend to offer small ‘retaining’ payment to each of our selected graduates, if only as a token of the importance which we attach to continued involvement. We also plan an ‘event’ at the end of the fieldwork to which we will invite our informants to participate in a final ‘feedback’ / ‘reflection’ day Finally, we have not ignored the potential difficulties of analysis. A considerable body of data will be collected. Our provisional plans are to record and subsequently transcribe the interviews and subsequently utilise QSR NVivo or QSR N5 (formerly NUD*IST) software to assist our analysis. It should be pointed out that this will require a commitment on behalf of ourselves to a period of our own professional development; previous analysis of qualitative data having been handled manually.

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