Lessons in Readiness: Self-determination and student agency in careers, employability, and success

Abstract

Many university careers services sit structurally within the broad family of “Student Success”, but in practice, their strategic drivers often look quite different. While university student success strategies often claim to be focused on the student’s holistic journey into and through the university, then out into the world, careers services’ success in supporting students’ transition out is often reduced to data measuring and judged by the outcome of that journey in terms of work or further study after graduation (e.g., Gasevic et al., 2019; Knox, 2017). Consequently, careers services can find themselves unwittingly trapped within a contradiction. On one hand, they are existentially motivated to support the student’s individual journey and the diversity of their future outcomes. On the other hand, they—and the student—are judged on the nature of those outcomes. This contradiction has—in the United Kingdom (UK) at least—led to some important and innovative approaches by university careers services to enabling students’ agency through their readiness to progress on that journey. But I think those approaches also surface some important questions with relevance to all student services about what we mean when we talk about agency.