• Reader Feedback | Author Tips and Tricks
  (tags: Writing)

• Times Higher Education – Education news, resources and university jobs for the academic world – OECD may fill ‘missing link’ in world rankings
  (tags: measurement highereducation outcomes)
• Policy Review Articles | Higher Education
  (tags: highereducation policy funding privateunis)
• Policy Review Articles | Higher Education
  (tags: highereducation policy)
• Policy Review Articles | Higher Education
  (tags: policy highereducation)
• Policy Review Articles | Higher Education
  (tags: highereducation policy)

• Unleashing Aspiration response published – Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
  From the actual report – "With the help of employers, we have set up a Graduate Talent Pool so that more graduates
  can take advantage of the opportunities offered by internships. These are vital in accessing
  powerful networks. This document includes plans to develop the Pool further and turn it into
  an online National Internship Service."
  (tags: employability graduatecareers)
• Growth in UK's postgraduate sector driven by overseas students
  (tags: highereducation overseasgrads)
• Times Higher Education – The people's view on degrees most likely to lead to work
  (tags: highereducation employability)

• Introduction
  Canal history
  (tags: bookresearch)

• UKCISA
  International student information
  (tags: HE students international)

• Social Media Statistics: Facebook
  (tags: socialmedia statistics)

• Coalition on Men and Boys
  Post my original research for my Masters about fathers and identities at work, a lot of really useful stuff seems to be appearing.
  (tags: fatherhood research gender masculinity)
• Student Blogging Guidelines by Kim Cofino
  Definitely a set of rules we should be borrowing heavily from in training Careers Advisers and other staff members to blog.
  (tags: blogging guidelines policies common_sense socialmedia)

A sceptic writes:

I had a preview about how ‘future recruitment’ might work some years ago when I was part of a panel reviewing some 1600 video clips of would-be online video stars.  Let’s just say that the process was both intensely wearisome and less than rigorous – I mean SIXTEEN HUNDRED VIDEO CLIPS!  You try evaluating that little lot fairly.

Now imagine you work for A Gigantic Investment Bank and some snake oil salesmen has managed to convince your Head of Recruitment that video CVs are the The Future.  You’re the CV sifter.  Now go and watch this sixteen hundred times.

Look, I’m not saying that the video CV format won’t one day evolve into something useful but in the meantime

1. They’re a discriminatory nightmare waiting to happen (“I didn’t get an interview because I wear a headscarf/beard/am clinically obese/female/male”).  There’s a reason why first round trawls of CVs/application forms are anonymized in big organisations and that reason is the mitigation of the risk of discrimination or victimisation.  And actually, that’s a good, appropriate thing – the best of us struggle with some level of unconscious prejudice and applying discriminatory little hermeneutic shortcuts is all too easy when dealing with this much information
2. This brings me to my next point – videos provide too much information about a candidate, most of it has to be processed ‘intuitively’ and very little of it is germane to the role in question.  Free-form interviews are notoriously bad at predicting job success (as opposed to the relative discipline offered by structured interviews) and a video CV is a one-sided free-form interview where the recruiter gets to concentrate in detail on considering exactly why the applicant chose that awful shirt (see secondary discrimination again, above).
3. Video interviews offer an infinite amount of opportunities to show you, the candidate, in the worst possible light.  See “shirt”, above.
4. Life’s too short.  A few weeks back I waded through ninety CVs.  I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch ninety videos.

In the interests of fairness, there are a number of things which might make video CVs useful:

1. Video search technology that sifts videos automatically in the same way soft copies of CVs can be sifted, looking for keywords, concrete expressions and so on.  A video equivalent of the kind of software that does buzz monitoring on social media networks, perhaps.
2. Very well formed enterprise platforms for recruiters to manage and review video resumes
3. A lot of training in schools and universities on how to present yourself on camera and how to edit ‘talking head’ videos

Or perhaps we could invest all that time and effort in something more useful.

• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful
  Via Beth Kantner (http://beth.typepad.com/). Scarily true. But don't tell anyone in management.
  (tags: visualization technology humor culture socialmedia)
• Twitter / Twitter Terms of Service
  The things I really like about Twitter's ToS in particular are the little yellow TIP boxes clarifying anything potentially scary such as ownership of tweets versus the licence to distribute them.
  (tags: twitter web2.0 intellectualproperty termsofservice)
• The Ed Techie: The "Technology isn't important" argument
  More than one or two perfectl wonderful, smart, professional careers advisers of my acquaintance have been known to deploy variations of the same argument Martin skewers here.
  (tags: technology resistance change HE highereducation)
• Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Re-reading <em>Sandman:</em> Issue #1, “The Sleep of the Just”
  Not that one should need an excuse to re-read the Sandman…
  (tags: book reading Gaiman comics graphic_novels)
• Interview With a BitTorrent Embracing Record Label | FreakBits
  Meanwhile, smaller distributers get creative while the labels sue Ellen Degeneres.
  (tags: mp3 copyright music web2.0)
• DIOSA | Communications: Web 2.0 Resources for Higher Education
  This looks interesting…
  (tags: web2.0 Education highered socialmedia resource)

I just sent this out as a reply to an email.   The question had to do with whether graduates really use social networks for career developement or whether it’s only about, well,  social networking.  The context was this article for Onrec.com which (correctly) discusses the importance reputation management but incorrectly supposes that everyone will defect from Facebook et al and head off to specialist recruitment planning sites to do so.

The article is inevitably slanted by not being based on any actual research – it’s a description of the business of Careers Site Advisor. At The Careers Group, we’ve found no evidence whatsoever that employers are at all interested in video CVs, for example, in a serious way.

As to use of social media by students for careers development, the qualitative research I’m doing suggests the same on the surface BUT each interview subject (a small but detailed sample using unstructured interviews and discourse analysis) talks about how they manage their identities and structure and how a lot of the ‘following’ or ‘friending’ they do to support their longer term career goals, implicitly or explicitly. What’s interesting is that NO-ONE I’ve spoken to uses any of the tools mentioned in the article (who are the people registering for these sites?) – people only have so much bandwidth for identity management and whilst they may look at these sites or even fill out a registration, I’m not convinced any of them ever go back (that’s hearsay and conjecture, by the way – but one major careers networking site, for example, boasts of 3000 members – that’s nothing if you think of Facebook or Twitter with tens or hundreds of millions of active participants).

And the other thing is that the use of existing ‘default’ networking sites for careers development would be perfectly in line with how people have networked to manage their careers for a very long time. Agencies or start-ups who’ll do well out of ‘passive jobseekers’ (perhaps ‘active digital reputation managers’ is more accurate) will be the ones who can work within the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter ecosystem, rather than trying to reinvent and drag people out of it. Social media marketers already know only too well that dragging people out of Facebook to interact is very, very challenging – best to get the required outcome from where people already are…