Career services in Australian higher education: aligning the training of practitioners to contemporary practice

ABSTRACT

As university graduates face increasingly changing and challenging labour markets and work environments, universities are prioritising the work of helping students develop their graduate employability. As a result, university Career Services and career development practitioners are subject to changing strategic and operational approaches to the provision of careers and employability learning opportunities at institution-wide scale. In this study, we examine current conceptualisations of careers and employability practice through the analysis of three sources of data: program descriptions of postgraduate career development qualifications, position descriptions for careers and employability jobs advertised in Australia over the past four years, and focus groups with career development practitioners. We evaluate how well existing career development qualifications align with the work of contemporary university career development practitioners, and identify opportunities to continue evolving the profession, to better help our students meet the demands of future life and work.

KEYWORDS:

• Careers
• educators
• training
• professional standards
• employability
• higher education

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

Professor Peter McIlveen is the program convenor for one of the CICA endorsed postgraduate programs included in this study. He was not involved in the collection and analysis of data for this study.