A few weeks ago we posted a piece from Fergus Green about Birkbeck’s ethical careers policy. This led to a period of very robust debate on Twitter and other social media. I asked Chris Webb to sum up the case for the prosecution, which he does in this piece. We would really like to hear more perspectives on this issue and encourage people to add comments or get in touch if they would like write more on this subject.

In September this year, Birkbeck, University of London made headlines both in career development circles and the national media by becoming the first UK higher education institution to ban fossil fuel companies from recruiting students through their careers service.

The rationale for this move was elaborated upon in a blog post from Fergus Green, Senior Climate Campaigns Coordinator at student campaigning charity People & Planet, which was published by both HEPI and the Career Guidance for Social Justice site, and provided more detail regarding Birkbeck’s Ethical Careers Policy (which contains more than simply references to employers that the service chooses not to work with, including guidelines for internship salaries and a commitment to impartial 1:1 guidance), the reasons behind the university taking this decision and why this approach was something that, in the author’s opinion, all HEIs should consider implementing moving forward.

The article, and wider debate on Twitter, generated a wide range of opinions from the careers community, from broad agreement that advocacy for social justice issues is a key part of careers work to concerns around the impartiality/objectivity of careers services making a value judgement regarding the moral legitimacy of a particular industry. The intention of this blog is not to specifically critique Birkbeck, University of London’s Ethical Careers Policy or the decision to ban fossil fuel companies from engaging with students via their careers service (after all, many universities already have policies in place regarding the types of companies they partner with on everything from construction projects to mentoring initiatives, so the principle of the move is not necessarily unprecedented) but rather to highlight some alternative perspectives in response to the blog mentioned above and reflect on the impact this situation could have on careers services and professionals now and in the future.

It’s important to start out by acknowledging that as much as we strive for independent, impartial guidance as careers professionals, our work does not exist in a vacuum and is subject to the same external societal, cultural and economic influences as any other profession. As Rebecca Fielding, Founder and Managing Director at Gradconsult, observed recently on Twitter following reports of University of Sheffield students protesting the appearance on campus of weapons manufacturers like BAE Systems, this sort of social action is hardly new news and is something that has been both carried out by students and responded to by careers services for a number of years now (indeed, the University of Sheffield Careers Service have already attempted to address student concerns over the value of companies attending their careers events by providing details about each company’s policy on Sustainability, their Disability Confident status and whether they offer Skilled Worker visa sponsorship). A number of career development and early career recruitment professionals in the online space have also responded to Birkbeck’s decision to ban fossil fuel recruitment from their careers service activities, leading to some key themes when it comes to concerns over engaging/disengaging with certain companies/industries:

Drawing Lines

If we are willing to take the decision not to work with fossil fuel companies/recruiters as these are not the types of organisations we feel our students and graduates should be working with, why not apply the same logic to industries like Agriculture, Construction, Manufacturing, FMCG or Transport, all of which are significant carbon contributors? Many organisations within the Oil & Gas industry are already pivoting to areas like carbon capture and clean energy, so where do we draw the line on which companies we engage with/permit our students to be exposed to?

Changing Their Spots

Another concern careers professionals raised regarding the Birkbeck situation focused on changing views and employer behaviour in relation to particular issues, such as Climate Change – for example, if an employer in the Oil & Gas industry is in the process of transitioning their business model to renewables, carbon capture and/or clean energy generation, would they still be classed in the same bracket as more traditional fossil fuel organisations? Given that Shell and BP are unlikely to simply disappear as corporations as the Oil & Gas industry diminishes over time and could potentially be significant future players in the renewables industry, could disengaging with these organisations now potentially be detrimental in the longer term? Charlotte Steggall, a Talent Acquisition Manager specialising in Early Careers, noted that the decision to ban particular companies from engaging with students could potentially have a negative impact on future career opportunities –

…as someone who has been on the advice and guidance side of things, and is now an early careers manager, young people don’t always understand how competitive these ethical choices are…if a student wants to work in sustainability, then working for Shell or a similar company on a sustainability project is an amazing place to cut your teeth, then take that experience elsewhere.

Other careers professionals on Twitter raised related concerns about students who might be interested in affecting change in particular industries potentially feeling judged or invalidated for their career decisions if a careers service had a particular stance regarding certain employers and that this could impact on their desire to engage with the service regarding other career development queries in the future, another example of a potential unintended consequence of this type of policy. This could also impact an institution’s relationship with its graduates. A cursory look at Birkbeck’s Alumni tab on LinkedIn highlights a number of their graduates who are currently working for organisations like BP and Shell – how might closing off relationships with these companies make these graduates feel in relation to both their own career choices and their association with the university?

A Fair Representation?

One of the strongest arguments made to support Birkbeck’s decision was that the ethical careers policy had been agreed and implemented following consultation between the university, Birkbeck Futures (the careers service) and the student body. However, Rebecca Fielding believes this assertion could in itself be problematic, citing the potential for false consensus and social desirability bias when consulting on any proposal –

The article refers to in depth consultation with students. I suspect this was via surveys, student unions/reps etc…Typically the most proactive, already engaged, privileged and well represented. As a 1st generation student myself – money mattered most (especially at the start of my career)…The social desirability response bias is routinely evident in student surveys where we see a big disparity between what students say motivates them/is most important in their career vs who they actually apply to in numbers every year. For example, BP/Shell do not struggle for applications!”

Rebecca adds that the two issues of student voice (e.g. representative of the majority or not?) and social desirability bias can often lead us to a false consensus, where we “…draw conclusions that we not only want to be true, but we are then reinforced by what we find to believe it to be so.”

The Right To Choose

Ghislaine Dell, a careers professional working in higher education, felt that banning certain employers from institutional careers activities risked taking agency away from students to make informed choices, noting that the question of who makes these decisions could have various ethical implications

Well, if the university doesn’t endorse them (particular companies), it is harder for students to find them for starters. Also – there are companies who still work with extractive technology but also with renewables or cleaner technology. So do we really have ‘good companies’ and ‘bad companies’? Should we judge for students?

Ghislaine added that although there may always be some restrictions on the type of businesses universities (or other education institutions) work with (for example, research funders preventing universities from taking money from tobacco companies), when it comes to free services like advertising jobs to students, careers services should ideally not seek to put up barriers

I wish there were no restrictions placed on who we were able to work with, because I believe students should make their own choices…I see it as our role as careers professionals to empower them to research companies and make decisions on what enables them to have an impact/make ethical choices career-wise.

The Role Of The Careers Service

Echoing Ghislaine’s comments and concerns raised by a number of other careers professionals, Rebecca Fielding also felt that Birkbeck’s decision could potentially be seen as being too directive, given that in this context careers services are working with adults who have their own ethics/drivers and by delivering an outright ban on employers from a particular industry (albeit I believe Birkbeck’s ban was limited to a designated list of named businesses, rather than the entirety of the Oil & Gas industry), it is in effect depriving the students at that institution from being able to make their own decisions about these companies (whether that be to protest their appearance at a careers fair or inquire after graduate job opportunities!) I have heard this perspective challenged on the grounds that ‘there is nothing stopping students at Birkbeck from researching into these companies independently’ but as a former careers leader in secondary education, it seems contrary that we would extol the virtues of employer encounters and exposing young people to a variety of career pathways at school but not consider this awareness raising to be similarly important once individuals are in higher education (even if a student’s first experience of a particular industry involves mass protest at their appearance on campus!)

Blurred Lines?

Speaking in a personal capacity, my concerns with the Birkbeck scenario from a careers professional lens boil down to where we draw our lines in respect of our individual practice – working for organisations, most careers professionals are cogniscant that there may be times when their professional ethics (e.g. impartiality, transparency) potentially clash with institutional objectives (e.g. schools attempting to encourage more students to their sixth-form, universities seeking to increase uptake of postgraduate courses etc.) but broadly speaking, as a member of a careers service I have always felt empowered to challenge any practices that seem contrary to the ethical framework I follow for my professional body (the CDI Code of Ethics). If careers services move further down the route of undertaking moral arbitration on certain issues (whether that is determining which employers/recruiters we wish to engage with or potentially making value judgements about which causes we might wish to promote during careers education sessions), this could cause discord within these services if practitioners do not feel they have space to critically discuss or challenge decisions that may impact their guidance delivery with clients.

That said, I acknowledge that Birkbeck’s ethical careers policy is careful to separate the decision on not engaging with fossil fuel recruiters from what it expects from its careers staff (“Birkbeck students are able to receive impartial one-to-one careers guidance on any industry of their choosing from the Birkbeck Futures team”) and that many careers professionals already make decisions on the careers services they work for based on their perceived values of the organisation (someone might decide not to undertake careers work with independent school clients from a social mobility perspective, for example). The more I’ve reflected on this matter, the more grey areas I seem to uncover in my thinking but perhaps this is no bad thing, given the multifaceted nature of the debate.

As Pete Robertson notes in his recent article for the Career Guidance for Social Justice site, entitled On the moral limits of the labour market: Navigating ethical issues around occupational choice, the morality of the labour market and occupational choice is an extremely complex issue and requires careers professionals, particularly those in training, to regularly reflect on their own views and how these interact with both society’s mores and the perspectives of the clients they work with, in order to consider to what extent they can balance their personal/professional ethics with the needs of service users, both moral and otherwise. For the careers community, this debate is clearly not going away and from my perspective, the more constructive conversations we can have around these ethics-related scenarios, the better position we will be in as a profession to respond proactively, rather than reactively, to these issues moving forward.

If any careers professionals or other interested parties would be open to contributing their thoughts on this topic via my weekly newsletter (#TheWeekInCareers) or the CDI’s #WeAreCareers Show, please do get in touch via LinkedIn or Twitter!