The Career Explorer is a new collaborative service between HESA, Jisc, Prospects, and UCAS to provide personalized career guidance to prospective university students. The innovative analytical tool will guide students with information to help inform their choices about future studies and careers. It will demystify pathways from subject choice through higher education and into careers. The tool utilizes key datasets and expertise to improve student experience and outcomes.

1. The Career Explorer:
helping young people
with educational choices
and career aspirations
James Jackson, Fraser Nicoll,
Lorna Eden, Richard Sandell

2. James Jackson
Head of Systems
Jisc
(Bishop Grosseteste University)
Lorna Eden
Senior Data and Visualisation Officer
Jisc
Fraser Nicoll
Service Lead - I&A
UCAS
Richard Sandell
IT and Infrastructure Director
Prospects
In response to the Bell Review HESA, Jisc, Prospects and UCAS have joined
forces to collaborate on a new service called the Career Explorer. This highly
innovative analytical tool will be designed to improve the student experience. It
will guide prospective university students with personalised information, to help
inform and empower the life changing choices they have to make about their
future studies and careers.
Introductions

3. Using analytics in strategy
•Our collective experience of the role and importance of analytics in
strategy development and/or policy creation
•How analytics has changed the Higher Education Landscape
•How this change might impact people in their role/career

4. Questions
As you think of questions
throughout the presentation,
please post them to our
Menti page! We will look at
these at various points
within the session.
Go to www.menti.com
and use code:
19 95 0

5. What is in a choice?
•Students fall into 3 broad categories:
•I know what I want to do but I don’t know where
•I know where I want to go but I don’t know what
•I don’t know what I want to do
Problem right now is there is so much
information in different places telling you
different things

6. What is career explorer?
•Take a starting point of learners (14 - 18/19-year olds) and reflect
educational progression routes from GCSE/Scottish Highers (Level 2
qualifications) through to HE (Levels 4 - 6 qualifications), subsequent
scope to be dictated by progress;
•Be anchored to what learners want and need in a format they will
use: utilising full user engagement, in its functionality, design and user
experience, with testing and refinement throughout the development
process;
•Maximise relevance to disadvantaged students and support
widening participation; and
•Utilise a range of key datasets (owned by the quartet and wider as
explored in the proof of concept) combined with the expertise held by
the quartet

7. What did we do?
We spoke to 4 groups of
year 12/13 students:
•Some had already applied
•Some had some idea of
what they wanted to do.
The students were at a mix
of schools:
•Some got a lot of support
from teachers
•Some had no help at all
from their peers
We showed them 3
dashboards showing them:
1. Skills input - career
2. Career input - degree
3. Qualification input -
university

8. VIDEO/DEMO OF DASHBOARD

9. “I would use this to choose
where to go on open day visits”
“I really like the third page”
“Wish I had this when I was choosing and applying”
“I think its an amazing idea – all 3”
“I want that now to start exploring”

10. The Career Explorer will demystify the
multitude of possible pathways to take from
pre-16 subject choice through their higher
education journey into careers. This will allow
universities to work closely with well-informed
students to help shape rewarding careers
thus improving the outcomes of graduates.
So what does the tool do?

11. How will this benefit your institution?

12. So what can it help you do?
•What kinds of purposes are analytics used for at each
level?
•Are the analytics used always ‘Institutional’, or
sometimes more ‘operational’ - or both?
•How might the use of analytics be more effective for
understanding the student body?

13. •This is a new collaboration, what might the sector see as a future
collaboration opportunity?
•Where can we take this tool?
•What would make it useful to you?
•Are there any other data sets we could be using?
Final thoughts

14. MENTI QUESTIONS FOLLOW UP

15. customerservices@jisc.ac.uk
jisc.ac.uk
Thank you
James Jackson
Head of Systems,
Jisc
(Bishop Grosseteste
University)
Fraser Nicoll
Service Lead – I&A
UCAS
Lorna Eden
Senior Data and
Visualisation Officer
Jisc
Richard Sandell
IT and Infrastructure
Director
Prospects