Managing e-guidance interventions within HE careers services...1. to develop a web-based e-guidance system in which HE careers services can manage and administer a local careers advice

Managing e-guidanceinterventions within HEcareers services:a new approach to providing guidance at a distance

Lucy Madahar,Graduate Prospects Ltd

Marcus Offer, NICEC

The UK’s Official Graduate Careers Support ServiceEstablished in 1972, CSU (the commercial subsidiary of HECSU) has recentlychanged its name to Graduate Prospects. The name was changed to moreclearly communicate the relationship between the highly successfulProspects brand and the organisation behind it.

Working in partnership with the most prominent official bodies in the field ofhigher education, Graduate Prospects has been bringing students, graduatesand recruiters together for over 30 years. It is our close working relationshipswith HECSU (the Higher Education Careers Services Unit), AGCAS(Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services), SCOP (the StandingConference of Principals) and Universities UK that allow us to maintain ourstatus as the UK’s official graduate careers support service.

Graduate Prospects and HECSUGraduate Prospects is the commercial subsidiary of the Higher EducationCareers Services Unit (HECSU). HECSU is a registered charity that supportsthe work of higher education careers services in the UK and Eire and fundsmajor research projects that benefit the higher education careers sector. HECSU is jointly owned by Universities UK and the Standing Conference ofPrincipals (SCOP).

© 2004 All Rights Reserved. Small extracts from thisdocument may be photocopied for educational purposesonly but should be acknowledged. Otherwise no part of thispublicaiton may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,mechanical, photocopying, rewriting or otherwise - withoutthe prior permission of HECSU.

Further copies of this report are available from

Graduate Prospects, Prospects House,

Booth Street East, Manchester M13 9EP

Tel: 0161 277 5200 Fax: 0161 277 5210

The National Institute for Careers Education and Counsellingis a network organisation initiated and supported by CRAC.It conducts applied research and development work relatedto guidance in educational institutions and in work andcommunity settings. Its aim is to develop theory, informpolicy and enhance practice through staff development,organisation development, curriculum development,consultancy and research.

Managing e-guidanceinterventions within HE careers services

a new approach to providing guidance at a distance

Lucy Madahar Graduate Prospects Ltd

Marcus Offer NICEC

contents

Contents

Preface 4Acknowledgements 5Executive summary 6

Project rationale and background 10

E-Guidance software design and functionality 12

National and local use of the e-guidance software 15

Contracting with the five HE careers services 17

What next after the research is over? 19

Evaluation of the project 20

Marketing, publicity, and statistics of use 21

Indicators of success 32

Sampling the content. “Yes, but is it guidance?” 39

Key issues and learning points 46

References and bibliography 51

Appendix one - Advisers’ Checklist 53

Appendix two - Screenshots from the e-guidance 55software system

Appendix three - Other e-guidance services 58

managing e-guidance 3

pref

ace

managing e-guidance4

PrefaceThis is the report of a Graduate ProspectsLtd project commissioned by the HigherEducation Careers Services Unit (HECSU).The aim of the action research project hasbeen twofold:1. to develop a web-based e-guidance

system in which HE careers services canmanage and administer a local careersadvice via email service to their ownstudents and graduates; and

2. to explore the whole issue of guidanceat a distance and its implications for HEcareers services and their clients.

The report starts by describing thebackground to the project and therationale for developing the e-guidancemanagement software. It acknowledgesthe growing trend amongst students andgraduates to email their university careersservices for careers advice and the ad-hocprocedures adopted by HE careers servicesin replying to email requests. The reportdescribes how the e-guidance softwarecurrently used in the national web-basedgraduate careers advice service, GraduateQuestiontime, has been adapted andmodified to provide a web-enabledmanagement system. This new systemoffers a streamlined process for not onlyencouraging students to submit theircareers queries, but for careers services torespond to queries, access detailedmonitoring routines and use integratedclient feedback mechanisms.

The report introduces the fiveparticipating HE careers services andidentifies their planned research objectivesand targets. It also illustrates how each ofthe five services has used the e-guidancesoftware and different approaches tomanaging their e-guidance services –including a comparison with how thenational Graduate Questiontime service ismanaged.

This report provides detailed evaluationsof the e-guidance software, as well asevaluations on the actual e-guidanceservice each careers service offers to itsown students and graduates. Evaluationson the impact of marketing and promoting

this type of guidance provision areprovided, as is an analysis of themonitoring statistics and usage figures.The evaluations also analyse in detail thetypes of indicators of success each careersservice works to, including customersatisfaction, integration with existingguidance provision, range of and reachingto new and existing client groups, qualityof service, effectiveness and sustainability.

A key chapter in the report analyses theactual quality of advice provided by the e-guidance services and discusses whetherthis is actually guidance or not. As part ofthis evaluation, the report identifies arange of current thinking and argumentregarding the issues of guidance at adistance and includes an analysis of theguidance process, what we mean byguidance outcomes, developing dialogueand interaction and also how counsellingand therapy are using email and Internet.

The final chapter presents our key learningpoints and the issues which arose from theproject. We believe that these issues willconstitute the key questions that need tobe answered by anyone setting up a similaremail/web-based service, since they offersignificant strategic and professionalalternatives. These issues include whetherto provide a team or personalisedapproach to your e-guidance service,whether to offer an embedded service oradditional service, should it be offered as astand-alone service or contextualisedwithin your existing guidance services,what skills and training will be required foryour staff and what ethical issues need tobe considered.

Within the areas of advice, guidance,counselling and therapy, the UK continuesto experiment with on-line and off-linedelivery. The e-guidance debate continuesto raise issues of how to deliver e-guidance, whether it should be integrated,can it deliver real human interactions anddialogue. We hope that this actionresearch project and report make asignificant contribution to this debate.

Acknowledgementsacknow

ledgements


We would like to acknowledge thegenerous help given to us by all those whoparticipated in the e-guidance actionresearch project:• Mike Williams and the staff at Graduate

Prospects Ltd, especially the technicaldevelopment staff;

• The HECSU Board of Directors who commissioned the action researchproject;

• The heads of service and staff of the fiveHE careers services contracted to pilotthe e-guidance systems – with specialthanks to Paul Redmond and Ginny Mair(Liverpool Hope); Ron Harle, SusanWilson and Dominic Linley (Universityof Bradford); John Gough and TaraPfeiffer-Christopher (De MontfortUniversity); Elspeth Farrar and KateCroucher (Middlesex University); andBarbara Graham and Audrey McCulloch(University of Strathclyde);

• The heads of service and staff of the six HE careers services who trialled, outsidethe official action research project, thee-guidance software and providedsuggestions for improvement – GlasgowCaledonian University; University ofWales College, Newport; University ofYork; University of Salford; Queen’sUniversity Belfast; and NapierUniversity;

• Anne Lidster, Partnerships Manager at Connexions Direct, for her contributionat the January 2003 e-guidanceworkshop and the Connexions Directmonitoring data supplied for thisreport;

• University for Industry (UfI) for their Learn Direct monitoring data suppliedfor this report.

exec

utiv

e su

mm

ary


Graduate Prospects Ltd set up a 12-month e-guidance action researchproject, the aim of which was to test thepossibility of extending a system used todeliver the national GraduateQuestiontime e-guidance service tocurrent students and graduates of anumber of local HE careers services and toexplore the whole issue of guidance at adistance. The pilot services were deliveredinitially by five careers services, who wereable to completely customise and brandthe web-based email system for their use,while the software continued to run in facton Graduate Prospects servers.

The project began in June 2002 andran until December 2003 with five HEcareers services at the universities ofBradford, Middlesex, Strathclyde, DeMontfort and Liverpool Hope. A further sixhave also piloted the e-guidance softwarebut did not contribute formally to theresearch, despite providing feedback onthe technology. All technical support andmaintenance was provided by GraduateProspects Ltd.

Access to the system for enquirers wasfrom branded links on the individualcareers services’ websites, and a range ofother aspects of the system includingfeedback email requests to clients,monitoring statistics, automated thank-youreplies and access permission levels couldbe configured by the local service. Briefdetails of the user and the topic of theirenquiry are gathered before allowing themto submit a query.

Monitoring statistics are readily availablein standard graph format and clientfeedback, in two stages, is collectedautomatically according to parametersdecided by the local service.

Team versus personalised or specialistapproach. In three out of four of the pilotservices, the enquirer’s question wasnormally fielded anonymously by the nextavailable adviser or staff member, sointeraction was with the system ratherthan a person. At Liverpool Hope, oneadviser had sole responsibility for the

service and used her name in allcommunications, while Strathclydenegotiated a redesign of the registrationform so that topic headings selected andthe subject discipline of the enquirertriggered a response from the adviser orother staff member appropriate to thattopic and faculty. Here, too, advisers usedtheir own names in replying to emails.Advantages of a personalised approach arethat it may tend to encourage the buildingof rapport with the user, ensuringcontinuity in case of any follow up, andcould be more attractive to the users. Inthe specialist format used at Strathclyde, itcan also avoid staff having to tacklequestions outside their normal areas ofexpertise. The team approach, on theother hand, has the advantage ofguaranteeing a swift response within alarger service, three days being thestandard turnaround time generallymaintained.

Access via Prospects Net. In the longerterm, HE careers services will be able toaccess the software for this system only asa module that can be selected throughProspects Net. The software for the latterwill be available for general use from May2004. It is the aim of Graduate Prospectsand the E-guidance team to undertakefurther work with IAG Partnerships during2004, extending the use of the system toadult guidance organisations in general.

Marketing and Use. Wide-ranging andcomprehensive marketing of the service inmost of the pilot sites did not necessarilybear the anticipated fruit. Numbers ofusers appeared initially disappointingly lowcompared to the (with hindsight) ratherambitious target figures. Most placesprobably received queries from 1-3% oftheir eligible population, compared with aroughly estimated 10-12% for face-to-faceservices. Differences in marketing strategydo not seem to have impacted on thesefigures across the pilot sites. However, thefigures, although smaller than expected,are actually in line with those achieved,albeit from a much larger eligiblepopulation, by Graduate Questiontimenationally. There are some signs that

1. Executive summary1.1

1.6

1.7

1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

executive summ

ary


returns on marketing investment may beobserved only over a longer period than12 months, and that many current usersactually first heard of the service while on-line. Strathclyde, which only marketed theservice as part of its normal publicity, doesnot appear to have lagged behind as aresult.

Types of query were differentlycategorised from one service to anotherbut a generally popular category across theboard appears to have been Further Study.Also frequently asked about are: how toexplore your options, career changes andidentifying vacancies (Strathclyde),applications, job sources and occupationalchoice (Bradford), finding a job, careerchoice, and applying for teacher training(Middlesex), searching for jobs andapplication enquiries (De Montfort), andgeneral guidance and information, andcareer change at Liverpool Hope.

Time Management raised various issues,including the length of time taken toanswer – widely varying from a fewminutes to a full hour and moredepending on the familiarity of the adviserwith the subject, the nature of thequestion itself, and the availability oftemplates or other resource from which tocut and paste. It neither saves, nor costs,time. Each pilot site took a differentapproach to allocating staff time, fromregular diary slots for all advisers, to fittingthe emails in as they come. Peak times foruse occur in the autumn, with a lowerdemand later in the academic year. Someexperienced a second smaller peak fromJuly onwards. Local circumstances andarrangements affect this significantly. InBradford 68% of use was during officehours on weekdays, though others felt thatthe freedom to submit queries 24/7 wasgenuinely appreciated.

Characteristics of users. There appearsto be no particularly significant genderimbalance – it goes one way in someplaces, the other way elsewhere – thoughthe national service has significantly morequeries from women (60%) than frommen. Other personal characteristics are

hard to collect: email is relativelyanonymous, unless users choose to revealanything about themselves. Subjectdisciplines vary from one institution toanother, with no discernible trend, whilegeographic location shows significantnumbers may use the system while livingwithin easy reach of the actual careerscentre.

1.11 Indicators of success• customer satisfaction – the feedback

gathered automatically by the systemshows the overwhelming majority inmost places regard the email service asa useful and user-friendly facility. Thosewho have not used it have not done so,it would appear, because, despite heavymarketing, they simply did not knowabout it. The main problem is to make itknown and keep it so.

• integration – the service is not seen asa stand-alone alternative, but as acomplementary part of the existingservice. In more than one case it hasbeen used as a preparatory activity tothe face-to-face interview, and, in one,linked to curriculum modules. Theplacing of the access point on thewebsite is also important – mostservices chose to make it an alternativereception area by adding it to the frontpage, but Strathclyde, in particular,decided an approach more consistentwith needs-based principles would be toadd it at those points in the websitewhere it offered a fall-back position forthose with unanswered questions.Integration with other projects andactivities is also important andfavourable feedback was received fromofficers of other projects who linkedfrom it, and from some academic staff.

• range and reach – the service reachedsome new groups, notably prospectivestudents, and distance learners, but it isdifficult to tell how far those who usedit were the same people as use the off-line services too. Graduates areparticularly important (45% of users inone case) and, to a lesser extent,international students.

• quality – while Graduate Questiontimehas already achieved Matrix standards,

1.8

1.9

1.10

exec

utiv

e su

mm

ary


the pilot email services have not yettaken this test. It is assumed this will beonly a matter of time.

• effectiveness – the email service isjudged by staff as an effective way ofusing their time, and many are relievedthey have not been swamped by it inthe first year. Overall evaluation isextremely positive, for slightly differentreasons at each service. Recentlyqualified staff have found it a usefulform of professional development.Figures for users themselves are harderto obtain as yet, but such data as thereis suggests that feedback is highlypositive there too.

Content of the emails: is it guidanceor “only” information and advice? Arandom but representative andanonymous sample of about 5% of thequestions and answers handled by the fivepilot services suggests that the mostcommon outcomes of guidance requiredand delivered are to do with the tactics ofgetting work and learning, as well asspecific information. However, other typesof need – for a sharper focus or widerapprehension of the scope ofopportunities, as well as greater realismabout the labour market and oneself, andsupport for specific decision making –appear to be tackled. Advisers have taken aprofessional but slightly conservativeapproach to the delivery of “guidance” byemail. Several believe that it is not, in fact,possible to deliver guidance as such by thismedium. However, evidence also showsthat guidance outcomes appear to bedelivered this way, and the main concernsare about the process which is perceivedas one-way and lacking interaction anddialogue, as well as not achieving the kindof warmth or relationship felt to bepresent in face-to-face interventions.Nevertheless, examination of the actualemails shows the sparks are there and canbe fanned into flame if necessary. Althoughmost emails are one question and oneanswer, this may lie as much with theperception of the system by client andadviser, especially where the lesspersonalised team approach is used, ratherthan with the nature of email itself as a

medium. Evidence from GraduateQuestiontime shows that an effective,interactive dialogue with a client ispossible, even within the anonymoussystem used at national level. Theremaining doubts seem to be about thefeasibility of developing on-line rapport orempathy without the use of non-verbalcommunication. Since this has apparentlybeen tested in personal counselling andtherapy, which are increasingly on-line, it issuggested that email services should betreated as a form of intervention in theirown right, not as a pale reflection of face-to-face interactions. This may make futuretechnical and professional developmentmore rewarding for the guidancepractitioner.

1.13 Key issues andlearning points • team or personalised approaches –

which of these is likely to be better atachieving good responses from users,and more effective management of thesystem? There are arguments on bothsides which must be decided in the lightof local policy and circumstances.

• embedded or additional services -there are also some arguments aboutwhere such a service is best located –locally, or regionally or nationally. Someof these concern the duplication ofresources, versus the face validity oflocal knowledge. This dilemma isessentially removed by the GraduateProspects software system whichremoves the need for local duplicationof resources while fully enabling localknowledge to come into play via acustomised branded service.

• stand-alone or contextualised –there is a question of where the accesspoint should be on the local website –embedded within relevant pages, in aneeds-based format, and/or on the frontpage as an alternative reception pointfor those whose “learning style” drawsthem to it.

• training – skills, demands, andopportunities – there arerequirements for technical fluency,ability to analyse a text, and to use anon-directive, informal writing style

1.12

executive summ

ary


effectively. At the same time, emailoffers less experienced advisers anopportunity to build up professionalknowledge. Peer review is a usefulactivity that many of the pilot serviceshave used. Given the availability of thefull text of all interactions with clients inthe system to other advisers, exchangeof ideas and experiences can be easy toachieve. Possibilities for supervision arealso enhanced. Email guidance asdescribed in section 10 also requiresexperience and specific writingtechniques that may not be availablenaturally, so continuous professionaldevelopment and exploration isrecommended. A checklist for advisersis at appendix one.

• ethical issues – all staff should beaware of the issues of security andconfidentiality and revisit existingprofessional codes and standards onthis. In the absence of a specific UK setof standards for on-line counselling, itmay be worth examining thoseproduced in the USA.

• attachments – because of the dangerof viruses, CVs cannot be attached tothese emails and this causes practicalproblems and irritation, though thereasons are understood.

1.14 ConclusionThe project has been a signal success inbringing together disparate previous emailservices and providing a streamlined,monitored system with automatic feedbackand data collection. This is widelyappreciated. The end-users of the servicealso appear very happy with the servicesthey have received, and the mainimpediment to its wider application is theapparent difficulty of ensuring that alleligible users know of it and remain awareof it.

The system can be applied in a variety ofways locally, and integrated with a range ofother services on- and off-line. Doubtsabout its ability to deliver real humaninteractions and dialogue may haveclouded the vision of its potential so far,but these should not be allowed to inhibitrobust testing and experimentaldevelopment in the future. Other areas ofadvice and guidance in the UK areexperimenting with on-line one-to-onedelivery, and higher education careersservices can make a significantcontribution to the debate.

proj

ect

ratio

nale

and

bac

kgro

und


Email has, of course, been available andused by careers advisers in a variety ofservices for all sorts of reasons. All of theHE careers services in the present projecthad used personal email addresses to fieldqueries from students, check CVs, arrangeappointments or offer information andadvice. Other services also run their ownspecific email response systems. Thenovelty of the current project has more todo with the systematic frameworkprovided by the Graduate Prospectssoftware, backed by the experience of thenational Graduate Questiontimeprogramme, to produce a branded andtimetabled service, than with the simplefact of using email to give information oradvice.

2.1 Graduate Questiontime Since February 2001, Graduate Prospectshas offered graduates1 a national careersadvice via email/Internet service entitled“Graduate Questiontime” (Madahar, 2003).Over 22,000 graduates have now made useof this web-based e-guidance service. Awide range of career queries has beenreceived covering all aspects ofinformation, advice and guidance.Graduates access the service via theInternet and submit their careers question.A team of HE careers advisers respond tothe query within three working days andemail their response to the graduate.

2.2 The E-guidance project As a direct result of the success of thisservice, plus a growing number ofenquiries from HE careers services aboutthe “Graduate Questiontime” software,Graduate Prospects Ltd set up a 12-monthe-guidance action research project.Another key reason for setting up the e-guidance project was to address thegrowing issue of how HE careers servicesdeal with the increase in student/graduateemail communication and to explore thewhole issue of guidance at a distance.

Issues to be addressed. Initialdiscussions with a handful of HE careersservices indicated that there had been asignificant growth in the number of emailrequests for careers information andadvice from their own students andgraduates. However, the key issue for mostof these HE careers services was thatrequests for careers advice by emailoperated on an ad-hoc basis, with no setprocedures or policies for dealing with thisgrowth in the use of communicationtechnology. HE careers services cited thefollowing issues as barriers to developing astructured careers-advice-via-emailprovision:• Emailed careers requests were either

emailed directly to an individual careersadviser or emailed to the careersservice’s general email address. Therewas, therefore, little opportunity tointerrogate the user and obtain a userprofile.

• Even if students/graduates wereemailing one general careers address,standard email software, such asMicrosoft Outlook, was not able tosystematically analyse user dataincluding type of email query, adviserresponse time; number of emails perday/week/month/year.

• Several HE careers services cited thelack of time in the careers adviser’sworking day to respond to incomingemails; e-guidance was not considered aformal part of the official jobdescription.

• Many careers advisers feltuncomfortable responding to emailqueries due to the lack of e-guidanceguidelines, policies and procedures forthe careers adviser to follow.

Objectives. In order to address theseissues and concerns, the e-guidance actionresearch had several objectives:• To develop customised web-based email

advice management software of HEcareers services to deliver, manage anmonitor their own careers advice viaemail service for students andgraduates.

2. Project rationale and background

2.2.1

2.2.2

2.2.3

1 Graduates must be nationals of states within the European Economic Area, have graduated from university within the last five years and be seeking help

identifying jobs and further study in the UK

project rationale and background


• To understand how to make e-guidance work effectively.

• To identify what are the strategic implications for the careers service andits impact on the organisation and staffdynamics.

• To evaluate the guidance outcomes for the client, the usability of the e-guidance service and client satisfactionlevels.

• To establish and identify indicators of success.

• To identify and disseminate learningpoints, which inform other careersservices who may decide to use the e-guidance software and/or undertakesimilar work in the future.

The e-guidance action research projectbegan in June 2002 and ran untilDecember 2003, with five HE careersservices: University of Bradford; LiverpoolHope; De Montfort University; MiddlesexUniversity; and University of Strathclyde.Six additional HE careers services alsopiloted the e-guidance software: GlasgowCaledonian University; University of WalesCollege, Newport; University of Salford;University of York; Queen’s University,Belfast; and Napier University. Althoughthese additional six HE careers services didnot contribute formally to the researchproject, they did provide informalfeedback on the software functionality andusability.

2.2.4

e-gu

idan

ce s

oftw

are

desi

gn a

nd fu

nctio

nalit

y


3.1 What is it?As part of the e-guidance research project,Graduate Prospects Ltd developed a pieceof e-guidance management, routing andmonitoring software, which runs on theInternet. The aim of the software is toenable an organisation to plan and managea service-wide approach to careers adviceat a distance.

The e-guidance software runs on GraduateProspects Ltd servers and it utilises thesame approach and programming that hasbeen used for the national graduatecareers advice via email service, GraduateQuestiontime2. The e-guidance softwarenot only enables a user to submit theircareers query, and a careers service torespond to it, in a structured way, it alsoincludes integrated monitoring routinesand client feedback functionality.

The e-guidance software runs as a back-office system, from Graduate Prospects’servers, and plugs into the careersservice’s own website. The careers serviceis only required to insert an external linkfrom its own website to the e-guidancewebsite. The e-guidance software,therefore, does not require access to spaceon the careers service’s own server andneither does the software requiremaintenance from the respective universityIT staff – all IT support and maintenance isprovided by Graduate Prospects Ltd.

3.2 How does it work forthe careers service?Configurability. There is quite a lot ofconfigurability built into the software sothat a careers service can decide to asktheir students particular sets of customisedquestions or ask for clarificationinformation, as well as allowing students tosend in their careers question. A careersservice can also customise their own….• automated thank-you replies.• legal disclaimer (which is automatically

placed at the bottom of all advice that issent to their students).

• client feedback emails.

Careers services can also set up their ownaccess permission levels for their ownstaff:• Master account access - access to all

aspects of the software includingcustomisation and monitoringstatistics.

• Adviser access - access to the query database and ability to respond toemails; can have access to monitoringstatistics if permission is given bymaster account.

• Observer access - can observe the database of queries but cannotrespond to queries, and can haveaccess to monitoring statistics ifpermission is given by master account.

Storage and management. As careersqueries are sent in, they are stored in adatabase (see Appendix 2, Figure 5:Database of career queries awaitingreply). To access the database, eachcareers service has its own password-controlled system, which is kept separatefrom the national graduate system andseparate from the other careers servicesusing the software. The e-guidancesoftware provides careers services with ameans of storing, managing andmonitoring careers queries. How thesecareers services respond to the queries isup to the careers services themselves – seechapter 4 for examples of how the nationalgraduate e-guidance service and the fiveresearch e-guidance services responded tothe incoming careers queries. The keyissue, though, for careers services, whenusing the e-guidance software, is thatprocedures and policies for responding toclients become a matter of management atcareers service level, rather than lots ofseparate sets of plans and decisions byindividual careers staff managing their ownemail inboxes (as is the case in many HEcareers services at present).

Staff access. The careers staff whorespond to careers queries do so througha password-controlled web-based adviserinterface, which they can use from anycomputer, anywhere, as long as it isconnected to the Internet. More than one

3. E-Guidance software design and functionality

3.1.1

3.1.2

3.1.3

3.2.1

3.2.2

3.2.3

2 Graduate Questiontime is accessible from www.prospects.ac.uk/links/GradEmail

e-guidance software design and functionality


member of staff can access the system atthe same time - it is impossible for thesame careers query to be opened by twopeople simultaneously. The software willalso archive all incoming queries andoutgoing feedback. It also provides adetailed search function of the archive.

Staff interface. When a member of staffopens a careers query, they are able notonly to view the student’s query, but also arange of biographical information, whichwas completed by the student when theysubmitted their careers question (seeAppendix 2, Figure 6: Example of anopened query awaiting a reply). If thestudent has used the e-guidance servicepreviously, the system can display thecomplete history of that student and thecorrespondence that he/she has had withthe adviser(s).

Adviser response. The member ofcareers staff responds to the query bytyping in their careers advice, includingany web addresses. Before they submittheir response, they can undertake aspellcheck. Their careers advice is thensent out to the student as a standard emailmessage, with a return link in case thestudent wants to submit a follow-upquestion. Once the query has been dealtwith, it is automatically moved to thearchive section and the member of careersstaff moves on to the next question in thequeue.

3.3 How does it work forthe student/graduate?Access points. The e-guidance software,as previously stated, plugs into the careersservice’s own website. A careers servicecan choose to have one single link to thee-guidance software, or several linksthroughout their website or even chooseboth options. The careers service canchoose to have their e-guidance link(s) ontheir top level pages (linked to a resource-based approach) and/or deeper in theirsite (linked to a needs-based approach).This will depend on whether they wantsimply to encourage large numbers ofstudents to use their e-guidance service orwhether they want to encourage them to

undertake an element of career decision-making before using the service.

Customisation. Graduate Prospects Ltdcustomises all of the student pages. Whenstudents access the software, therefore, ittakes the look of the careers service’s ownwebsite; and is simply part of that site asfar as the students are concerned. Thus,when the student clicks on the e-guidancelink, they will not know they have movedto another server, as the page designs donot change. When the user has submittedtheir careers query, they are returned tothe careers service’s website.

Interaction with the system. A keyissue when using the e-guidance softwareis to realise that the students do notinteract by using the individual mailboxesof careers advisers or whoever is giving theadvice (as is the current case in manycareers services). Instead, the studentsinteract with the system – they submittheir careers query to an e-guidancesystem as opposed to an individual careersadviser.

For the student, the process ofsubmitting a careers query is kept verysimple. The student clicks on the e-guidance link and completes thecustomised careers query form (seeAppendix 2, Figure 7: Careers query form- University of Bradford). In order tosubmit their query, they agree to the termsand conditions of the e-guidance service,as set by the individual careers service.When they accept these terms, their queryis submitted to the e-guidance database.They receive an immediateacknowledgement that their query hasbeen received and will be responded towithin a set number of days. The studentthen returns to the careers service’swebsite. If the student decides not toaccept the terms, their query is notsubmitted, none of the student’sinformation is stored and they are taken toan alternative information page, whichoffers them additional means of receivinginformation, advice and guidance. All ofthe text that appears to the student duringthis submission process is written by, andcustomised for, the individual careersservice.

3.2.4

3.2.5

3.3.1

3.3.2

3.3.3

3.3.4

e-gu

idan

ce s

oftw

are

desi

gn a

nd fu

nctio

nalit

y


3.4 Additional functionalityof the e-guidance softwareMonitoring. The e-guidance software alsocontains a full range of monitoringroutines, statistics collection and reportingand automated emailing facilities, whichcan collect evaluation feedback fromsamples of users. In fact, the e-guidancesoftware provides everything a careersservice is likely to need as part of gainingor maintaining Matrix quality standardsapproval - which the national e-guidancegraduate service received in March 2003.

Monitoring statistics. The e-guidancesoftware provides careers services withtheir own automated monitoring statisticsin the form of standard graphs, as well asproviding downloadable data for use withExcel spreadsheets, Access databases andSPSS software.

Feedback. Graduate Prospects Ltd hasalso developed an integrated clientfeedback system using web-basedquestionnaires, with downloadable data foruse with Excel spreadsheets, Accessdatabases and SPSS software. The client

feedback is divided into two stages andeach careers service can decide when tosend out a client feedback form (e.g. fivedays after the student receives theircareers advice) and which students shouldreceive a client feedback form (e.g. allclients, every tenth client and so on). Eachcareers service can decide to turn on orturn off their client feedback forms.

Stage 1 client feedback occurs as soonas the student has submitted their careersquery. The student is asked to complete afew questions on the ease of use,accessibility of the e-guidance service andwhere they heard about the email service.

Stage 2 client feedback occurs sometime after the student has received theircareers advice. The student is asked tocomplete a few questions on the quality ofthe advice they have received and whetherthey have acted on this advice.

3.4.1

3.4.4

3.4.5

3.4.2

3.4.3

national and local use of the e-guidance softw

are


During the course of the research project,it has become apparent that each HEcareers service has developed a slightlydifferent approach to the management andstaffing of their e-guidance services.

4.1 National e-guidance graduate serviceWhen Graduate Questiontime waslaunched in February 2001, the optionchosen for managing the service was tohave an anonymous “Careers Team” whowould respond to queries as they come in.Thus, each careers adviser in the team hasto be a generalist, dealing with a widerange of careers queries. Each member ofstaff is scheduled into a weekly rota andundertakes so many hours per week. Theyrespond to each graduate, as a member ofthe “Careers Team” rather than sign off asa named careers adviser. In effect, thegraduate using this e-guidance servicedevelops a relationship with the system, asopposed to developing a relationship withthe careers adviser.

Liverpool HopeLiverpool Hope employed a specific e-guidance adviser to manage and delivertheir e-guidance service. There is sporadicassistance from other members of thecareers service, but generally, thedesignated e-guidance adviser deliverstheir e-guidance service. As a result of thisapproach, the e-guidance adviser is able toname herself in her careers responses andalso when she markets the e-guidanceservice and at the access point to theservice on the website. Students andgraduates, in effect, are able to develop aone-to-one relationship with the adviser.

Middlesex UniversityMiddlesex University staffs its e-guidanceservice using a team of careers advisers.Other staff are not directly involved. Itoperates along similar lines to the nationalGraduate Questiontime service – a team ofadvisers, acting as generalists, responds toqueries as they enter the database. The e-guidance project officer manages the

weekly rota, so that staff can set aside timein their diaries to staff the e-guidanceservice. The students/graduates using theMEG (Middlesex E-Guidance) service thusdevelop a relationship with the teamrather than the individual advisers, whoseown names are not added to theresponses they provide.

University of BradfordThe University of Bradford also staffs its e-guidance service using a team of careersadvisers. The database of careers queries ismanaged and administered by the careersinformation officer and senior careersinformation assistant. They also preparethe weekly rota for the team of advisers towork from. As at Middlesex, thestudents/graduates using CAVE (“CareersAdvice Via Email”) at Bradford relate to thesystem and not the individual adviser.

De Montfort UniversityDe Montfort University operates its e-guidance service along similar lines to theUniversity of Bradford, with the careersinformation manager and employment andinformation assistant managing andadministering the e-guidance system andstaff rota. Again, students/graduates usingDe Montfort University’s e-guidanceservice thus develop a relationship withthe system and not the individual adviser.

University of StrathclydeThe University of Strathclyde opted to useits team of careers advisers, informationand reception staff and SES co-ordinator,who only respond to queries which belongto set subject categories, each of which, itwas agreed, should be dealt with by aparticular grade of staff whetherreceptionist, information assistant, SES co-ordinator or careers adviser. Thereceptionist maintains an overview of thedatabase, collates the e-guidance statisticsand responds to general enquiries aboutthe careers service. Information staffrespond to information-related enquiries,leaving individual careers advisers torespond to specialist subject queries. As aresult of this approach to managing an e-

4. National and local use of the e-guidance software

4.1.1

4.1.2

4.1.3

4.1.4

4.1.5

natio

nal a

nd lo

cal u

se o

f th

e e-

guid

ance

sof

twar

e


guidance service, students and graduatesat the University of Strathclyde are able todevelop one-to-one relationships withindividual named members of the careersstaff who will use their own names to signoff their responses. The service is further

personalised by the secondary allocation ofqueries on the basis of subjects studied bythe enquirers. Thus, a social studiesstudent asking about issues to do with“exploring career options” would bepicked up by one of two careers adviserswho normally deal with such students.

contracting with

the five H

E careers services


At the start of the e-guidance actionresearch, each of the five HE careersservices agreed a contract with GraduateProspects Ltd identifying their stated aimsand objectives and agreed targets.

Liverpool HopeThe aims of the project were to:• design and implement appropriate

Internet-based web links.• promote e-careers guidance to students,

graduates and staff at Liverpool Hope.• achieve a minimum target of ten e-

guidance transactions per day.• integrate e-careers guidance within

academic-based curricula.• develop the skills and professional

knowledge of those involved in theproject.

• disseminate the findings (and key learning outcomes) of the project viawritten report to the Rectorate Team atLiverpool Hope, the Management Boardof HECSU and other careers servicesand HEI’s in the sector.

Middlesex UniversityThe aims of the project were to:• deliver an integrated email guidance

service to undergraduates across sixcampuses of the university, inconjunction with other activities of thecareers advisory service and involving allthe careers staff.

• embed the e-guidance service into the newly designed CAS website.

• deliver a minimum of 2000 e-guidanceinteractions over the course of theproject year.

University of BradfordThe aims of the project were to:• conduct and manage an action-based

project on the delivery of a ‘CareersAdvice via Email’ service using softwareprovided by Graduate Prospects tostudents and graduates of the Universityof Bradford during the academic year2002/3.

• market the service extensively toachieve a target delivery of 2,000 unitsof e-guidance.

• involve all careers advisers in the

delivery of the service, using astructured workload plan.

• concurrently redesign and re-launch theUniversity of Bradford careers websiteas a ‘needs-based’ site incorporating e-guidance principles.

• monitor the use of electronicallymediated guidance delivered throughthe email service and the website and toactively seek feedback from both usersand non-users.

• seek from careers advisers appropriatefeedback relating to models of guidanceand appropriateness of the mode ofdelivery.

• develop expertise during the project tofully integrate e-guidance services intoour overall service delivery and todevelop a continuation strategy post2003.

De Montfort UniversityThe aims of the project were to:• establish e-guidance as part of an

integrated ICT strategy within theservice.

• explore the potential and limits ofproviding careers information, adviceand guidance through email.

• establish a resources methodology formeeting client need through ICT.

• establish an email guidance system forstudents and graduates as part of anintegrated ICT strategy consistent withthe aims of the project.

• answer a minimum of ten e-guidancequeries per day.

University of StrathclydeThe aims of the project were to:• integrate email into the range of

methods by which our students andgraduates receive advice, guidance andinformation.

• develop a system by which most emailtraffic from students and graduates canbe recorded, managed and analysed.

• eliminate the need for our receptionistto act as postmaster.

• ensure that queries are dealt with by themember of staff whose area ofspecialism most closely matches theneed.

5. Contracting with the five HE careers services

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5

cont

ract

ing

with

th

e fiv

e H

E ca

reer

s se

rvic

es


• evaluate the effectiveness – for bothstaff and clients - of providing careerssupport via email.

• identify ways in which the currentsystem might further develop to allowfor an effective integration between thee-guidance software and Prospects Net.

“…… students and graduates wereincreasingly contacting us by using theiradviser’s personal email address oradvisers were giving out their address. Werecognised that this was not an idealscenario and felt that it was leading to‘queue jumping’ and a build-up ofpressure on advisers who faced theseemails in their in-boxes daily. It was alsodifficult to obtain adequate statisticalrecords. It was time to commit to email aspart of our provision and we wanted todo it to our usual high standards.”Report from Strathclyde…. McCulloch(2003)

wh

at next after the research

is over?


The key aim of the e-guidance actionresearch project is to developcustomised web-based email advicemanagement software for HE careersservices to deliver, manage and monitortheir own careers-advice-via-email servicefor students and graduates. Even after theresearch project has ended, plans are inplace to further develop and extend the e-guidance software.

Further development. Based onfeedback from the HE careers services,who have been piloting their e-guidanceprovision, further development work iscurrently taking place to enhance thesoftware, including:• Simplifying the careers query

submission process for students andgraduates to make it even easier forclients to use.

• Improving the email archives to recordwhen archive emails are accessed andemail responses are resent.

• Developing an integrated resourcecentre within the software, which willenable advisers to store, edit and pasteweb addresses and other referralinformation into their careers adviceresponses.

Prospects Net. Plans are also in place tofully integrate the e-guidance software intoProspects Net. Prospects Net has beendeveloped by Graduate Prospects Ltd andSardin Solutions to provide HE careersservices with customised web-basedemployer vacancy database and eventsmanagement software. Any HE careersservices wanting to use the e-guidancesoftware will only be able to access it viaProspects Net. HE careers services will be

able to choose which modules to use within Prospects Net – employer vacancydatabase, events management systemand/or e-guidance software – and thesewill be customised to meet the needs ofindividual careers services. In order to usethe Prospects Net software, HE careersservices will agree an annual individuallybased licence fee, which can besignificantly reduced via set discounts. HEcareers services who are interested inusing the e-guidance software withinProspects Net will be encouraged tocontact Graduate Prospects. It is envisagedthat the Prospects Net e-guidance softwarewill be available for general use from May2004.

General Adult Guidance. An importantdevelopment during the research projecthas been to investigate how the e-guidance software can be developed tomeet the needs of general adult guidanceorganisations. In June 2003, GraduateProspects Ltd contracted withConnect2Learning (Bournemouth, Pooleand Dorset IAG Partnership) to develop ane-guidance system that would meet theemployment and learning needs queries ofits adult clients and IAG practitioners. Thisproject is still in the developmental stagesas Graduate Prospects undertakes work toadapt and customise the e-guidancesystems in order to address the needs ofan IAG Partnership organisation. It is theaim of Graduate Prospects and the E-Guidance Team to undertake further workwith IAG Partnerships during 2004, toensure that the e-guidance software canserve the needs of adult guidanceorganisations in general, who are lookingto develop their web-based guidanceinterventions.

6. What next after the research is over?

6.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

eval

uatio

n of

th

e pr

ojec

t


Methods and evidenceThe project was evaluated using a varietyof evidence and methods.• Visits to the five pilot sites were made

by the external project evaluator(Marcus Offer) at the start and end ofthe project, and discussions held withheads of service and other staff involvedin the project. These elicited a numberof key issues and learning points.

• A one-day workshop was held inManchester in January 2003, attendedby representatives of all but one of thefive pilot projects. This was used toagree the key issues and to elicit themost important indicators of successand to discuss various methods ofevaluation. There was also an input on aparallel service for younger people,Connexions Direct, from the head ofthat service, Anne Lidster, who was alsodeputy chair of NAEGA and a managerof the LearnDirect service for adults.

• A review of the literature on emailand related on-line services used forguidance, counselling or therapeuticpurposes was undertaken by theexternal project evaluator.

• The content of an (anonymous)sample of 75 email queries received,and responses made, across the fivepilot services, was analysed, to try toanswer the question: to what extentdoes the level of activity involvedrepresent “guidance” as opposed to“merely” information or advice?

• Each service also conducted its owncustomer feedback and evaluationusing the software provided byGraduate Prospects and wrote up theirfindings in an individual report. Eachalso provided statistics of theirusage.

7. Evaluation of the project7.1

marketing, publicity and statistics of use


8.1 A target for the numberof users?

“One of the most difficult aspects ofmanaging the Graduate Questiontimeservice…was, and still is, anticipating thelevels of graduate demand. GraduateQuestiontime was the first onlinegraduate careers advice service operatingon a national basis. There was, therefore,no previous history of this type of activityand as such, an element of estimationand guessing of potential numbers tookplace.”

(Madahar, 2003, p.20)

A common element in most of the pilotproject contracts was the stated target ofaround 2000 email enquiries per project,(the University of Strathclyde took adifferent line – see below). This was atleast in part because the project wasintended to be a research project so theachievement of enough traffic on which tobase reliable conclusions for the future wasclearly important. It has also been theexperience of the national service thatregular and significant marketing is neededto keep up awareness of the serviceamong the population of potentialgraduate enquirers. While all the pilot siteshad used email as a means ofcommunication with students, mostly onan ad hoc basis, none had systematicallydeveloped and marketed it before, soexpectations were quite high. All butStrathclyde made the achievement of thetarget an explicit objective in their initialcontract with Graduate Prospects, andposted an invitation to use the emailservice either on the home page of theirwebsite or on the front page for studentsand graduates. In this position it could beseen as an alternative “reception” point tothe website itself or to the physicalreception area in the careers centre.Certainly it offers a choice to the user as tohow guidance is provided – by email, bywebsite or by face-to-face contact, (thiscould be seen as a “learning style”

approach, leaving the choice of method tothe user).

8.2 Marketing the serviceTo this end most services undertook verysignificant marketing of the e-guidancefacility. All but Strathclyde posted an accesspoint to the email service on, or close to,the home page of their website, andfollowed this up with a range of otherpublicity measures.

Bradford, for example, the first of thepilot projects to start, produced 3000flyers, 500 posters and 1000 postcardsadvertising the email service anddistributed them to departments anddisplayed them throughout the university,as well as handing them out at events suchas graduation ceremonies, careers talks,careers fairs, etc. The service was alsoadvertised in the on-line and printedversions of their graduate vacancy bulletin,and in regular email bulletins sent outweekly to all final year students andmonthly to second years. The studentnewspaper and daily newssheet weretargeted, and the service was alsoadvertised to staff with suggestions toencourage their students to use it. Specificsub-groups of students were also targeted– part-time students and some students onplacements. Advertisements appeared indepartmental magazines, especially instrongly vocational departments wherestudents tend not to be strong users of thecareers service otherwise. Otheruniversities carried out similar levels ofmarketing.

De Montfort included information andposters about the service in launch packssent to all associate colleges, promotionalpacks to their contacts in distance learningand part-time learning units, emaileddetails of the e-guidance service to all oftheir students who were registered withthe Prospects website. Computer screensin the student services resource area alsohad a screen saver advertising the emailservice.

8. Marketing, publicity,and statistics of use

8.2.1

8.2.2

8.2.3

mar

ketin

g, p

ublic

ity a

nd s

tatis

tics

of o

f use


Liverpool Hope held an official launchwith invited guests from all heads ofsubject areas and made specificpresentations to all first and third yearstudents by subject group, as well as thestudents at six associated colleges in theNorth West for which the careers service isresponsible. The e-guidance address wasalso added to the reverse of theappointment card given to anyone whomakes an appointment for an interview,stressing that they can access email adviceand guidance via this service to preparethem for their interview. They also madethe use of it a requirement as part of a“Mathematics and Education in Society”course module delivered to final yearstudents, who were asked to email theircareer enquiries and then disseminate theinformation received in an assignment,(this generated, reportedly, 20-25enquiries, “about one week’s worth ofstatistics”).

At Middlesex, in addition, a series ofemails publicising the service were sentout to all enrolled students and insertsabout the service were enclosed in otherpublications, and references on mousemats, bookmarks and web cards.

Marketing is not enough? After all thisactivity it was still frustrating to find thatthere were significant numbers of studentswho “didn’t know about it” – theoverwhelming response to a sample surveyat Bradford. Evidence from elsewhereshows that marketing alone is not enough,or at least that it takes longer to build upawareness of the service than wasoriginally anticipated.

8.3 An alternative approachStrathclyde took the view, on the otherhand, that the email service should beintegrated as far as possible with theirexisting services. Therefore, this includedthe fact that email was one way to get helpin their normal marketing literature,featuring it in all leaflets explaining whatthe careers service does. They also placedaccess points to the email service, not onthe front page of their website (“ourconcerns were that such an offer mightencourage laziness”), but on inside pages,

so that the user would only reach theemail access point after having workedthrough the rest of a page containingadvice and information. At that point theymight see the words “Unansweredquestions? Email-Us!” This, they argue, ismore in line with a needs-based approachto service delivery.

This view is endorsed by some otherservices. Bradford reported:

“With hindsight, because we ran theservice as a ‘stand-alone’ project, we didnot explain fully to clients its benefits inrelation to our other services. Futuremarketing will adopt the ‘needs-based’principle which has been so successful forour website….We have had to askourselves when CAVE would be the mostappropriate medium for our clients andwhat the CAVE service can deliver betterand quicker than our traditional services(and, of course, what it can’t!).The CAVEservice is no longer marketed as a ‘stand-alone’ option but as an integratedelement of our guidance services, with anexplanation of its benefits and itslimitations.” (Wilson and Linley, 2003)

8.4 The results – adisappointment or whatmight have been expected?Short of the target. After so much effortexpended on publicity, the results fell farshort of the target of 2,000 enquiries in theyear or ten per day, which some of theservices had set. The number of enquirieshandled over the year ranged from 180 to311. Not all sites managed to start theirservice as early in the year as others and itmay have taken time to build up publicity.Strathclyde, who “went live” only in April2003, with, as we have seen, less specificmarketing, had answered 280 queries inseven months. These results might seemdisappointing to some, and certainlycontrasted with the concerns expressed bysome advisers involved in earlier projectsabout the possibility of careers serviceslosing control of email enquiries if thecurrent trend of use continued (Offer etal., 2001 p.42) In practice a more soberanalysis is required.

8.2.5

8.2.6

8.3.1

8.3.2

8.4.1

8.2.4



The total eligible population of anemail guidance service at any universitywill vary widely. It should presumablyinclude all current students,undergraduate and postgraduate, full-timeand part-time as well as distance learners,and graduates of the university for thenumber of years after graduation duringwhich they are able to access the careersservice. Since email is independent of timeand place, the number of those for whomit is a real access point is going to be largerthan for the face-to-face service at thecareers centre. Indeed, the desire to offera service to those hitherto unable toaccess it, is surely one of the key reasonsfor setting up an email service and, thoughnot officially stated by any of the pilotservices in their formal contract withGraduate Prospects, it was mentionedmore than once in discussions with theexternal evaluator.

Complexities. However, it appears to bemuch more difficult to define who is a“current student” of the university thanwho is a graduate. Complexities arise fromsuch factors as the franchising of coursesin other colleges, networking acrosscolleges and campuses in the local area,and considerations as to whether a studentis “extra-curricular” but counted within thetotal. Figures even for the “eligiblepopulation” of those using the face-to-faceservice were not usually to hand, andrequests for them caused some problems.In addition, different careers services offerservices to their graduates for differentlengths of time, ranging from about twoyears after graduation to life! So that too,can seriously affect the figures. Add to thisthat there is an almost infinite number ofprospective students who could send inqueries by email, and the difficulty of everestimating the size of the audience for anemail service can appear insuperable.

Benchmark data. In the end, we adoptedas a benchmark, the assumption inparagraph 8.4.2 above, that all currentstudents, full and part-time howeverdefined locally, and all graduates for anarbitrary period of three years aftergraduation (this being the period when

most enquiries are in fact likely),constitute a reasonable guess at thepotential user group for an e-guidanceservice. Taking the number of enquiriesdealt with in the year as a percentage ofthe total population, it then follows(subject to all the caveats above) that ourpilot services were probably used bybetween 0.6% and 2.3% of the eligiblepopulation so defined. If only currentstudents are taken into account, thepercentage may rise to 3% or 4%. Thegraduate population is perhaps a lessquantifiable quantity because many will behappily settled in a job so the real figurefor potential graduate guidance seekers ishard to anticipate. The percentages givenhere, however, are fairly consistent acrossthe five services. In other words, anycareers service manager thinking ofembarking on setting up such an emailservice could anticipate that, at least in thefirst few years, a figure of no more thanaround 3-4 % of the eligible population forthat university would use it.

Other factors. These percentages mustbe set against two other factors. GraduateProspects’ national service for graduatesdeals with an average of 1,000 careersqueries per month, which at first sightlooks much more successful than thefigures for the local project. If we try towork out the eligible population for theGraduate Questiontime service, however,the percentage who use the service maynot be so different. If we assume around300,000 graduates leave higher educationevery year, and as the national emailservice is available to graduates for up tofive years after graduation, this means atotal eligible population from the UK of1,500.000, from whom 12,150 emails werereceived in 12 months, which works out atabout 0.8%. Of course, GraduateQuestiontime is a national service, open toall EEA graduates seeking study or work inthe UK, and as such, will have an evenbigger and more intangible audience thanUK graduates alone, and a largeproportion of these will also be in work orlearning, or unable to speak good English,and hence perhaps less likely to send in anenquiry. The percentage reached of the

8.4.2

8.4.3

8.4.4

8.4.5

mar

ketin

g, p

ublic

ity a

nd s

tatis

tics

of u

se


population of those who may need thehelp, could therefore rise, we calculated,to between 1% and 2% of those eligible touse it.

A comparable result? Despite thecomplexities and uncertainties of thecalculations here, it is clear that we are notdealing with percentages much above the3-4 % mark whatever population baselinewe assume. It seems that the local servicesare not doing much worse in reachingtheir audiences than the national GraduateQuestiontime service, which is alsomarketed heavily, and has been runningfor over two years now.

Vis a vis face-to-face. Finally, it is worthconsidering the relationship between thepercentage using the email service andthose using the face-to-face services of thecareers centre. Again, it was sometimesdifficult to work out the eligiblepopulations of the respective universitiesfor these services, but estimates that wereoffered suggested 9-12% was a reasonablefigure. Such statistics could varysignificantly according to time of year anddepend on whether one is considering allface-to-face contact, or just the longerinterviews or appointments. Many of theactual enquiries look like those that wouldbe brought to a drop-in session or shortappointment. For specific comparison, atStrathclyde, during the period April –September 2003, 193 email enquiries maybe compared to 597 long appointments,face-to-face with an adviser, 243 shortappointments, and 208 “CV drop in”sessions. Local variations between servicesare considerable, however, includingvarying degrees of involvement in groupwork and the flexibility of arrangementsfor one-to-one, face-to-face appointments.

A hypothesis. No records are generallykept of all the traffic that passes through acareers centre. Granted all theconsiderable uncertainties of thecalculations, it may, nevertheless, be aviable hypothesis for the future that theratio of use of face-to-face compared toemail services could be expected to besomething like 4 to 1. Such a hypothesis,

like all hypotheses, remains to be tested. Itmay, nevertheless, help with practicalmanagement forecasting, or provide thebasis for more in-depth research.

Achievement as expected. However, inthese terms, the project’s achievements innumbers of users look very much withinthe realms of what might have beenexpected and the main problem is therelatively over-ambitious initial “target” set.

8.5 Should numbers be a target at all?Strathclyde, as already mentioned, took asomewhat different stance towards the“target” from the start. Their previousexperience with the West of ScotlandGraduate Careers Email Service (Gow,2002) was partly responsible for this. Forthem, the issue was not one of attaininghigh numbers of users, nor of proving thatan email service could be provided, but ofthe “effectiveness” of providing careerssupport by email to those who used it,within an integrated set of “methods bywhich our students and graduates receiveadvice, guidance and information”. Thisstance, as has already been said, affectedthe positioning of the email access pointon the website, and the level and type ofmarketing undertaken. “We do not havenumerical targets for how many studentsand graduates we will advise face-to-face orfor how many we want to come toseminars. Neither did we, therefore, setnumerical targets for Email-Us”. However,they still received 280 enquiries in sevenmonths, which, in percentage terms as faras these can be calculated, was notdissimilar from the results achievedelsewhere.

8.6 Total enquiriesreceived Of course, there still are practicalmanagerial arguments for trying to assessthe likely uptake of any such new service,and to decide on realistic levels ofresource provision for it. As was pointedout earlier, the project was a researchproject, and the size of the sample is not

8.4.6

8.4.7

8.4.8

8.4.9

8.5.1

8.6.1



immaterial to the validity of the results. Inour case, the sample was a total (acrossall five centres) of 1,362 enquiriesreceived.

8.7 What topics were mostcommonly asked about?The fact that the software enables the localservice to pre-categorise enquiries by topicmeans that the categories are not

necessarily the same ones in each of thepilot services. Strathclyde, for example, set 12 topic headings - from which usersare obliged to select one (see figure 1below). These, then, also determinedwhether the query was answered by areceptionist, SES co-ordinator, a memberof information staff, or a careers adviser – afeature unique to Strathclyde’s particularapproach to the project (see table 1below).

8.7.1

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

3038 2530 1519 1011 910 79

40

How to explore your optionsCareers facilities & events

Further studyCareer changes

Identifying vacancies

Making applicationsPart-time work whilst studyingInternship/vacation workInterviews/assessment centresInformation on qualifications

Working abroad

Info on a specific employer

Figure 1. Strathclyde - Number of email enquiries by category

Table 1. How Strathclyde matched categories of enquiry to staff roles:

How to explore your options Advisers

Career changes Advisers

Identifying vacancies Advisers

Making applications Advisers

Interviews and assessment centres Advisers

Further study Advisers

Information on a specific job/employer Information staff

Internships/vacation work Student Employment Service

Part-time work whilst studying Student Employment Service

Working abroad Information staff

Information on qualifications Information staff

Careers service facilities and events Receptionist

mar

ketin

g, p

ublic

ity a

nd s

tatis

tics

of u

se


Bradford, by contrast, had only eightheadings, and did not necessarily use themto allocate enquiries to particular staffmembers. In descending order offrequency there were enquiriescategorised as applications, further study,job sources, occupational choice,placements, working abroad, selectioninterviews, and “other”. These arereported as numbers of enquiries, in figure2 above.

about PGCE courses (19%). The largestsingle category, however, was described as“General Guidance and Information”(38%). Other categories includedPostgraduate study (other than PGCE)(15%), Career Change (12%), JobApplications and Interviews (9%), and CVs(7%). Information about careers and jobsrelated to my degree, what can I do with adegree in X, and where to find jobvacancies, were frequent queries.

ApplicationsFurther study

Job sourcesOccupational choice

PlacementsSelection interviewsWorking abroadOther

0

20

40

60

80

100

84

58

51

36

23

15

36

7

Figure 2. Bradford - Number of email enquiries by category

Middlesex’s top category for enquiries, bycontrast, was Postgraduate study (28%),followed closely by Finding a Job (26%),then Career Choice (16%), Applying forTeacher Training (12%) and Module Choice(4%). Other, uncategorised enquiresamounted to 19% of the total.

At De Montfort most enquiries (37%)were about searching for jobs, followed byapplication enquiries (20%).

Liverpool Hope with a high proportionof students studying and aiming ateducation as a career had as their secondhighest category, not surprisingly, enquiries

However, the fact that for much of the yearHope had no website to speak of, mayhave meant that the email service stood inon some occasions for topics that mightotherwise have been dealt with on such asite.

Localised content analysis. Within thesystem used in all services, users areinvited to select from a drop-down menuof topics, which then sets the strapline foreach enquiry. However, as we can see, thismenu is increasingly determined by thelocal service and has, in most cases, beenamended as experience grew. Thus, a kindof informal content analysis was carried

8.7.2

8.7.3

8.7.4

8.7.5

8.7.6



out by some of the services which mayhave involved recategorising a user’s ownselection as to what a query might beabout. Even where the same categoryheading is used, therefore, allocation tothis is not necessarily the same from oneservice to another. This flexibility ofcategorisation makes it impossible tocompare statistics reliably across the fivesites.

Guidance or information? We mightspeculate that the differences betweenStrathclyde and the four other pilotservices could be due to users havingalready worked through the website beforereaching the email access point, hencehaving answered more of the specific,informational questions, leaving thebroader “guidance-related” issues to floatto the top. Liverpool Hope, where a muchmore personalised service enabled usersto email a named adviser, may also havepicked up more general guidance issuesthan those services who stuck to a teamapproach and who tended to have more ofthose enquiries which users can formulateclearly for themselves and perhaps feelmore comfortable presenting – to do withgetting a job, handling applications andinterviews etc. But this is a purelyspeculative hypothesis that needs to betested in future research. Issues to do withfurther study appear, however, to be acommon and popular feature across allservices. Some of these issues are taken upin a later section on the content of theemails themselves.

For comparison, the national GraduateQuestiontime service classified itsqueries under 13 headings of which thelargest groups were: Job hunting (20%);Further study (18%); What to do with mydegree (15%); Career change (14%);Specific occupational query (9%) andApplication forms and CVs (6%).

Among all these statistics “FurtherStudy” seems to be a generally commonand significant query area, and should beanalysed further, although obviously thecategory may not have been similarly usedby all the services involved. Comparisons

across the services must, therefore, betreated with caution.

8.8 Time managementissues How long do they take to answer?i. The estimate for this varied widely from

a few minutes to an hour and a half,with most being around the length of anormal “drop-in” style encounter. DeMontfort, for example, suggested theaverage time for them was fourteenminutes (by comparison with a 30minute allocation for a face-to-faceinterview). “What takes time” said oneadviser, “is when you get an enquirythat is way out of your normal area.”This, of course, was a specific issue onlyin those services who chose to take thestrict team approach, whereby the dutyadviser takes the next query from themailbox on a first-come-first-servedbasis, and, hence, the normal allocationby subject specialism among careersadvisers is bypassed - the contrast,again, is mainly with Strathclyde’sapproach. The familiarity of theadviser with the subject area of theenquiry is thus a key factor, and lessexperienced/recently qualified advisersmay also take longer - this could alsohave a beneficial professionaldevelopment aspect.

ii. The nature of the question itself isalso, naturally, a key determinant. Morecoherent and focused questions alsotake less time to answer. The qualityand precision of the pre-access“registration” process can have animpact on this: users can beencouraged to think more preciselywhat their enquiry is about, but suchpre-emption needs to be used withcaution. In replying, the use ofinformation templates, developed forthe national service for graduates, andadapted for use in the local projects bysome of the local services, as well asthe build-up of a database of responsesto common questions over time, meansthat as a service acquires experience itcan also cut and paste more often todeal with “standard” questions.

8.7.7

8.7.8

8.7.9

8.8.1

mar

ketin

g, p

ublic

ity a

nd s

tatis

tics

of u

se


iii. At Bradford, specifically to meet thedemand for on-line resources torespond to questions, a ResourcesDatabase was created, an extension ofone already in use in the informationroom to keep track of resourcesavailable and aid ordering of materials.It was modified to be searchable by theAGCAS occupational index and othergeneral categories, and extended toinclude details of useful websites aswell as resources available in theinformation room. It can now be usedby advisers to search for resourcesboth on paper and on-line, that maybe relevant to the queries they areanswering. At the time of this report,the database had over 550 resourcesand was constantly growing.

iv. Neither saving nor costing time. A good summary of the issue wasprovided during a conversation atStrathclyde with the deputy head ofservice: “All of us now know of timeswhen we have dealt with an emailand it has taken us two minutes todeal with, and that is tremendous,because at some point in the past thatperson would have got a twenty-minute appointment. So there aretimes in which it is very time efficient.Equally, there are other times when ittakes twenty minutes or longerbecause you have to go away and looksomething up. So it is neither greatlysaving time, nor costing time….”

How do you allocate staff time? Time management is also, of course, aboutthe way in which the service allocates stafftime to cover the emails received.Guaranteed turnaround times variedfrom three days (the most usual) to five.Strathclyde’s is five days, and this extraallowance may be a concomitant of theirmore personalised and specialistapproach: with an interchangeable teamoperating an essentially anonymousservice, it is easier to deliver shorterturnaround times. With a high proportionof part-time advisers, and sticking tosubject specialisations, it is harder toguarantee shorter, swifter responses,

especially over weekends. There wereseveral other ways of managing time,however. Some services required staff toset aside specific time in their diariesevery week to deal with email enquiries,others simply made it a function of theduty officer for that week to deal with allemail enquiries. At De Montfort, emailswere simply “slotted in as they come”with no allocated times as such. The latterapproach is, of course, more feasiblewhere the number of emails coming in isrelatively low and would need to bemodified if there were a significant andsustained surge in enquiries. At Bradford,for example, “a total of 18 hours ofadviser time was allocated per week, witha reduced 50% capacity during non-teaching/vacation periods. A timetablewas implemented to attempt to ensurethat advisers’ time was spread evenly overthe week so that emails could be dealtwith quickly and efficiently” (Wilson andLinley, 2003).

Who runs it?There were also interesting differencesbetween the pilot sites in terms of whichstaff were involved – Strathclyde, forexample, used all grades of staff from arange of teams, according to the subject ofthe enquiry, whereas Middlesex only usedcareers advisers. At Liverpool Hope, allenquiries were taken by one adviser. AtBradford and De Montfort, the project wasmanaged and administered on a day-to-daybasis by information officers, who, atBradford, also regularly fielded aproportion of the questions.

What are the peak times for use?i. Most places experienced peak usage in

the first half of the academic year and arelatively lower demand after that. Thisreflects the use of GraduateQuestiontime nationally to some extent,but the national service also gets verybusy from June through to September.Some of the local services tended to getbusier then also – Bradford’s figures aregiven opposite as an example – seefigure 3 - but the second peak in thesummer is less prominent. Others hadrather fewer emails later in the

8.8.2

8.8.3

8.8.4



academic year. Middlesex had 92enquiries in the first quarter of the year,but 38 and 44 in the third and fourthquarters respectively. This again, mayreflect local circumstances – timing ofexams etc – but the degree of variationover a year needs to be taken intoaccount in any management thinkingabout resource allocation.

ii. An intriguing analysis of the times atwhich enquirers send off their emailmessages also throws light on the needor otherwise for a 24/7 service.Strathclyde offered the opinion that asignificant number of enquiries hadbeen input outside normal office hours,suggesting that users may not get downto thinking about such issues until afterthe normal day has finished. However,Bradford found that 68% of use wasduring normal office hours (9-5) and22.5% on weekdays outside thesehours. 9.5% of queries were made atweekends. The proportions suggestthat for some people, email is actually apreferred or more convenient mode ofaccess to the service, even when

face-to-face facilities are available. This,again will be affected by the perceived accessibility of the physical careerscentre itself, and comparisons acrossservices will have to take widevariations in other factors into account.As Bradford pointed out, their campushas “a very high proportion ofcomputers to students and, of course,access to the internet is free fromanywhere on campus”.

iii. Users of the system at Liverpool Hope said that “they like the freedom to asktheir questions whenever they feelthey need to, and can then take theirtime to digest the advice and guidancereceived.” The adviser alsocommented that “likewise, it providesme with the flexibility to fit myworking hours around othercommitments.” She added that“questions have been received late atnight, first thing in the morning, andeven on Christmas Day!” - needless tosay, it was not a requirement of theproject that advisers open theirmailboxes late at night or on ChristmasDay.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

12

17

29

41

34

14

19

27

1820

29

22

26

Jul 0

2Au

g 02

Sep

02Oc

t 02

Nov

02

Dec

02

Jan

03Fe

b 03

Mar

03

Apr 0

3M

ay 0

3Ju

n 03

Jul 0

3Figure 3. Bradford - Monthly e-guidance queries

mar

ketin

g, p

ublic

ity a

nd s

tatis

tics

of u

se


8.9 Who do enquiriesgenerally come from?In terms of subject disciplines (eithercurrent, or those of the first degree forgraduates), there is again, and naturally,variation between institutions, because ofthe different sizes of faculties anddisciplines at different places. AtStrathclyde, where the largest number offace-to-face enquiries come from studentsin law, engineering, and accountancy, thesame emphasis appeared in the emailservice. “Our heaviest users are those whowere always the heaviest users of thecareers service anyway.” At Middlesex, also,students from computing and IT, socialsciences, accountancy and finance, and lawwere the largest sources of queries, in thatorder, but in general enquiries thereappear to have been “spread across thesubject areas” and included art and designstudents.

In terms of user locations, not everyonewas able to measure this. Bradfordrecorded that 49% of enquiries came fromusers in Bradford, suggesting that “evenwhen distance is not an issue, email isseen as a useful contact method”. (Wilsonand Linley, 2003, p 18). Another 12% camefrom elsewhere in Yorkshire, 28% fromelsewhere in the UK and 11% from abroad.51% were thus defined as ‘distance clients’as they may “experience difficultyaccessing some of our services due totheir location”. For De Montfort also,there was particular satisfaction that“distance learners seemed to find theservice so helpful, allowing them to accesscareers information, advice andguidance, often for the first time”. Ofthose Bradford enquirers from abroad, “asignificant number were either fromgraduates living outside the country orprospective students enquiring aboutcourse and work permits.” (Ibid. p 18).This echoes the finding of the West ofScotland Graduate Email Careers Service(see Appendix 3, Section 2).

In terms of personal characteristics, therewere, again, significant differences fromplace to place. At Bradford, for example, 53% of enquirers were male and 47%

female, whereas the proportions werealmost exactly reversed at Middlesex - 55%female and 45% male. This variation is,therefore, less likely to be due to themedium used than to the gender andsubject balances at particular universities.For comparison, the Graduate Questiontimegender statistics of users are 60% female,40% male.

Because email is a relatively anonymousmedium, and because the services chosenot to instigate a lengthy registrationprocedure, which might have been off-putting, more details of personalcharacteristics are not generally available.In their evaluation of customer feedback,however, Middlesex chose to ask about ageand ethnic background. Of the relativelysmall number (38) who replied to thissurvey, the largest single ethnic groupwere Asian (15), compared to 8 White, 8Black, and 6 others, with one whowithheld information. In terms of age, thesame group identified themselves asmainly in the 18-25 age group (21 people),but 8 were over thirty and 2 of these were41 or older. Again, the proportions seemlikely to reflect local characteristics of theinstitution and its “catchment area” ratherthan the nature of email.

“Some non-Strathclyders were ignoringthe fact that Email-Us! is not for them.That gave us a dilemma – do we answeror not? In the end we have decided totake a middle course. This means that wereply – it would be rude not to – but donot spend time as we would with our ownclients in giving detailed answers. We aremost likely simply to refer to Prospects.ac.ukand point out that they are not eligibleusers of Email-Us! though we have beenhappy to refer on in this instance. If theyfollow up, our stance is that we shall notreply again. Fortunately this has nothappened often, as we would havedifficulties here at Strathclyde in settingup a password-protected system.”

University of Strathclyde Careers Service:Final Report on the Design andImplementation of the E-guidance Project.McCulloch, A., 2003

8.9.1

8.9.2

8.9.3

8.9.4



8.10 When they arereferred, who are theyreferred to?Bradford analysed the resources orservices to which their users were referredas a result of their enquiries (see figure 4below). The vast majority of referrals(57%) were to on-line resources includingtheir own website (13%), and theProspects website (24%). 23% werereferred to paper-based resources,

including those in the careers centreinformation room. 4% were referred toProspects Planner, off-line, while MutualAid got another 4%. 12% were referred forcareers appointments, face-to-face. Thislast figure could confirm the impression,mentioned in other sections, that about12% of enquiries might be deemed torequire a “guidance” response and thatadvisers have tended to deal with this byreferring enquirers off-line to face-to-faceappointments, rather than attempting todeal with the issues in any depth on-line.

8.10.1

0

20

40

60

8080

142

122

50

86

72

100

120

140

160

2227

Car

eers

Ser

vice

W

ebsi

te

Pros

pect

sW

ebsi

te

Oth

er o

n-lin

e R

esou

rces

Info

rmat

ion

Roo

m

Pape

r-Bas

edR

esou

rces

Car

eers

Ap

poin

tmen

ts

Pros

pect

sPl

anne

r

Mut

ual A

id

Figure 4. Bradford - Referrals from the email service

indi

cato

rs o

f suc

cess


We engaged actively with GraduateProspects in the design of the evaluationtools, having considerable expertise atStrathclyde of conducting the four levelsof Evaluation (after the Donald Kilpatrickmodel). The resulting confirmation,combined with level 1: reactionevaluation, provides good feedback onthe usability of, and immediate reactionto, using Email-Us! We feel that it isimportant to combine the confirmation(of receipt of an email query) withseeking feedback – when the two wereseparate we suspect that few even readthe request for feedback thinking that itwas a duplicate of the confirmation. Wewere particularly keen to be able to getfeedback after the reply had been given sothat we could identify that the users’needs were met, not just that thetechnology works and they like having theopportunity to use email to get careerssupport form us. We are grateful for thestaff at Graduate Prospects taking this on,appreciating that it was a technologicalchallenge. Report from University of StrathclydeCareers Service (McCulloch, 2003)

Clearly, all the pilot services had objectivesthey hoped to attain, (see chapter 5) buthow would they tell they had achievedthem? At a workshop in January 2003,representatives of the pilot services agreedthat the following were the mostimportant indicators of success:• customer satisfaction• integration • range and reach • quality• effectiveness• sustainability

9.1 Customer satisfaction It was broadly agreed that user satisfactionwas key. If the service was widely used,clearly meeting a need, and users said so,continuing to use it, for example, aftergraduation, and recommending it toothers, all services would regard that assuccess. The absolute numbers using the serviceare clearly one piece of evidence here. Aswe have seen they are broadly comparable

9. Indicators of success9.1.1

9.1.2

“ “

to those of the more established andsuccessful Graduate Questiontime service.To decide if this indicates customersatisfaction, data will need to be collectedfor at least another year to establishwhether the trend is upwards or not.Asking about how users found out aboutthe service could establish if word ofmouth was a major factor, for example. Atpresent, what little information we have onthis point seems to suggest that on-linesources (e.g. references from theProspects website, or the local service’sown website) are the most significant.

Having only used the service once, andfinding it to be excellent, I don’t feel thatany improvements are necessary.

I found the advice and service excellentand will definitely come back to you viaemail in the future as I know you’ll replyasap. Many thanks for all your help sofar!

I didn’t find anything wrong with theservice. I had a very quick and helpfulreply and this led to me finding the courseI was looking for and I am now enrolledon the course. Thank you very much

(Responses at Bradford to the question asto what could be improved in the service.From Wilson and Linley, 2003)

However, the system itself provides, asalready described (see chapter 3), regularfeedback mechanisms for samplingcustomer satisfaction. At Middlesex, forexample, 95% of respondents said it hadbeen a “useful facility” and 97% found ituser-friendly, and the remainder in bothcases merely said they “did not know”.Similar feedback has been receivedelsewhere - see table 2 page 32 forStrathclyde’s customer feedback data.Liverpool Hope’s e-guidance advisercommented “To date there has been nonegative response.” Bradford carried outtwo feedback days on campus wherestudents were invited to fill in aquestionnaire on both the email andtraditional services. Three per cent of thesample had used the email services and, of

indicators of success


and the Bradford survey confirms what hasbeen known from earlier surveys (e.g.Offer et al, 2001 p.10) – a significant andincreasing majority of students are usingthe Internet for career purposes on aregular (monthly, weekly or daily) basis.Only 17% of the survey sample said they“never” did so - however, even a minorityas small as this must, of course, be takeninto account. In addition, 73% agreed orstrongly agreed with a further statementthat “being able to access careersinformation and advice whilst not oncampus is important to me” and 24% ofstudents agreed or strongly agreed that “Iprefer to communicate via email ratherthan in person” while only 42% disagreedor strongly disagreed. Finally, while 65%indicated they would prefer to speak to anadviser rather than use email whenseeking individual careers advice, 9%disagreed or strongly disagreed, and 26%refused to agree or disagree with thestatement. Thus, there is evidence of atleast some students for whom email is thepreferred mode of interaction, even whenface-to-face is available. At Middlesex froma small sample of ten students followed upby the system, five said they would preferemail or web-based services for futurecareers advice, while one opted for thetelephone and only one for face-to-facecontact. Three remained uncertain.Liverpool Hope’s adviser commented that“not everyone feels comfortable talkingface-to-face with a stranger. The e-guidance facility provides for impersonalcommunication initially, although arelationship can then be built from thesecurity of their own environment.” (Mair.G., 2003)

Feedback from the system is provided intwo stages – the first customer satisfactionquestionnaire is illustrated in table 2 page32. This occurs as soon as the student hassubmitted their careers query. The studentis asked to complete a few questions onthe ease of use and accessibility of the e-guidance service.

9.1.3 9.1.4

“ “

those who hadn’t, just under half (49%)said “I didn’t know about it”, while 29%said “I don’t currently need careers help”.Interestingly, 18% said “I would prefer tospeak to someone personally”. Otherreasons given included – “It’s easy to dropby on campus”, “already have a job”, “toolazy, not a priority for my time”, “lookingfor a job in another country”, and “delay inresponse: not everything can bementioned”. Asked if they would use theemail service in future, 31% said“definitely”, and 36% “probably” and only6% said “no”. The reasons given by this lastgroup included several who already haddefinite career destinations and only twoclear negatives “too much like spam” and“hate email – much too much email”. Inthe light of the current general problemsemail services of all kinds are having with“information pollution” these tiny straws inthe wind may be worth keeping a watchon for the future (see, e.g. Coughlan, S.2003).

Thank you so much for all your help… Ialways find your feedback extremelyuseful and am very appreciative of all thetime and trouble you take to make ithighly relevant to my question.

Thank you very much for being so promptin your reply. The information you havegiven has been very useful.

I am a lot clearer about what’s going onand I like to tell you thank you for theinformation that you have giving me.

(Comments made on the Middlesex emailservice, MEG. Farrar, E., 2003)

Resistance to the medium of the service isclearly low – the only problem inincreasing numbers would seem to be tomake it, and keep it, more widely known.There is clearly a sizeable pool ofuntapped users on many campuses. Onthe whole, Internet access is not difficult for the bulk of current university students,

indi

cato

rs o

f suc

cess


It was useful to have the facility to email my question 134 yes

It linked from a relevant topic or area on the website 97 yes

How to submit my query was explained well 130 yes

I understood why I needed to give details before submitting my query 133 yes

It was user friendly 131 yes

It was easy to find 117 yes

How did you find out about the opportunity to email for advice?

• Our website 88

• Referral by careers service 16

• Marketing/flyer/poster 3

• Word of mouth 17

• Prospects.ac.uk 4

• other 10

I am clear about the main issues relating to my enquiry 10 yes

I understand the next steps I should take 16 yes

I have the information I need to move on 17 yes

How helpful did you find any resources recommended to you?

• Helped a lot 13

• Helped a little 1

• Made no difference 6

• Made things worse 1

• Did not use 3

The reply covered all the points you raised 20 yes

The reply was provided in an acceptable period of time. 27 yes

Email-us! is a good addition to our Careers Service 21 yes

Which method would you prefer to use to gain careers advice in future?

• Internet/e-mail 16

• Face-to-face 10

• Telephone 0

This is followed up later with a second request for more in-depth feedback five days after the adviser’sreply has been sent to the student. Table 3 below shows an example.

Table 2. Strathclyde - Customer Feedback, stage 1

Table 3. Strathclyde - Customer Feedback, stage 2 (28 responses)

9.1.5



Strathclyde comment particularly on thesefigures: “Our evaluation of face-to-faceinteractions also shows that clients arenot always clear about the issues or thenext steps to take. This is most prevalentamongst those who are at a very earlystage of career thinking but who hope fora quick fix. A closer look at the feedbackidentifies those who responded ‘no’ and‘don’t know’ as mainly those whosequeries were about exploring options orwho wanted information about theCareers Service, postgrad study etc. We’dtherefore recommend adding a newoption ‘not relevant’.”

9.2 Integration. A more complex set of indicators issubsumed by the word “integration”.

Impact on other services andresources. In one sense, this may beabout the impact of the email service onother services and resources – are theyused more or less because of this? Watts(Watts et al., 1996, p.276) summarises theuse of computer-based resources as stand-alone, supported (in which the user isseen, perhaps briefly, before or after theuse of the system), incorporated (thecomputer system is used within anotherguidance intervention), or progressive (theuse of the computer is preceded and/orfollowed by other guidance interventionsin a developmental sequence). Theprogressive model seems to have beenquite common in some of the pilotservices. Liverpool Hope, as we havealready seen, used “careers interviewappointment cards” to market the emailservice explicitly as a preparation for theinterview and the adviser therecommented that “the Project Team doesnot see e-guidance as replacing thecareers interview, but as an additionalcomplementary resource” and that “manylike the opportunity to access bothmediums.” (Mair, 2003). Moreover,“students and graduates also use the e-guidance service to follow upinformation given to them at face-to-faceinterviews.” At Middlesex, referral toexisting services was “frequent” where theuser was a current student. “We are quite

keen for them to come in to the websitefirst, because there is a lot of informationthere…”

Fitting into the total package. Does theemail system fit in as part of a package thatincludes other services and resources,does it promote their uses, or does itstand alone and disconnect from them?What does the system look like with orwithout it? This is reminiscent also of someof the points made in chapter 4 of CareersServices: Technology and the Future (Offeret al., 2001). If the email link is a linkamong links – and therefore subject to theneed-based rules for links, (Offer, 2003, p.23) – as it was on the Strathclyde website -it is, therefore, more clearly a part of thewhole system of resources and servicesoffered, with a clear role to play. The otherfour services, however, chose to make theemail service an alternative receptionpoint, which the user could choose toaccess instead of exploring the website orvisiting the careers centre. There arearguments for this approach, chiefly thatthe choice of email as the access point tothe careers service is a “learning style”issue, but it can mean advisers have to domore work down the line to ensure thatenquirers access relevant other resourcesand services.

Other projects and initiatives –IMPACT3, for example – should beintegrated with the email service and onecould expect referrals across theboundaries with other services andprojects and from tutors within theacademic departments, both from and tothe email service. That means for someservices, referrals both ways across theboundaries of traditional student services.Guidelines for such referrals should alsobe in place. While there is anecdotalevidence of conversations and informalreferrals between careers adviser and otherprofessionals in student services, there isno hard evidence that this has been takenmuch further. Only in Bradford, where theIMPACT project works within the fouruniversities in West Yorkshire, has a projectofficer with such a remit apparentlyworked across the boundaries. Here “sheused emails to encourage participation in

9.1.6

9.2.1

9.2.2

9.2.3

3IMPACT - a positive action scheme managed by Bradford and working across the four universities of West Yorkshire.

indi

cato

rs o

f suc

cess


the Project and to start a dialogue andthese now form a substantial element ofher interactions. She believes that, formany people in her target group, thecomfort of making the first contact byemail was a crucial step in building uptheir confidence to seek further detailedhelp.” (Wilson and Linley, 2003. p.17).Liverpool Hope also mention the positiveresponse from other academic staff whohad begun to recommend it to theirstudents – “the service has alsostrengthened our links and knowledge ofother departments and services within theuniversity due to the variety of questionsthat have been received….” and the workdone on this has “assisted in forgingstronger links with other members of staffwithin the Hope Community.” (Mair, G.2003).

If the email service is integrated, it will befilling an identified gap in provision,and staff will understand clearly whythey use it or recommend its use incertain circumstances, as opposed to otherparticular resources or services. The endusers too will understand what it canoffer them in their terms, and what it cando for them, in comparison with otherways of accessing and using the resourcesof the careers service. In conversation withstaff at the pilot services, we have a sensethat a clear understanding of the areas ofneed that are appropriately dealt with byemail, is firming up. Strathclyde’sdevelopment of the categories list as ameans of identifying the needs appropriateto the medium is the most formalconfirmation of this. Users with otherneeds that cannot be subsumed underthese headings are advised to makecontact in other ways. This is based onsimilar guidelines to those used in thephysical reception area of the service. Thelarger the careers service, the moreimportant this managerial clarity may be,while for places like Liverpool Hope, theflexibility of delivery that comes from asmall service closely in touch with itsclientele, means that the contract with theclient can be more easily negotiated at apersonal level. They also experimentedfurther than some of the other pilots in

linking the use of e-guidance with theircurriculum-based work. In Bradford “theCAVE service is no longer marketed as a‘stand-alone’ option, but as an integratedelement of our guidance services, with anexplanation of its benefits and itslimitations”. (Wilson and Linley, 2003).

9.3 Range, reach, andboundariesRange. There was clearly an intention toextend existing services to existingclients, beyond the normal parameters ofcareers centre opening hours and thephysical geography of the campus andcareers centre. The email service’sambitious targets may have been partlyfuelled by this intention. As we have seen,the email services certainly were availableand, more importantly, used, outsidenormal office hours. Many services,however, also wanted to see the servicecovering a range of topics. The successof this we have already documented inchapter 8 while some of the issues thatsuccess raises are broached in chapter 10.As several of the services point out, thesuccess of the email facility does not seemto have entailed any visible reduction inthe demand for other, face-to-face services.

Reach. As well as serving a lot of peopleand hence meeting the targets of theproject, the pilot services generally hopeto reach different types of groups, inparticular those who are not currently wellrepresented among careers service users.The fact of having a range of users andreaching particular target audiences, is asimportant for some as the total numbers.Although the new element in this project,as opposed to its predecessors, was thesetting up of a systematic managedresource for current students, the servicewas obviously also including graduates inits remit. Graduates did use the service(45% of the CAVE service’s enquiries camefrom Bradford graduates, for example) buta particular new, though small, group wereprospective students – 2% of enquiriesin Bradford’s case. The Liverpool Hopeservice was marketed on OpenDays/Evenings and Information Days and

9.2.4

9.3.1

9.3.2



responses were received from prospectivestudents. Bradford also commented thatprospective students had been making useof the service and that they were hopingto formally extend it to them. Strathclydealso had enquiries from this group: “Anumber of prospective students – both UKand international – used Email-us! toseek information which needs to beprovided by the University of StrathclydeSchools and Colleges Liaison Service orthe Graduate and International Office.”Anecdotal evidence elsewhere alsosuggests a high proportion ofinternational students in some places.De Montfort were “particularly satisfiedthat distance learners seemed to find theservice so helpful, allowing them to accesscareers information, advice andguidance, often for the first time.”

Testing the boundaries. It was hopedthe email service would test theboundaries of the medium, giving genuineevidence about what is in fact possible andhow it can be developed. The chief ofthese issues are dealt with in chapter 10 inmore detail.

9.4 Quality This has to be maintained, here aselsewhere. The same standards coveremail as cover other aspects of the service,though it may be a little harder to defineexactly how the Matrix standards, forexample, apply in the relatively unfamiliarcontext. Users should also be able toaccess the service whenever they want itand expect to get a response within thestated time span. The same scrutiny of theprocess, as is applied to interviews ordrop-in sessions, should probably also beapplied to email queries and responses.There is no specific evidence that this wasdone formally at any of the pilot services,and the national service, GraduateQuestiontime, remains the only one tohave received Matrix accreditation in thisway. This will presumably only be a matterof time.

9.5 Effectiveness It should be judged effective also bythe staff, who needed to be convincedthat this is indeed an effective way of usingtheir time and extending their skill andknowledge to a wider audience. Stafffeedback was largely positive. Many wererelieved that the demands of the emailservice had not swamped them after all.

The adviser responsible for the service atLiverpool Hope concludes: “My overallevaluation of the e-guidance service isextremely positive. I feel it enables us toprovide a valued and essential service toour students and graduates…. this is arespected and appreciated method ofcareers advice and guidance delivery.”(Mair, 2003). The e-guidance system was“easy to use and manage. I particularlyappreciate the monitoring of the statisticsfacility. It has proved an invaluable toolin highlighting the peaks and troughs inour service and mirrored that of the face-to-face interviews in our office.” Thispositive assessment is echoed across allthe services. Everyone wants to continueusing it.

Strathclyde, whose reasons for taking iton had a lot to do with wanting tostreamline the existing use of email forstaff, commented “We are highly satisfiedthat with most traffic now coming throughEmail-Us! we have a streamlined,comprehensive and easily managedsystem. All advisers, information staff andreceptionist have benefited. With regard tomanagement information, the way inwhich the system is set up to providegraphs of all key elements of usage isexcellent… Staff feedback is verypositive…The implementation was verysmooth…. Using Email-Us felt verynatural to us from the outset.”(McCulloch, 2003)

At Middlesex the project coordinatorcommented that “All the careers advisersquickly became adept at using thesoftware and constructing the responseseven in subject areas that wereunfamiliar. However, the overallimpression is that what is being offered to

9.3.3

9.5.1

9.5.2

9.5.3

9.5.4

indi

cato

rs o

f suc

cess


9.6 Sustainability At the same time, it must also be asustainable resource, which demandsrealistic time allocations, and it shouldattract core funding once the experimentalproject period is over. As Gow (2002b)remarks “The fact that the West of ScotlandGraduate Careers Email Service did notsurvive beyond the pilot phase due to thelack of ongoing funding, simplyemphasises the fact that the demand, thedesire and the expertise are all in place,and it is simply an issue of resourcingwhich now holds back the development ofthis resource.” (page 31). Lack ofresourcing can be in terms of both fundsand also of IT support.

As the Head of Service at Liverpool Hopesaid: “E-Guidance is not an easy or cheapoption. Without CSU (now GraduateProspects) funding we would not havebeen able to commit a full member ofstaff to it. Nor could we have developedthe IT framework.”

All services seem intent on continuing theuse of the software, and GraduateProspects is to continue providing itthrough Prospects Net. There is, therefore,for the time being at least, a sustainablefuture for e-guidance. All see it as anenhancement to their existing services andan easy-to-use and effective tool, whichthey hope to develop further.

9.6.2

9.6.3

9.6.1

““

students is information and advice, notguidance” (This point will be taken upagain in chapter 10.) “All careers advisershave found it to be a useful addition tothe way in which we interact withstudents.” (Middlesex, 2003)

As a newly qualified careers adviser inmy first post, I personally found e-guidance an excellent way ofprofessionally developing my advice andguidance skills and occupationalknowledge. It allowed me to research myresponses and, if necessary, to check withcolleagues on the validity of myinformation.

A highly successful project that hasachieved a significant proportion of itsaims.

I think it fills a gap for those who can’t ordon’t feel able to access us.

I believe that I’m giving informationrather than guidance. As there’s noconcurrent exchange of dialogue, I findmyself guessing at what they really wantand sometimes giving them severalpossible angles to cover the topic.

I think it’s a valuable addition to ourrange of services from an informationand advice perspective. But I agree that Idon’t think it’s guidance. Maybe if it werea more personalised system where thestudent knew they could enter into adialogue with the same adviser it woulddevelop that way.

Comments on the service from staff of thevarious pilot services

sampling th

e content “yes, but is it guidance?”


A common objection to the notion of e-guidance is that while it may be possible todeliver information and advice by email,“guidance” properly so-called is notfeasible, or not effective, via email. Thisview was debated most recently by Marriset al (2003) where the argument was putforward that “Most e-guidance is a one-offresponse to a presenting query….As aconsequence, there is an inherent lack ofdialogue, which makes it impossible todraw on the effective questioningtechniques and counselling skills that arenecessary to facilitate guidance.Guidance becomes, in most cases, dilutedto information provision, which can beunhelpful or misleading in the absence ofan understanding of the client’s decision-making context.”

Echoes of this view were heard from some,but not all, advisers during the presentproject. The Middlesex report makes asimilar but shorter point (see section 9.5.4above), continuing “the general feeling isthat because of the one-way nature of thecommunication it is not possible to enterinto what would be recognised as a trueguidance process.” Comments of somecareers advisers in some other project siteshave echoed this position. On the otherhand, the head of service at LiverpoolHope took an alternative view:

“Several heads of service have expressedconcerns that E-Guidance is not guidancein the professional sense. In ourexperience, such claims are unjustified.Throughout the project, evaluations havebeen excellent. The quality of the servicehas been beyond doubt. If guidancemeans, ultimately, helping an individualto become autonomous (see McNair,1997) then there is no reason why EGshould be less effective than traditionalguidance models.”

It is important but difficult to clarify whatwe mean by “guidance”. Offer (2003)argues that “the distinction between‘guidance’ and ‘information’ may notstand up to scrutiny - guidance effectively

subsumes information: the two terms arenot strictly alternatives.” On this view,guidance is composed of specificoutcomes, such as those outlined in DOTS(Law andWatts, 1977) or FIRST (Bedford,1982) delivered by activities, such as theUDACE (1986) seven activities of guidance,of which informing, and advising are asmuch a part as counselling or advocacy.“Guidance” is then the umbrella term,which encompasses and describes thewhole. If this is so, it seems self-evidentthat email can and does deliver“guidance”, for example, in the descriptionof feedback from the national GraduateQuestiontime project, below.

Using a set of five statements foragreement based on the FIRST model ofguidance outcomes (Bedford, 1982a andb), it was established that as a result ofusing the service, 42% of clients agreedthey felt clearer about what they wantedto do (Focus), 33% indicated they werebetter informed, about the opportunities(Information), 34% that they were morerealistic (Realism), 36% that they weremore aware of the range of options tochoose from (Scope), and 41% that theywere more able to take action to get whatthey wanted (Tactics). (Madahar, 2003,p.40. erratum)

On the other hand we might resort toofficial definitions.

The Learning and Skills Councildefines guidance as

“An in-depth interview or other activityconducted by a trained adviser, whichhelps clients to explore a range of options,to relate information to their own needsand circumstance and to make decisionsabout their career (i.e. their progressionin learning and work). It may or may notinclude psychometric assessment” (IAGFunding Guidance 2003/2004, p.3).

The Guidance Council defines guidancefor the user as helping you to

10. Sampling the content. “Yes, but is it guidance?”

10.1

10.2

10.3

10.4

10.4.1

10.4.2

sam

plin

g th

e co

nten

t. “y

es, b

ut is

it g

uida

nce?

”


“explore your options, relate informationto your own needs and circumstances, andmake decisions about your career. Thiscould include helping you to set goals forlearning and work.”(http://www.guidancecouncil.com/public/what_is_career_guidance.php)

“Exploring options” was one of thecategories used to classify enquirers’questions in more than one service – e.g.Strathclyde (para. 8.7.1 figure 1, page 25)and other elements of this definition alsorelate to topic headings offered atregistration for the email service in severalof our pilot sites e.g. “Career Changes”(Strathclyde), “Career choice…. Careerimplications of module choice”(Middlesex), “Occupational choice”(Bradford), “Career change”, “Generalguidance and information (LiverpoolHope). It appears, then, that the serviceswere at least expecting to handle whatmight officially have been designated“guidance” issues.

Key elements of the guidanceprocess? All this does not necessarily getto the bottom of what the originalobjections were about. These are comingfrom experienced and trained guidancepractitioners rather than policy makers.They are essentially saying three things.Firstly, the lack of non-verbalcommunication means that the normalprocess of establishing a relationship orrapport with the client is impossible. Theemail relationship lacks warmth. “You can’tshow empathy by email”, as one adviserclaimed. Secondly, interaction and“dialogue” are absent as a result, so thatidentification of the issues that concernthe client, and, hence, their needs,becomes very much more difficult.Another way of putting this might be tosay that of the UDACE (1986) activities,informing and advising may be possible byemail, but not “counselling”, whichinvolves helping the client to identifythe issue where this is uncertain at first.To establish some evidence for or againstsuch conclusions, it was necessary to takea closer look at what was going on in theenquiries themselves and the responsesgiven to them by the advisers. Fortunately

this is a more practical proposition withemail than with face-to-face interviews.

Accordingly a random stratified sampleof 75 email questions and answers(minus the name of adviser or client andother identifying features, to ensure nobreach of confidentiality) was taken fromthe pilot services, and a further 15 forcomparison from the national GraduateQuestiontime service. The selectionensured an equal sample from eachservice, and spread across the whole yearor similar period of operation. We believeit therefore offers a representativeselection of approximately 5% of thequestions and responses in the pilotservices. The responses were analysed bythe project evaluator.

What guidance outcomes or needs?The pilot project questions and responseswere dealt with separately from thenational sample. The Bedford (1982)model of guidance outcomes, FIRST, wasused to identify the issues raised and dealtwith, as it seemed particularly appropriate,having been first developed as a tool forassessing careers advisers’ interviews. Itinvolves five outcomes – focus (havingnarrowed down the options), information(being better informed about them),realism (being more realistic aboutoneself or the labour market), scope(having a greater awareness of the range ofoptions one might choose from) andtactics (knowing what the next steps areand how best to achieve what one wants).More than one issue or need might, ofcourse, be raised and dealt with in onequestion and answer. Our sampleappeared to be predominantly abouttactics (53%) and information (44%) –i.e. principally about job search andapplications or relatively straightforwardrequests for information on choices thatappeared to have been already made.However, focus (15%) and scope (29%)also occurred. Realism was an issue inonly 5% of cases. We added a sixth issue –decision making – to examine where theclient appeared to need help in choosingbetween alternatives, since this is notspecifically addressed by the FIRST model.This seemed to be the issue in 7% of cases.

10.4.3

10.5

10.6

10.7

sampling th

e content. “yes, but is it guidance?”


How many need guidance? If we acceptthat guidance (in the sense of“counselling” in the UDACE definitions) isnecessary when the issue or some part ofit may be unclear to the client, or whenthey appear uncertain themselves abouttheir declared aims, then about 10% of thesample seemed to require guidance. Theyused words or phrases like “I’m a bitunsure…” “I’m rather unsure as to theoptions available to me”, “I’m not surewhether it’s the right field for me”. “I needtime out to see if this is the right career forme”. They may also have demonstratedthe need for clarification in presenting anumber of conflicting ideas which onewould have wanted to explore the reasonsfor in an equivalent face-to-face situation.Mention of a need or desire to changecareers was also categorised as a possibletrigger for “guidance” in calculating thenumbers in the sample that might requireit, as was a large number of open-endedquestions from the enquirer. Clearlyanyone who had no idea what to do wasalso in need of guidance.

A typology of responses? Advisers in thepilot project dealt with such “guidance”enquiries in a fairly conservative manner.The typology of websites (Offer et al,2001) describes how these canalternatively funnel the user into off-lineservices, divert them to other on-lineresources, or offer guidance directlyon-site. A similar set of approaches isrelevant here. Confronted by the need forguidance, the adviser more often than notfunnelled the user towards a face-to-faceappointment at the careers centre. Thereis nothing professionally wrong with thisresponse, of course, and it may be fuelledby an accurate judgement that this matteris better handled that way or by a policydecision at management level. A smallnumber, mainly from only one of the pilotservices, “diverted” the guidance seeker toProspects Planner (on- or off-line) as arelevant resource. Only rarely did anyoneactually attempt to give guidance on-line –i.e. to ask the questions, prompt thethinking and suggest the process of self-examination that might be relevant to theuncertainty of the enquiry.

Dialogue/interaction? As far as onecould see from the small number ofreviewed enquiries, all of them were firstquestions, so there was almost noevidence of dialogue following on from theadviser’s responses4. Since it was also rarefor the adviser to ask clarifying questionsin response to the query (in about 5% ofcases), the initiative needed to start adialogue via a second follow up emailseems to rest with the client, althoughmany of the responses from the adviserend with an invitation to come back formore help or information if required. Inonly two cases did the adviser, faced with alack of detail, say something like “couldyou be a bit more specific about what sortof administration or which areas ofresearch interest you?” and invite the clientto think about their interests and workpreferences, concluding “I look forward tohearing from you very soon with moredetails…” while providing immediatereferences to work on. Follow-upquestions are a minority of the whole, inany case, as the general statistics show – inmost cases about 10% – though the oneservice that had a named adviser(Liverpool Hope) appeared also to have ahigher proportion of follow-up enquiries.This may be worth exploring further.

The tone of the exchanges is usuallyfairly neutral. The questions from theclients, especially current students, varyfrom very short, very specific one-linequeries to longer accounts of a paragraphor more. Those which are longer still aregenerally from graduates or maturestudents with more to tell or moreapparently complex questions. Theadvisers are professional, friendly, butobjective, with occasional short,conventional expressions of warmth andfeeling, such as “it is good to hear fromour graduates” or “good luck with youroptions” or “I’m sorry to hear you havebeen unsuccessful in your….. application”or “we look forward to seeing you soon”or simply “thank you for your question”.Where these occur they do help in smallways to humanise the process, but couldbecome mechanical “customer care”statements if used too regularly. By

10.8

10.9

10.10

10.11

4 Follow-up enquiries did occur, but did not fall within the random sampling

sam

plin

g th

e co

nten

t. “y

es, b

ut is

it g

uida

nce?

”


contrast, an occasional statement such as“Please let me know how it works out foryou” manages to suggest an on-goingpersonal interest in the client’s future. Afew advisers appeared to use quite terse,task-orientated answering styles thatignore anything but the direct questionwithout wasting time on openingsentences or closing good wishes. In onecase an adviser had obviously had atelephone conversation with the client(who gave their mobile number in theemail) and used the email reply to followthis up. In another case the adviser hadobviously met the client in person at ameeting the previous week andacknowledges that “it’s good to hear fromyou after meeting last week”. In only onecase did an adviser use anythingapproaching what Murphy and Mitchell(1998) refer to as “descriptive immediacy”– in this instance, anticipating anddescribing the client’s (rather than theadviser’s) response. After asking whetherthe client has considered something thatmight appear obvious, the adviserdemonstrates they are attempting toenvisage the client’s reaction to what theyare writing and adds “I’m sure youprobably have, and are just now yellingat the screen of course!!!”.

Advisers in the Graduate Questiontimesample of 15 responses spread over twoyears (and similarly anonymous to thereviewer) have had considerableexperience of using this particular emailsystem and working around its constraints.The enquiries they get, it must be said,also give them more to go on in manycases – graduates have more of a story totell, more complex situations to explain.The advisers respond to this. They alsomore often demonstrate their extraexperience with a somewhat moresystematically set out reply. Since theirclient group are less likely to be withineasy reach of a careers centre it is perhapsunderstandable that only occasionally isthat option referred to when the clientapparently needs guidance. There are,equally, more serious attempts to giveguidance on-line than in the pilot project,and this is tackled usually in a manner

analogous to the way in which somewebsites offer advice to those who want to“know where to start” or haven’t any ideas.The adviser offers a series of questions andactivities for the client to follow upindividually that may help to bring aboutthe focus they seek or increase the scopeof their thinking, and help with decisionmaking. About half the enquiries appear toneed some sort of guidance or support fordecision making. However, there is nomore use of the question asking for moredetail to enable the adviser to make abetter response than in the pilot projectsample. The responses read as if theadviser has to deal with the issue in onego, and cannot risk letting the client gowithout a full answer. It may be one of thefeatures of this particular email system thatadvisers adopting the team approach dofeel that they cannot wait for a secondemail from the client, since they will notnecessarily be there to deal with it.

An effective dialogue. One of theresponses in the national GraduateQuestiontime sample, however, provedthat an email service, even when set uplike this one, can generate and sustainsuch a dialogue effectively. In this case, theenquirer and the advisers engaged in asequence of four questions and responsesto deal with a client who appeared initiallyto be having some considerable difficulties,and to be somewhat depressed. Theevaluator could not tell, of course, if it wasin fact the same adviser who provided allfour replies, but although it seems unlikely,given the way the system works, the factthat one cannot tell is perhaps a tribute tothe professionalism of the team. This was acase where a personal relationship wasquite important and it is apparent theclient felt listened to and supported, finallygetting the job they needed and soundingmuch more emotionally balanced at theend. The adviser(s) display empathythroughout – e.g. “it made me very sad tohear your account of… try to staypositive….you really do sound morepositive,… I’m so pleased everything hasworked out for you…” Such little verbaltouches make the exchange a much lessimpersonal affair and, in this case, appear

10.12

10.13

sampling th



to have been quite important, as well asthe professional expertise which offersrelevant advice and information. Theadviser(s) are also not afraid to askquestions, asking for feedback from theclient where they have not supplied thenecessary clues, and checking if theenquirer has done anything with theadvice given last time (e.g. used ProspectsPlanner). The result is a heart-warmingillustration of how guidance on-line canmove beyond the cool professionalobjectivity of a one-off computerisedanswering machine to something that, onanyone’s definition, surely displaysinteractivity and dialogue. Many adviserswould be happy to have achieved as muchface to face.

So can guidance be delivered byemail? On the admittedly limited evidencewe have here, the onus would seem to beon those who doubt it to prove that itcan’t. Guidance outcomes are beingachieved, according to client feedback, anddialogue is possible. It may be moredifficult to interact with someone on-line,but some people may prefer to interactthat way rather than face to face. Theparticular system being used here –especially when it is used in what we havedefined as the “team approach” – maydiscourage some advisers from using it asthe starting point for a dialogue, since theyhave come to see it as requiring a one-offanswer to specific questions and tend torefer the user to off-line face-to-faceservices when they are obviously availablerather than attempt on-line guidance.Using probing questions or asking formore detail and being confident enough toanticipate a follow-up response from theenquirer is not much in evidence at themoment, even where it would be useful.For example, one enquiry talked of acareer change to a very different type ofcareer, and the adviser responded simplywith information about that new careerrather than asking for the (unwritten)reasons that lay behind the desire tochange, and on which a much moreeffective reply could have been sent. In aface-to-face situation this might have beenprobed, but it could also have been doneon-line. Email typically, in private life, leads

easily to conversation and interaction.Personal relationships are easily builtelsewhere on-line. There is no obviousprofessional reason why relationship anddialogue should be impossible ininteractions of this kind, except perhaps apractical managerial concern for costs andbenefits. The concern in some of the pilotprojects that one reason for low take-up ofthe service was the preference for apersonalised service with a named adviserresponding, may be a related issue. Twoservices took this line from the start, andothers may move in that direction later,but the national service has already shownthat even with anonymous advisers,dialogue and rapport can be built incertain cases.

Lessons from counselling andtherapy. Beyond the evidence alreadycited, it is difficult to say how much theloss of non-verbal communication inguidance is a handicap. However, therelated fields of counselling andpsychotherapy, where feeling andemotions are generally more potentcomponents of the conversation, and thetopics are usually more personal andconfidential, seem to have been able tocope with the problem despite on-goingcontroversy. Sampson et al. (1997) reportthat as a result of a survey, they discovered“275 practitioners currently offering directcounselling services across the Internet” –more than six years ago. The number hasalmost certainly multiplied since. Some ofthese will be by other media (chat,videoconferencing) but a substantialnumber are via email. Wright (2002),quoting Ginns, reported that theSamaritans dealt with 25,000 emailcontacts in 1999 and 57,000 in 2000 andwere anticipating a similar rate of increasein 2001 (see also Baughan, 2000). Wrightalso quotes the analysis of a survey for theBritish Association for Counselling (Parker,1999) where 30% of BAC memberscontacted responded, of whom 10% hadused email for counselling with clients, 5%as an adjunct to face-to-face counselling,while another 10% felt strongly it was notpossible. Griffiths and Cooper (2003,p.116) claim that on-line therapy appearsto be growing “at exponential rates…” If

10.14 10.15

sam

plin

g th

e co

nten

t. “y

es, b

ut is

it g

uida

nce?

”


personal counselling and therapy can livewith it, what is so special about guidancethat it cannot?

10.16 But can you deliverempathy without non-verbal communication?Apart from the examples we have alreadygiven, Murphy and Mitchell (1998) areperhaps one of the best exponents of thecase for on-line empathy. In their accountof therap-email, they specifically addressthe challenges of conveying humanwarmth and emotion in such a setting andthe lack of non-verbal cues. Theydeveloped practical innovations such as“emotional bracketing” - stating explicitly(in brackets) the feelings the written wordscarry, to emphasise this where necessary -and “descriptive immediacy” - which,loosely, involves describing in writing whatthe client would see the therapist doingthat was relevant to the words – a kind ofwritten non-verbal cue. These are justexamples of literary techniques which,they argue, are the non-verbalcommunication of therap-email.

Good writers, for example, are able tocommunicate emotion in their works.Books can make us laugh, bring us totears, or draw out our anger andindignation. Furthermore, it was not solong ago that the only way tocommunicate with someone at a distancewas to write to them. Individuals in ourgrandparents’ generation had intimate,long-term relationships sustained only bywriting. We suspect that persons of thatgeneration would be as perplexed by thesuggestion that caring, trust and so oncannot develop through writing as theywould be by the computer technologyitself. (Murphy and Mitchell, 1998)

The psychology of cyberspace. Suler’swork on the psychology of cyberspace(2003a) supports this. He explores emailcommunications and relationships amongother on-line experiences. “Email is notjust electronic mail sent via the Internet.Email communication creates apsychological space in which pairs of

people – or groups of people – interact. Itcreates a context and boundary in whichhuman relationships can unfold” (Suler,2003b). His ideas are important becausethey suggest that email is not a pale two-dimensional substitute for the rich three-dimensional world of face-to-face reality,but a reality in its own right where skillsthat may be less highly valued, or lowerpriority, in face-to-face communicationcome to the fore, and where somewhatdifferent codes of conduct apply. Givingadvice and guidance by email, then, needsto be treated as an activity in its own right.

E-mail empathy – Does the sender payattention to, and anticipate, the needs ofthe recipient? Empathic people willspecifically respond to what their emailpartners have said. They ask theirpartners questions about themselves andtheir lives. But they also construct theirmessages anticipating what it will be likefor the recipient to read it. They write in astyle that is both engaging and readilyunderstood. With appropriate use ofspacing, paragraph breaks and variouskeyboard characters (….////****) to serveas highlights and dividers, they visuallyconstruct the message so that it is easyand pleasing to read. They estimate justhow long is too long. Essentially they aregood writers who pay attention to theneeds of their audience…

Suler, 2003, E-mail communications and relationship, athttp://truecenterpoint.com/ce/emailrel.html

Not a substitute: but a starting pointfor development – technological andprofessional. All the pilot services areclear that the email service is not asubstitute for the face-to-face service. AsSampson et al. (1997) pointed out sometime ago, on-line counselling can be partof a progression towards other modes ofinteraction for some clients. Many of theadvisers on the pilot projects would agreewith that. However, on the evidencepresented in this chapter, there is plenty ofroom for innovative exploration of theoptions and skills involved, bothtechnological and professional. This might,of course, include synchronous as well asasynchronous media. The example of

10.16.1

10.16.2

10.17

sampling th



Connexions Direct (see Appendix 3)illustrates some of the things that arepossible technically, especially with thedevelopment of text messaging and chat. Itis also possible to move the model of theservice along the continuum, as some ofthe pilot services have done, towards amore personalised relationship betweenenquirer and adviser. The story of theApaja Centre in Helsinki (see Appendix 3)is instructive here, but not necessarily the

only alternative. Graduate Questiontime’sadviser team have already shown that theycan construct dialogue and facilitateinteraction within the present system.Exploring the boundaries of what might bedone was part of the objectives of some ofthe pilot services, and it would be a pity ifthis elaboration were to be curtailed by ana priori insistence that guidance isimpossible by email.

key

issu

es a

nd le

arni

ng p

oint

s


The nature of the target group, the contextin which it comes to the point of sendingan email message, the filters that can beset up to manage the system: all haverelevance to the strategic implications ofa relatively new and untried mediumthat is certain to increase in significanceas careers services respond to the HarrisReport’s vision of a careers service that“makes best use of new technologies toreach the greatest number of people.”(Offer et al. 2001)

Email cannot be ignored. This is a factnot only because working with emergingtechnology is essential for the continuedrelevant development of careers servicesin the UK, but because this newtechnology is bringing new competitorsinto our marketplace. If….someone elseprovides a service, there is no guaranteethat it will be as diverse, as professional,or of the quality which graduatesdemand. (Gow, 2002b)

Certain key issues arose from theexperience of the project. They generallyconstitute key questions that need to beanswered by anyone setting up a similaremail-based service since they offersignificant strategic and professionalalternatives.

11.1 Team or personalisedapproachesOn the one hand some services imitatedclosely the model of delivery set byGraduate Questiontime onProspects.ac.uk: the enquiry is answeredby the next available adviser or (in someplaces) information staff member in theteam, who will take the next query off thetop of the list and deal with it whatever itscontent. Any follow-up response to thatresponse (a “handful” according to oneestimate, but up to 10% or more in others)will, therefore, not necessarily be dealtwith by the same adviser – the enquirer isdealing with a system or team rather thanwith an individual counsellor with whomthey establish a personal relationship. The

closest face-to-face equivalent is the drop-in session rather than the one-to-one in-depth interview. Time to deal with email isblocked out in advance in staff diaries orallocated in a similar fashion to the dutyadviser rota with which it may overlap.

Possible features of a team approachare the fact that an adviser may be calledon to answer questions on areas of thelabour market they would previously nothave specialised in, and more frequentrecourse to advice from colleagues,including information staff, can enhancethe “team” atmosphere, with more sharedpractice between colleagues on the staffside, by contrast with the relativeexclusiveness of a more traditionaladviser/client relationship. People learnmore about the different ways in whichtheir colleagues work and learn from eachother in the process. In one service, as aresult of the introduction of the emailservice, information staff experienced anincreased number of questions asked ofthem by advisers, possibly because thelatter were being drawn into earlier phasesof the information, advice and guidanceprocess to deal with questions and issuesthat might previously have been filteredout by the information team. Suchenhanced cooperation between differenttypes of staff can obviously have beneficialeffects on morale and communicationgenerally. This happened at Bradford.However, it can also mean that advisershandle a proportion of enquiries thatwould otherwise have been dispatched byinformation staff if they had come in viathe physical reception area. A modifiedversion of this model is for one member ofstaff to take responsibility for carrying outa rough sieve of enquiries and ensuringthat turnaround times are always met.

Joined up working? Another, and slightlydifferent, meaning of the “team” approachoccurs in those services which are moreclosely integrated with the general studentservices of the university: here the emailservice, by fielding most queries if they canbe answered, and accepting referrals from

11. Key issues and learning points

11.1.1

11.1.2

11.1.3

key issues and learning points


adjacent student services, may be seen asextending the possibilities for workingclosely with non-careers colleagues anddealing with queries that require aresponse that goes beyond “careers” work,“blurring the professional boundaries”, asone service put it. The extent to which thisactually occurred in the project is unclear,but it remains a theoretical possibility.

A more personalised approach. AtLiverpool Hope, however, a much morepersonalised approach was taken, with theadviser principally responsible having hername alongside the e-guidance service onthe website, and encouraging enquirers tofollow up the email with personal contactat the careers centre where necessary. Thiswas how email had been dealt withpreviously in other services – derivingfrom a personal relationship – and therewas increasing speculation as to whethersuch personalisation might increase thenumbers using the email service. Theservice at Hope did develop significantlymore follow-up enquiries (22%) than mostother places, (including some longer termcontacts where email might be used tooffer on-going support to a client overvacation periods).

Guaranteed response times. The “teamapproach” may, then, in some forms,discourage enquirers from responding toan anonymous adviser – although this is byno means true in all cases, particularly atthe national level of GraduateQuestiontime. But how can a three-daytime limit for responding to queries beguaranteed in a more personalised service?The advantage of being able to guarantee aprompt response to an enquiry is one ofthe quality elements of email over otherinterventions and clients seem to haveappreciated the speed of reply in manycases. At Hope, with a dedicated adviser,taking full and enthusiastic responsibilityfor the service, backed up in emergency bycolleagues, this did not cause problems,but it could have done so elsewhere.

The specialist team approach. There isyet another alternative – the Strathclydeapproach, already described (chapter 8)

where the user’s choice of the topic oftheir enquiry and statement of subjectdiscipline, present or past, triggers aspecific staff member to pick up that emailfrom the ‘in-tray’. This, from one point ofview, could be the best of all worlds – thetraditional specialist skills of advisers couldbe deployed, and all staff could potentiallybecome part of the team that delivered theservice. The downside is that Strathclydeneeded to increase the response time tofive days, and that elsewhere, more thanone adviser said they actually enjoyedtaking on enquiries in new areas outsidetheir specialism, for a change. Thoseadvisers who already have heavy caseloadsin certain popular subject areas, may alsosimply increase these, as email enquiriesare added to the in-tray. The diagnosticcategories clearly do have to be madewatertight, which involves significant extradevelopment time; otherwise time couldbe lost in reallocating and reroutingmisdiagnosed queries. However, the sameproblem occurs in other parts of theservice, including off-line. Clarifying it herecan lead to clearer roles elsewhere too.

At the end of the first year of the project,however, there were signs that severalservices were considering moving towardsa more personalised service, adding thecareers adviser’s own name to the end ofthe email. According to Wilson and Linley(2003) a client actually went as far as towrite in response to an anonymoussignature “May I ask whom I amaddressing? Furnishing your name willcertainly help to create a rapport.” 59% ofstudents in the Bradford survey said it wasimportant to them always to contact thesame person when seeking advice. As aresult, advisers are now to give their nameat the end of the email, and will be“working on the CAVE service in teams oftwo for a two-week period. This will helpboth with workload planning and,hopefully, will allow the same adviser torespond to any immediate follow-upqueries….” (Wilson and Linley, 2003).

11.1.4

11.1.5

11.1.6

11.1.7

key

issu

es a

nd le

arni

ng p

oint

s


11.2 Embedded oradditional services: local,regional or national?This construct comes largely from the Westof Scotland Graduate Email Serviceproject: two possible models for thedevelopment of email were identifiedthere – either the facility would be offeredby an individual careers service withintheir own resources – an embeddedservice – or it would be recognised that“email careers guidance requires expertiseand development which is additional tothe work already being undertaken withstudents and graduates by careers services,…(and) need not be physically based withthe ‘home’ careers service” (Gow, 2002b) –the additional service.

The present project has to some extentblurred this distinction by making thetechnical structures available from anational source, but allowing individualservices to customise the entry points anddeliver the actual responses to questions,minimising the duplication of technicalresources while localising the professionalguidance expertise. However, the issueremains, as a variation of thelocal/regional/national debate highlightedalready in chapter 3 of Careers Services:Technology and the Future (Offer et al.2001). Where should e-guidance servicesbe most effectively located andmaintained, given that a “virtual” servicecan be located anywhere? On the onehand, there is clearly a “risk of duplicationof work across careers services in terms ofstructuring, maintenance and policy andpractice” in any purely local provision(Gow, 2002b). On the other hand, thereare arguments for the face validity of localservices and the value of local knowledgeand awareness in keeping the service trulyresponsive to its users’ needs, especiallywhere these users are current students –the arguments may be differently weightedin the case of graduates. The rise ofregional websites for graduates means thatcooperative working between local andregional careers services could, in someareas, present an alternative to a purelylocal model of delivery.

11.3 Stand alone orcontextualisedIn all cases the gateway to the emailservice was via the careers services’website. Thus, what is distributed inpublicity literature is not an email address,but a website address where the emailenquirer can find the gateway and entertheir enquiry. As with the nationalGraduate Questiontime on Prospects.ac.uk,users will need to visit the website to sendan email. To that extent it is alreadycontextualised. This is important becauseit allows the service to frame the enquiryand start the process of identifying needsand negotiating a “contract” with theenquirer, in a way that would not bepossible from a simple email address. Inaddition, “using a form on a web page tocapture information can also allowadvisers to gain the explicit permission ofa user as to the uses of their information”,(Gow, 2002a, p.39)

A question arises, however, as to whetherthe gateway should be on the websitehome page, or embedded within the siteitself at those points where it representsan appropriate alternative or addition toinformation or advice already offered onthe site itself. The latter was the approachtaken at Strathclyde. This might reduce thenumber of “impulse” users, and hence thetotal numbers, but would, it is argued,mean that the incoming emails would bemore informed and the issues betterclarified, since the user will have sent intheir query because it has not beenanswered by the information and advicealready on the site. The email gateway willprobably then be linked from more thanone page within the site. Placing it on thehome page, it has been argued, “encourageslaziness”, the “please-sort-out-my-lifesyndrome” as one adviser put it.

An alternative argument might be that theemail service is appropriate to a particulartype of caller who will have preferred toget the information or advice that way andwho might have been unwilling to delveinto the website to find the answer, andnever have made contact at all, if that were

11.2.1

11.2.2

11.3.1

11.3.2

11.3.3

key issues and learning points


necessary. If so, the purpose of reachingout to groups who are underrepresentedin the present categories of users of thecareers service may be better served byaccepting a certain amount of duplicationwithin the provision of service, based onwhat might be loosely called “learningstyle”. Some users, therefore, will accessthe service because it is an email serviceregardless of whether their needs couldhave been met elsewhere on the website.For such people an access point on thehome page is important, even if there areothers dotted around the website. Thehypotheses involved here have yet to beproperly tested.

11.4 Training – skills,demands and opportunitiesThe delivery of an email service mayrequire new or upgraded skills, but thiswas not a key concern for most services.Technical fluency with computer-basedsystems was variable within the teamsinvolved, and some were initially betterthan others at such matters as cutting andpasting from web pages, or searching theWeb for information. Tasks such ascomposing a response in Word, and thenpasting it into an email reply, may not,even now, be a simple skill for everyone.The introduction of a spellchecker to thesystem was helpful in this respect.Keyboard skills and the speeds achievedmay still, however, limit productivity forsome advisers.

More central may be the ability toanalyse a text and extract and summarisethe key issues quickly, especially if it is notclear what the enquirer is asking. Theability to deliver in writing as much aspossible of what one conveys in speech ina face-to-face communication is alsoimportant, and though analogous, is notthe same skill. The need to do thesethings, and also to adapt your own writtenstyle to that of the client, to aid rapport,was another perceived need in someservices.

A non-directive, informal style may notalways come easy: as one adviser

commented, professionals in writing tendto adopt a rather formal manner and mayneed to learn to convey warmth andempathy in written words. The ability toexpress what is generally referred to asempathy and to build rapport on-line is anart which opponents of email as a meansof delivering guidance would describe asonly remotely achievable. However, theuse of such techniques as “emotionalbracketing” and “descriptive immediacy”(Murphy and Mitchell, 1998, alreadydescribed in chapter 10) can be learnt andexamination of the practice of others inthe related fields of counselling andtherapy, along with a study of the“Psychology of Cyberspace” (Suler, 2003,see also chapter 10) may facilitate thedevelopment of email-specific skills usablein guidance.

The use of email also offers possibilities fortraining and development to new andless experienced advisers, who mayhave space and time to put together aresponse to a question they would havestruggled with face to face. Several of thepilot services explored the possibility ofdrawing on colleagues and sharingexperiences and expertise with others,even using peer review as a deliberateway of stimulating group learning. Someadvisers clearly felt the advantage of ateam approach was the openness it canfacilitate about each other’s work. In anycase, the system used here means that allresponses are open to other advisers andcan be searched for references or ideas, orsimply to check that one is on the rightlines. The possibilities of supervision arealso considerable, (with the proviso thatconfidentiality and security must bepreserved, and that client consent shouldbe obtained for uses of their materialbeyond those of guidance alone). It is evenpossible that email delivery might be usedas a preliminary training role for an adviserbefore they move into face-to-faceguidance. At least one less experiencedadviser found this an advantage.

In one case an adviser described howemail from graduates in particular drew on more in-depth knowledge of

11.4.1

11.4.2

11.4.3

11.4.4

11.4.5

key

issu

es a

nd le

arni

ng p

oint

s


professions by the adviser: a graduate witha pharmacy degree, who did not use theservice at all while at university, had askedquestions about the ways forward from theparticular point in the profession he hadreached. This is not everyday territory formany advisers, but illustrates how emailservices configured in the “team approach”may draw advisers into less familiar areasof knowledge, and create a need for initialand additional research before responding,as well as introducing a new audience forsome university careers services, whichmay throw up new training needs.

Continuous professional development.While training needs may not have beenidentified by the staff involved, it shouldnot be assumed that that is the end of thematter. Given that email is a very newmedium, new skills have to be applied orold ones adapted. Until we have had someyears’ experience of it, it is important, aselsewhere, to be constantly on the lookoutfor ways of developing professional skills.We would recommend regular review andon-going analysis of the learning pointsarising elsewhere from the use of on-linecounselling and therapy (e.g. Suler, 2003,Murphy and Mitchell, 1998, Griffiths, M.and Cooper, G. 2003), as well as thesharing of experiences and insights withothers involved in the use of email forguidance purpose (e.g. at LearnDirect andConnexions Direct).

The Advisers’ Checklist in Appendix 1draws together some of the more practicalobservations on the skills required byadvisers in using email. It has been testedout on practitioners in the pilot servicesand amended according to the feedback.

11.5 Ethical IssuesSecurity and confidentiality. Theseissues lie behind a number of objections tothe use of email as a guidance tool. Thereis, certainly, a need to refresh one’sunderstanding of professional ethics, andlegal and moral issues surrounding thesecurity and confidentiality of personalmaterial in electronic format. All dataprovided by users is password protected.However, where a more personalisedapproach is adopted, the security of the

adviser him/herself is also a consideration:there has been advice against, for example,adding the picture of the adviser inquestion to the email entry point. Theremay be differences, also, between dataprotection policies at each university. Itshould be emphasised, however, thatconfidentiality is an ethical as well as legalissue, and any guarantee to users mustultimately rest on the professionalstandards of those who deliver the service.

The application of existing standards.In an area as relatively new as this, suchstandards are still fraught with controversy(see, for example, Bloom, 1998). Some ofthe (typically) American codes of ethics foron-line guidance and counselling may beworth investigating until such time as a UKversion is developed. The work ofSampson (1997 and 2003) is particularlypertinent to our area. With someallowance for the fact that the generallyless sensitive information contained intypical e-guidance exchange does not needa sledge hammer to crack a nut, these canbe helpful reminders of professional codeswe already subscribe to, but have not yetapplied to the contexts offered by the newmedia. As one adviser said, the sameguidance principles essentially apply –unconditional positive regard, impartiality,etc.

11.9 Attachments: apractical problemThere is no option to attach files to theemail enquiry in this system – to avoid thedanger of viruses and also to stop thecareers advice via email service becoming aCV checking service. (The CV checkingservice offered nationally on Prospects.ac.ukis only available if one uses the CV formfrom My Prospects.) This means that if theenquirer needs their CV checked anotheremail address must be offered whichallows attachments, or they have to send itby post or bring it in person. One adviserfelt that the need to qualify carefully whatyou say in commenting on a CV, (becausethe opinion offered is, of necessity, quitesubjective and may contradict what anenquirer might be told elsewhere) meantthat it was preferable anyway to do this ina face-to-face context.

11.4.6

11.4.7

11.5.1

11.5.2

references and bibliography


Baughan, R. (2000), E-listening: theSamaritans’ experience. Counselling,11(5), 292-293

Bedford, T. (1982a) Vocational GuidanceInterviews: a survey by the careers serviceinspectorate, Careers Service Branch,Department of Employment, London

Bedford, T. (1982b) Vocational GuidanceInterviews Explored, Careers ServiceBranch, Department of Employment,London.

Bloom, J.W. (1998) The ethical practice ofweb counselling. British Journal ofGuidance and Counselling, 26 (1) 53-59

Coughlan, S. (2003) Can we ever junkthis daily deluge of unwanted material?Guardian, Jobs and Money, 08.11.03 pp 14-15.

Farrar, E. (2003). E-Guidance Project,Final Report. Middlesex University, CareersAdvisory Service Mimeo.

Gow, K. (2002a)West of ScotlandGraduate Careers Email Service: Reporton the Learning Outcomes of the Projectincluding Policy and Practice Guidelines,University of Strathclyde.

Gow, K. (2002b) Graduate CareersProvision and Technology. Why Email?Why Now? (summary of the findings of thefull GCES report, above), University ofStrathclyde.

Griffiths, M. and Cooper, G. (2003)Online therapy: implications for problemgamblers and clinicians, British Journal ofGuidance and Counselling, 31 (1) 113-135

Madahar, L. (2003) Services forGraduates: A national careerdevelopment service for graduates,CSU Ltd, Manchester.

Department for Education and Skills,(2003) Connexions Direct, MakingConnexions. Issue 12, Autumn 2003,www.connexions.gov.uk

Loga, C. (2003) Making the Connection,Education Guardian, March 11th, pp 5-6,also retrieved 08/11/03 from http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4622220-108699,00.html

Mair, G. (2003) End of E-GuidanceProject Report, Liverpool Hope UniversityCollege, mimeo.

Marris, L., Reid, H., and Madahar, L.(2003) ICT is proving to be a powerful toolin the delivery of careers information andadvice. But is e-guidance a step too far?Newscheck, October/November 2003, pp8-9.

McCulloch, A. (2003), Final Report onthe Design and Implementation of the E-guidance Project. University of StrathclydeCareers Service, mimeo.

Murphy, L. J., and Mitchell, D.L. (1998)When writing helps to heal: e-mail astherapy, British Journal of Guidance andCounselling, 26 (1) 21-32

Offer, M. (2003) Report on theCSU/NICEC Careers Service website designproject 2001-2003, CSU Ltd, Manchester.

Offer, M.S., Sampson, J.P. Jr., andWatts, A.G. (2001) Careers Services:Technology and the Future, CSU Ltd.,Manchester.

Parker, L., (1999) Counselling Online:Survey on the Extent of, and Attitudes to,Online Counselling amongst 425 BACMembers. British Association forCounselling, Rugby.

Sampson, J.P., Jr. (2003) PotentialProblems and Ethical Concerns. TheInternet: a tool for career planning.Presentation to the National CareerDevelopment Association Conference,Career Development across the Lifespan,retrieved 08/11/03 from http://career.fsu.edu/documents/implementation/NCDA%202003/PDI/NCDA%20PDI%202003%20Ethics_files/frame.htm

References and bibliography

refe

renc

es a

nd b

iblio

grap

hy


Sampson, J.P., Jr., Kolodinsky, R.W.,and Greeno, B.P. (1997). Counseling onthe Information Highway: FuturePossibilities and Potential Problems,Journal of Counseling and Development,January/February, Vol. 75, pp 203-212

Suler, J. (2003a). The Psychology ofCyberspace, retrieved 4.11.03 from http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html

Suler, J. (2003b). E-Mail Communicationsand Relationships, retrieved 08/11/03 fromhttp://truecenterpoint.com/ce/emailrel.html

Tait, A. (1999). Face-to-face and at adistance: the mediation of guidance andcounselling through the new technologies.British Journal of Guidance andCounselling, 27 (1) 113-122.

UDACE (Unit for Adult ContinuingEducation) (1986). The Challenge ofChange: Developing EducationalGuidance for Adults, NIACE, Leicester.

Wilson, S. and Linley, D. (2003). OpenAll Hours: the role of email and theInternet in delivering careersinformation and guidance. Report on theaction-centred research on theintegration of electronically mediatedguidance services in a higher educationcareers service in the academic year2002/3. University of Bradford CareerDevelopment Services, Bradford.(unpublished).

Watts, A.G. (1996). Computers inGuidance, in Watts, A.G., Law, B., Killeen,J., Kidd, J.M., and Hawthorn, R.,Rethinking Careers Education andGuidance, Theory Policy and Practice,Routledge, London.

Watts, A.G., and Dent, G. (2003). ‘Letyour fingers do the walking’: the use oftelephone helplines in career informationand guidance, British Journal of Guidanceand Counselling, 30 (1) 17-35.

Wright, J. (2002). On-line counselling:learning from writing therapy, BritishJournal of Guidance and Counselling, Vol.30, No 3. 285-298.

Wright, J. and Chung, M.C. (2001).Mastery or Mystery? Therapeutic writing: areview of the literature, British Journal ofGuidance and Counselling, 29(3),277-291.

(See also Shy, J.D. and Sampson, J.P. DistanceCounselling Bibliography retrieved 08/11/03 fromhttp://www.career.fsu.edu/documents/bibliographies/Distance%20Counseling_7_22.htm)

appendix one


Using email for advice andguidance: an advisers’checklistDon’t expect advice and guidance byemail to take less time on averagethan it takes face to face or on thetelephone. A common complaint byadvisers is that it may sometimes takelonger because you try to “cover all thepoints”, uncertain if you’ve understoodprecisely what the enquiry was about. Bigissues may underlie a simple issue. Butsome queries can be dispatched in lesstime than might have been allocated fore.g. a fifteen-minute drop-in session, andwhen you’ve finished one, you can go onto the next without waiting for the nextclient to “arrive”. (Just don’t become anautomaton! You need a short break inbetween.)

Make sure you know what you intendthe medium to be for and make itclear to users. A contract is needed as forface-to-face advice and guidance: what canbe done and what can’t. What is this bestfor? What kind of queries are better dealtwith another way? You need to be clearabout this and clear with them. “Email”means many things to many people.

Decide what/who it is appropriate todeal with by email and what/who youwould refer to another medium orresource. Does the email system you haveset up mean you can refer people to awebsite, a computer program, a localcourse, a tutor or student services adviser,a counsellor, a book? In which case, youmay not need to do everything with theemail – it is part of a package, not thewhole response.

Make enquirers clear about the lackof confidentiality if that is relevant totheir query. Email is about as confidentialand secure as a postcard, unless yoursystem has some built-in extra securitysuch as encryption.

Don’t respond instantly. The bigadvantage of email - over telephone, faceto face or chat - is you don’t have to. Take

time, make sure you understand the query,consult colleagues or do some research, ifnecessary, and make sure you’ve answeredthe question. You can “play above yourlevel” in this way – the less experiencedcan look things up and consult colleaguesfor help before replying. But keep to theturnaround time you promised.

Prepare answers to FAQs and cut andpaste to use your time efficiently, butdon’t forget the uniqueness of individualneeds that can lie behind the moststandard presenting question. If in doubt,check it out. Send simple informationwhere asked for it, but make the caveatsclear, if there are some, and invite theenquirer to send more details if that couldmake for a different answer.

Allow for the need to probepresenting questions or ask for moreinformation from the enquirer. Willyour system allow you to respond to aninitial enquiry with a request forclarification or more information, and toexchange several emails until you haveagreed what the real issue is?

Check your assumptions constantly. Ifyou can do so without breach ofconfidentiality, periodically check a sampleof queries with a colleague. Do they seethings you don’t? Your assumptions maybe about the enquirer: even email canelicit stereotypes – bad spelling, a “foreign”name etc, can cause you to reactunconsciously and sometimes irrationally.Your assumptions may also be about thelocal circumstances: your advice may begood for this area but not for the area theenquirer comes from. With email youdon’t always know where that is.

Don’t overwhelm with information.It’s not good practice in face-to-faceinterviews, and it’s not good practice hereeither. But it’s the first reaction of theweaker adviser to cut and paste theirentire knowledge of the subject into theanswer. Better to keep it simple and referthem to where they can get the full details– on-line and by simply clicking on the linkyou provided in your response, if possible:

Appendix one

appe

ndix

one


an on-line reference is more likely to befollowed up by an on-line enquirer. It alsoencourages an active response.

Spend some time trying to identifythe needs. A short checklist you can workthrough, based on a model of guidance oraction planning (e.g. Where are they now?Where do they want to be? How do theyget there? What barriers do there seem tobe?) can be a useful framework to ensureyou pay attention to all the aspects of theincoming email rather than the one thatstrikes you first. If you can, ensure the linkto the email address for enquirers isframed on a website and that enquirers areasked to give some details of the topic andthemselves along with the email message.There is a balance to be struck betweenintrusive long-winded questionnaires andno information at all accompanying anenquiry. If enquirers “register” in someway, you may ensure that queries arebetter thought out and hence easier todiagnose and respond to. Where the emailis situated on the website may also help toensure they have worked through someissues and identified some of their ownneeds first.

Hone your writing skills. Practisewriting things informally, but succinctlyand clearly. Writing is what you have to begood at, but may not be your strongestsuit. Test out the results on a colleague – ifthey don’t get it first time, chances areneither will your enquirer. How can youcreate a warm, friendly atmosphere in afew written words? Try taping a responseto an enquiry occasionally and writingdown what you said. Does it sounddifferent from what you would havewritten otherwise?

Empathy is possible but different on-line. “Empathic people… construct theirmessages anticipating what it will be likefor the recipient to read it. They write in astyle that is both engaging and readilyunderstood. With appropriate use ofspacing, paragraph breaks and variouskeyboard characters …to serve as

highlights and dividers, they visuallyconstruct the message so that it is easyand pleasing to read. They estimate justhow long is too long. Essentially they aregood writers who pay attention to theneeds of their audience…” Suler, 2003.

Keep the records and keep themsecure. With email you have every wordof the exchange. This is valuable andsensitive for legal/ethical reasons (checkyour understanding of what dataprotection legislation requires, check anyprofessional ethical codes). Such “casestudy” material is also useful for trainingand development purposes withcolleagues and supervisors, whereconfidentiality allows. You may need tomake clear to enquirers upfront how theirmaterial may be used (anonymously) andfor what purpose (training anddevelopment).

Don’t use your personal emailaddress if you can help it and don’t giveout your personal address or details. Usean organisational address instead. Apartfrom getting lots of spam, you, as well asyour clients, can sometimes be at risk ifyou disclose too much.

(A version of a paper by Marcus Offer, NICEC, originallyfunded by BECTA, but substantially updated and amendedin the light of the experiences of advisers on this project andin the national service for graduates. With thanks to MikeCox, Audrey McCulloch, Catherine Gregory and others)

Further readingMurphy, L.J., and Mitchell, D.L.(1998)When writing helps to heal: e-mail astherapy, British Journal of Guidance andCounselling, Vol. 26, No 1, 21-32

Sampson, J.P., Jr., Kolodinsky, R.W.,and Greeno, B.P.(1997) Counseling onthe Information Highway: FuturePossibilities and Potential Problems,Journal of Counseling and Development,January/February, Volume 75, pp 203-212

Suler, J., E-Mail Communications andRelationships, retrieved 08/11/03 from http://truecenterpoint.com/ce/emailrel.html

appendix two


Appendix two - Screenshots from the

e-guidance software system

Figure 5. Database of careers queries awaiting reply

appe

ndix

tw

o


Figure 6. Example of an opened query awaiting a reply

appendix two


Figure 7. Careers query form (University of Bradford)

appe

ndix

th

ree


1. Services for Graduates –Graduate Prospects LtdThe largest body of evidence concerning e-guidance in the UK comes from theServices for Graduates project (Madahar,2003), of which the present project is anoffshoot. The eligible population for theservice consists of graduates, up to fiveyears after graduating, who are nationals ofstates within the European Economic Area(EEA) aiming to study or work in the UK.Over 16,000 graduates had used theGraduate Questiontime careers advice byemail service in the period under survey,an average of 1,000 a month, eachreceiving answers to their questions withinthree working days from a team of careersadvisers. This was in addition to thenumbers using the more specific on-lineCV checking service, the graduatediscussion forum and the careers chat livesessions. The service achievedaccreditation against Matrix Standards forInformation Advice and Guidance Services.The software on which it is based,including the automatic feedback andmonitoring systems, is essentially the sameas that used in the current project. Clientfeedback has been very positive, with anaverage of 87% indicating that services areeasily accessible, easy to use, and providethe help and support the graduate needs.Clients also indicated that they hadachieved a certain number of guidanceoutcomes. Using a set of five statementsfor agreement based on the FIRST modelof guidance outcomes (Bedford, 1982a andb), it was established that, as a result ofusing the service, 42% of clients agreedthey felt clearer about what they wanted todo (Focus), 33% indicated they were betterinformed about the opportunities(Information), 34% that they were morerealistic (Realism), 36% that they weremore aware of the range of options tochoose from (Scope), and 41% that theywere more able to take action to get whatthey wanted (Tactics). (Madahar, 2003,p.40. erratum)

The service was deliberately designed to“operate along similar lines to an HEcareers service drop-in duty system, wheregraduates can just turn-up in order to seethe duty adviser for a 15-minuteconsultation session” though advisers arenot expected to keep to such a time limit,which is used purely for planningpurposes. (ibid, p. 20)

Learning outcomes from this projectincluded: how to develop a system toensure that advisers can be allocated tothe interactive services at peak times andat short notice; new skills ofcommunicating via email; thedevelopment of training sessions, peerreview procedures and evaluationexercises; and the thorough testing inpractice of a software system that enablescareers advisers to concentrate on theguidance issues, while also ensuring asteady flow of monitoring and evaluationfeedback to enable the system to adjust tothe changing demands of its clients overtime. The different effects of differenttypes of marketing activity in suddenly orsteadily increasing graduate demand forthe service is another practical learningpoint in managing such a facility. (ibid,p.20)

2. West of ScotlandGraduate Careers EmailService This project is particularly importantbecause it formed the background for oneof the participant services to our presentproject. The service was established in2001, for a limited period, using moneyfrom the Services for Graduates projectdescribed above, in response to issuesbeing raised by four west of Scotlanduniversity carers services (Glasgow,Glasgow Caledonian, Paisley, andStrathclyde). These issues had to doparticularly with the ad hoc, unstructurednature of current email use by clientsseeking advice, and a concern that thepotential of the medium was not being

Appendix three - Other e-guidance services

1.1

1.2

1.3

2.1

appendix three


sufficiently explored, while advisers werebeing “plunged into this form ofcommunication without any real trainingor guidance on the provision of advice viaemail”.(Gow, 2002a) The project aimed,among other things, to “discover how andfor what purposes graduates use an emailservice and what they want from it,” aswell as to develop a “code of good practicefor careers services” on the managementand delivery of an email service (Gow,2002a). Initial market research suggestedthat there was “a demand amongstgraduates for such a service…. based on…regional and graduate expertise” andthat graduates expected the developmentof careers provision would “take advantageof the development of technology” (Gow,2002b). They wanted “information andadvice tailored towards their needs andprovided by professionals” and “felt it wasimportant for such a service to have stronglinks with other virtual resources” (ibid).

In the event, the service handled 602enquiries during the thirty weeks it was inexistence, 442 of which were fromindividuals eligible to use it, and to whomdetailed responses were sent. By far thelargest group of users (200+) were aged21-25, 50% from Glasgow, the majorityfrom areas close to the university they hadgraduated from. As the report suggested(Gow, 2002a p. 21) this raised issues aboutwhy graduates would use an email serviceif they had access to face-to-face servicesthat close at hand. It speculated that thismight be to do with the type of serviceavailable in their own institution, factorspreventing them using the local service,including opening times (e.g. foremployed advice seekers), and “a simplepreference for this type ofcommunication”. 60% of users hadpreviously studied sciences andengineering or business, law and finance(ibid, p 22). The types of query receivedwere classified into three main groups: (i)information only, (ii) information andadvice (e.g. “I’m not sure what to do nowI’ve graduated – what are my options?”),and (iii) mainly advice (e.g. “should I stickwith the company I am currently workingfor but unhappy with? I am scared that

changing my job this early in my careerwill reflect badly…”) (ibid, p.22). The mostcommon type of query was (ii). As thesummary of the report says “An element ofguidance which it was deemed notpossible to effectively deliver via email dueto the complex nature of the issues facingthe graduate was occasionally required fortype (iii) queries. In such cases, the adviserattempted to provide suggestions for astructured approach to tackle the issueswhilst referring the user on to other, moreappropriate forms of provision such asface-to-face interviews or Careerline.”(Gow, 2002b, p.5)

The report also raised the issue of thelevel at which such email services are bestprovided. Two possible models emerged –an “embedded” service, run from withinthe core structure and resources of thelocal careers service, and an “additional”service, which recognises that it is aservice that “does not need to bephysically based within the ‘home’ careersservice of the graduate and for whichadditional expertise and development maybe required. The former carries a “risk ofduplication of work across careersservices….whilst also failing to tackle thecontinued non-uniformity of provision”(Gow, 2002b, p.4). However, the wider thegeographical area covered the morediluted the knowledge of local provisionand opportunities.

A number of learning outcomes wereidentified, including the need forgraduates to register their query via awebsite to use the service in order to meetsome of the requirements of dataprotection legislation, the need for aperiod of training for advisers new to theemail format, for regular on-goingevaluation and peer review. It also stressedthat email is no less time consuming thanface-to-face contact with graduates, andshould not be regarded as a “quick fix”.Email should be regarded as “a part of awider strategy of careers provision” inorder to provide a wide range of resourcesto users and “to effectively refer them tothe most appropriate resources for theirneeds” (Gow, 2002b, p.6). A major issue,

2.2

2.3

2.4

appe

ndix

th

ree


however, remained “ a lack of resources tosupport the work, not only financially butalso in terms of IT support. The projectconcluded, nevertheless, that careersservices “have the capacity to link theirexpert knowledge of the graduate labourmarket to the opportunities which newtechnology has to offer. The furtherdevelopment of this area can only benefitall involved.” (ibid, p 8).

3 The Apaja Centre, HelsinkiThe Apaja Centre was one of the servicesvisited during the CSU/NICEC tour ofFinland during the action research project“Careers Services: Technology and theFuture” (Offer et al. 2001).

This centre, which has now ceased tooperate, was set up to provide a learningenvironment where job seekers (graduatesof any age from all over Finland) coulddesign and implement individualised self-development and employment plans. Itwas, in the final stage, an entirely on-lineservice, including distance learningcourses and workshops, as well as an on-line career counselling facility. Thisinvolved the user registering in the firstinstance, and, by contrast to the GraduateQuestiontime programme, receiving apersonalised service from a counsellorwhose picture would be visible on thewebsite. All subsequent emails from theuser went to the same counsellor, andthere could be up to eight contacts and anaverage of three between enquirer andcounsellor. Dealing with an enquiry couldtake, it was said, around one to one-and-a-half hours. Such a service was clearlyintended to mimic as closely as possiblethe face-to-face, one-to-one relationshipdeveloped in off-line guidance work (Offeret al. 2001, p.40/41 and 48). The emailservices here were integrated within anoverall offering that was focused towardse-learning, with most activities being on-line career planning courses and on-linediscussions between participants. Theservice was clearly aimed at reaching usersacross considerable geographicaldistances, who would not otherwise havebeen able to access campus-based services

in Helsinki or elsewhere, and who mightbe many years away from graduation –20%, it was reported, were people whograduated as far back as the 1970s.

4. Connexions DirectThis government-funded service is aimedat 13-19 year olds and covers wider issuesthan careers guidance alone. Access is viathe Connexions Direct website atwww.connexions-direct.com or viatelephone. It was set up in September2001 and by the end of July 2003 hadhelped around 49,000 young people, witha team of twenty-seven or more advisersusing multi-channel call-centre technology.Demand for the service is increasing, andcontacts have grown from around 100 aweek in 2002 to 1,200 a week by July 2003(Making Connexions, 2003).

Calls relate to a range of issues includingfamily relationships, health, housing,learning, the law, money, personaldevelopment, substance misuse, and asignificant number of callers are said to bein “despair” though crisis calls are only asmall proportion (Loga, 2003). Callers canselect a variety of ways of accessing theservice, which is run at a national callcentre and is open 8am to 2am every day.Advisers will deal with enquiries by email,telephone, chat, or text message. About athird of enquirers choose not to disclosetheir identity (ibid) and need not do sounless they require practical help, such asa place to stay for the night. Fewer thanhalf the queries come by phone, mostcallers preferring to use email or web chat,but especially the latter. Chat is said to beparticularly popular with young people,because of its relative anonymity. Careerplanning, work- or study-related issuesmake up about half the enquiries (ibid).Most calls are handled directly by theadviser and not through referral and thestaff are not necessarily careers advisersand may come from a variety ofbackgrounds, including those with acounselling focus and others with moretask-centred specialisms. They undergo anintensive four-week training involving ICTskills and specialist areas of information.

3.1

4.1

4.2

appendix threets


Email contact to Connexions Direct hasincreased significantly over the past sixmonths, mainly due to a nationalawareness campaign for the ConnexionsService as a whole. This can be seen in thefollowing charts (figures 8 and 9 below).

In both charts below, email and SMScontacts are added together, this isbecause SMS text queries appear as emailsfor advisers. The majority of these contacts

are emails, with SMS being a much moredifficult medium for offering advice,restricted to 160 characters for reply. The proportion of telephone contacts(voice on the charts) increased over theawareness campaign. Television ads wereexpected to alternate between thosedisplaying the phone number and thoseonly giving the website address. When theweb-chat facility was particularly busy,young people who could not get through

4.3

4.4

0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

14000

16000

18000

April May June July Aug Sept Oct

10101704974

157824371499

239137382406

153533092629

354847757476

359950168148

372956496193

email/smswebchat

Voice

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

April May June July Aug Sept Oct

%

27.4 28.6 28.0 20.5 22.5 21.5 23.9

46.2 44.2 43.8 44.3 30.2 29.9 36.3

26.4 27.2 28.2 35.2 47.3 48.6 39.8

email/sms Webchat

Voice

Figure 8. Contacts handled per month

Figure 9. Type of contact by month

appe

ndix

th

ree


to an adviser would regularly send anemail query instead. Adults contacting theLearndirect advice line can do so by email,although this is not widely promoted atthe moment. This may change when the ITsystem is updated, making the emailfacility more robust.

Since the service began, over 50% ofcontacts to Connexions Direct haveconcerned Learning and Careers. Duringsome weeks of the recent awarenesscampaign, however, this increased toalmost 70%. Ninety per cent of all contactsare from young people, with the other10% made up of parents, Connexionspartnerships, other organisations andservice enquiries. In a typical month, thebreakdown of contacts looks somethinglike:

•Learning and Careers 50%

•Family and Relationships 12%

•Health – physical and mental 11%

•Sexual health and related issues 9%

•Work related 9%

•Housing and Homelessness 3%

•Money and debt related 2%

•Drugs and substance use 1%

•Legal and crime relatedless than 1%

A key issue for Connexions Direct hasbeen relationships with, and referrals to,local Connexions partnerships. A largenumber are now signed up to market theservice locally, but it continues to bedelivered remotely from a national callcentre, with access points from localConnexions services’ websites. But itremains a complementary national service,which is not run by local services, whomay only do the marketing. Feedback fromusers goes to the DfES Careers ServiceNational Unit.

Although Connexions Direct deals with ayounger audience and much wider issuesthan the project being evaluated here, itdoes offer examples of advancedtechnological communication being usedto deal with some very personal issues,and the integration of three or four

different channels of communication is animpressive example of where graduateservices could go next.

5. LearnDirectLearnDirect is operated by University ForIndustry (UFI). Its national helpline servicefor adults seeking learning is well known,but generally as Europe’s largest telephonehelpline service and call centre (Cf. Wattsand Dent, 2002). Less commonlyunderstood is the way email services haveexpanded recently from the use of email tosupport users of the related guidancesoftware, LearnDirect Futures, where userswere invited at particular points in the useof the program (notably the CV-buildingsection) to email an adviser for more help,to a more general email service, “Get intouch”, available from the menus on thewebsite at www.learndirect.co.uk. Fromhere the email service is a fifth option, forexample, on the National Learning Advicemenu after “finding a course”, “jobs andcareers”, “learning advice”, and “features”and occurs in three out of the five mainsections the site is divided into, and isoffered in conjunction with the telephonehelpline number. The enquirer is asked“What is your enquiry about?” but needs toselect from four options – “I’d like to emailan adviser”, “I could not find the courseinformation I wanted”, “General feedback”and “Problems logging on to LearnDirectFutures”. On selecting to email an adviser,the user has a blank box to enter theirenquiry but is asked also to complete aform, if education/training is the issue, asto what subject they want, to what level, bywhat mode of study, and whatqualifications and/or experience they have,and the area in which they wish to study.This service has been developed in the lasttwo years.

The total number of email enquires sent tothe LearnDirect National Advice Line variesin the academic year, from approximately700 emails per week during the peak timeof year to 150 during the lowest. The emailservice for the National Advice Line beganin January 2001. The main categories oftopics enquirers will request informationfor are: course search requests forattendance and self study; career change;entry into careers; funding for education;and facilities for child care.

4.5

4.6

4.7

5.1

5.2

notes


notes

note

s


notes

Documents

Managing e-guidance interventions within HE careers services...1. to develop a web-based e-guidance system in which HE careers services can manage and administer a local careers advice