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Information literacy and graduate employability

Stéphane Goldstein InformAll

European Conference on Information Literacy ECIL2016Prague12 October 2016

Photo: Jiugang Wang, on Flickr - CC BY 2.0)

• Devising a graduate employability lens for SCONUL’s Seven Pillars of Information Literacy

• Lens is backed by a review of sources on perceptions and understanding of employability

• Published December 2015

Background

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A conventional definition:“A set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy.”

Cole & Tibby (2013), for HEA

What is employability?

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• Not just about getting a job or possessing a set of skills / attributes…

• Also about lifelong learning and development, in the workplace and beyond

• Other factors come into play, not directly related to specific job requirements: self-awareness, self-belief, deploying learning strategies…

• Employability related to the characteristics of graduate identity, e.g. as uncovered in an investigation of employers in East Anglia: value, intellect and social engagement, as well as performance (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011)

But is it more than that?

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What graduates need to know to build and develop their own careers, and navigate their way through the ever-evolving and highly competitive world of work:• Self-management

• Career-building skills (e.g. finding and using information about labour markets, locating and applying for work, creating professional relationships…) – some evidence that new graduates aren’t very good at this

• Implies a lifelong, proactive commitment

• Wending a way through complex career paths that are often enmeshed with other aspects of own lives

• Adapting to and exploiting rapidly-changing nature of work, to the labour market of the future

It’s also about future-proofing

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• Review of reports, from 8 organisations, which included employability frameworks– Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Universities UK (UUK), National Union of

Students (NUS), Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) and, in the USA, National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)

• Strong focus on generic, soft attributes and skills

• Technical, job-specific skills and knowledge about particular employment sector are not a prominent feature

The view from employers(and others at the interface between HE and employment)

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• “The term ‘employability’ or ‘employability skills’ is used to refer to a set of generic softer skills such as self-management, teamworking and communication. Much work has been done in defining what employability means as well as in establishing a list of the competencies that are central to being employable. Although the term employability skills is commonly used, it is evident from our research that employability is not solely concerned with the possession of a certain set of skills”.

CBI also stresses the notion of a ‘positive attitude’:• “A ‘can-do’ approach, a readiness to take part and contribute,

openness to new ideas and a drive to make these happen”CBI (2007)

Example: what the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) says

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• Employability attributes most commonly cited as desirable:

• Other attributes include self-management / time management / resilience, analytical skills, literacy / use of English and job-specific skills

• Information or digital literacy do not explicitly feature

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Teamworking Communication (oral and/or written)The two above attributes are the only ones flagged up by all 8 organisations Problem-solving Planning and organisation Business / customer awareness and customer

handling Numeracy IT skills

Main employability attributes

• Employers’ concerns about graduate entrants to labour market:⁃ 44% dissatisfied with business/customer awareness competencies, 25%

with self-management, 20% with teamwork (CBI/NUS 2010)⁃ 53% dissatisfied with business/customer awareness competencies, 51%

with foreign language skills, 37% with international cultural awareness, 37% with relevant work experience, 31% with self-management/resilience (CBI 2014)

• Where employers are happier:⁃ 95% satisfied/very satisfied with graduates’ use of IT, 90% with basic

numeracy, 85% with positive attitude to work (CBI/NUS 2010)⁃ 98% satisfied/very satisfied with graduates’ use of IT, 91% with technical

skills, 86% with basic numeracy, 85% with analysis skills (CBI 2014)⁃ On a scale of 1 to 13 for satisfaction with graduate recruits, employers

score 10.82 for team working, 10.63 for analytical/quantitative skills, 10.48 for problem-solving, 10.42 for initiative, 10.39 for work ethic (NACE 2012)

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Attributes in practiceEmployers’ perceptions – selected findings from different surveys

• Growing body of scholarly/empirical research on IL in the workplace charted in two recent literature reviews– Williams, Cooper & Wavell (2014) and Inskip (2014)

• A useful definition of IL adapted for the workplace, which summarises the relationship to employability:“A set of abilities for employees to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, organize and use information effectively, as well as the abilities to create, package and present information effectively to the intended audience. Simply speaking, it is a set of abilities for employees to interact with information when they need to address any business issues or problems at work.” (Cheuk, 2008)

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Information literacy in the workplace (1)

• Workplace information environments are rather different from those in academia– Workplaces are ‘messier’ than scholarly learning environments,

characterised by business challenges that are often less linear, less predictable and more open-ended

– In the workplace, greater emphasis on people and networks as sources of information and knowledge

– IL as acquired at university does not necessarily translate well to business settings – this can be disconcerting for students who need to adapt rapidly to unfamiliar, non-academic information practices

• IL’s contribution to employability should be driven by factors and requirements reflecting the reality and culture of the workplace, and the contextual nature of workplace information practices

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Information literacy in the workplace (2)

A worrying view from employers in the US:“When we specifically asked employers to assess how adept new graduates were at finding and using information, many noted that the online proficiency they had prized at the recruiting stage turned out, in many cases, to be both limited and limiting.”Concern expressed by employers about competencies they feel that graduates lack:• Engaging team members during the research process• Retrieving information using a variety of formats• Finding patterns and making connections• Exploring a topic thoroughly(Head, 2013)

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Information literacy in the workplace (3)

Business and customer awareness• Keeping proactively informed about the practices, expectations

and goals of employers; the dynamics of the workplace; the evolving nature of the business environments in which enterprises operate and the needs of customers and users.

• Requires an ability to seek out, interpret, share and present information / data which exists in many forms, and which tends to be specific to given business environments.

• New graduates, with little or no experience of employment, may find this attribute challenging, and employer surveys suggest that there are concerns about graduates’ often poor grasp of the business environment and what this entails.

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Alignment between IL and employability (1)

Coping with workplace complexities• Understanding that the information

needs of enterprises are complex, often messy and largely determined by the nature of their services, products and organisational cultures.

• Adaptability is therefore important to cope with a context-specificity that varies from enterprise to enterprise.

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Alignment between IL and employability (2)

Analytical skills and problem-solving• Using, handling, interpreting and analysing

information / data, to resolve business questions and problems.

• Bears some similarity to the skills and competencies necessary in higher education – but the key distinction is that, in the world of employment, such know-how is deployed for the purpose of providing practical, timely, innovative and cost-effective solutions to meet organisational goals.

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Alignment between IL and employability (3)

Ability to work socially• Making use of people (colleagues, associates, clients and

others) and teams as valuable sources of organisational information and knowledge; and sharing information as appropriate.

• Implies an aptitude to work collectively and to network imaginatively, seeking and obtaining information, and tapping into corporate knowledge, in ways which may be less formal and more diffuse than is the case in student settings.

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Alignment between IL and employability (4)

Career management and lifelong learning capacityKeeping informed about career opportunities, the evolving nature of work, and the adaptability and resilience needed to cope with that, as a means of charting career paths and defining lifelong learning and self-development preferences.

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Alignment between IL and employability (5)

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A couple of key points…

• Information literacy is relevant to the workplace. It is not explicitly recognised as a graduate employability attribute, but it is inherent to a range of well-recognised competencies

• The challenge is to explain how IL relates to these competencies, and how it contributes to the reality of workplace culture and practices

• CBI (2007), ‘Time well spent: embedding employability in work experience’ – http://www.educationandemployers.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/time-well-spent-cbi.pdf

• CBI (2014), ‘Gateway to Growth – CBI/Pearson Education and Skills Survey 2014’ – http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/2809181/embargo_00.01_4_july_cbi_pearson_education_and_skills_survey_2014.pdf

• CBI / National Union of Students (2010), ‘Working towards the future: making the most of your time in higher education’ – http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1121431/cbi_nus_employability_report_march_2011.pdf

• Cheuk, B. (2008), ‘Delivering business value through information literacy in the workplace’, Libri, 58(3), pp. 137-143

• Cole, D. and Tibby, M. (2013), ‘Defining and developing your approach to employability: a framework for higher education institutions’, Higher Education Academy – https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/employability_framework.pdf

• Head, A. et al (2013), ‘What information competencies matter in today’s workplace?’, Library and Information Research, 37 (114), pp. 74-104 – http://www.lirgjournal.org.uk/lir/ojs/index.php/lir/article/view/557

References (1)

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• Hinchliffe, G.W. and Jolly, A. (2011), ‘Graduate identity and employability’, British Educational Research Journal, 37(4), pp. 564-584 – http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/01411926.2010.482200/abstract

• Inskip C. (2014), ‘Information literacy is for life, not just for a good degree: a literature review’, CILIP – www.cilip.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/IL in the workplace literature review Dr C Inskip June 2014. doc.pdf

• Klusek, L. & Bornstein, J. (2006), ‘Information Literacy Skills for Business Careers: Matching Skills to the Workplace’, Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, 11, pp. 3-21 – http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J109v11n04_02

• NACE (2012), ‘Job Outlook 2013’ – http://career.sa.ucsb.edu/files/docs/handouts/job-outlook-2013.pdf

• SCONUL (December 2015), ‘A graduate employability lens for the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy’ – http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Employability%20lens%20and%20report.pdf

• Williams, D., Cooper, K. and Wavell C. (2014) ‘Information Literacy in the Workplace – an annotated bibliography’, Robert Gordon University, Institute for Management, Governance and Society (IMaGeS), in association with InformAll – http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Workplace-IL-annotated-bibliography.pdf

References (2)

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Stéphane Goldsteinsg@informall.org.uk

https://www.informall.org.uk @stephgold7

Thank you for your attention!

Photo credit: Jan Fidler, on Flickr – CC BY 2.0