Preparing political science students for a non-academic career: Experiences from a novel course module
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Rasmus Broms,Jenny de Fine Licht |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395719828651 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Learning and Teaching in Politics and International Studies |
research-article2019
Learning and Teaching in Politics
and International Studies
Politics
2019, Vol. 39(4) 514 –526
Preparing political science
© The Author(s) 2019
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students for a non-academic
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719828651
DOI: 10.1177/0263395719828651
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
career: Experiences from a
novel course module
Rasmus Broms and Jenny de Fine Licht
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
Higher education is increasingly expected not only to provide students with disciplinary knowledge
and skills but also to prepare them for a future career. As political science is a diverse discipline
and does not train students for a certain profession, its students often feel uncertain of the career
paths available to them and how their expertise can be used in a future career. In this article, we
present and discuss the course ‘The Professional Political Scientist’, given at the bachelor’s level
at the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, which is an attempt
to fill this gap. We present the preparatory work, the design, the pedagogy behind the themes
and exercises included in the curriculum, as well as the experiences and evaluations of the first
three rounds of the course. Finally, we provide suggestions for teachers interested in developing
similar courses.
Keywords
career, employability, teaching
Received: 9th October 2018; Revised version received: 13th December 2018; Accepted: 14th January 2019
Introduction
Pressures on higher education to prepare students for an internationalized and volatile
labour market with high demands on flexibility and additivity have grown considerably
over recent decades (Allen and van der Velden, 2011). This indicates a clear need for
more experience-based studies on how to work with skill-building and career-preparation
in practical terms. Nevertheless, the literature focusing on the incorporation of post-grad-
uate career concerns into political science education remains limited (Lee et al., 2016).
For example, Craig (2014) finds that only 2.3% of the articles on teaching and learning in
political science published between 2005 and 2012 focused on employability – less than
half as many as works devoted to, for instance, critical thinking.
Corresponding author:
Rasmus Broms, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email: rasmus.broms@pol.gu.se
Broms and de Fine Licht
515
In this article, we report our experiences from the first three rounds of a module spe-
cifically devised to prepare political science students for a post-graduate professional life
outside academia, which has been given at the Department of Political Science at the
University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The aim of the article is to contribute with practical
examples of how teachers in political science can work with career-preparation concerns
and hopefully stimulate further discussion on how to bridge academic education and pro-
fessional working life.
Political science and the question of employability
Higher education is experiencing increasing demands to prepare students for their post-
graduate careers. Not least with the implementation of the Bologna process, employability
– referring to the skills, understandings, and personal attributes that make graduates more
likely to gain employment and be successful in their occupations (Yorke, 2006) – has
become a major task and challenge for universities across the world (EHEA, 2015; Times
Higher Education, n.d.). For example, employability now plays a central role in the
European Commission’s strategy for higher education reform (European Commission/
EACEA/Eurydice, 2014: 61), with a focus on transferable competences, generic skills, and
practical experiences with labour market relevance.
This development has generated a lively debate on the meaning and purpose of higher
education, where many observers – not least social scientists – fear a trade-off with aca-
demic standards if presumptive employers get too much influence over curriculums
(Arora, 2015; Harvey, 2001; Lee et al., 2016; Maurer and Mawdsley, 2014; Moreau and
Leathwood, 2006). For instance, Ashe (2012: 129) argues that the employability agenda
and its focus on employers’ demands might be viewed as especially problematic by teach-
ers of critical subject areas, such as sociology or political science. The main concerns
include potential threats against academic freedom and quality and fears that the dis-
course of employability emphasizes the individual’s attributes and responsibilities at the
potential expense of a more systematic view of labour, the labour market, and employ-
ment. Many academics would probably agree with the argument by, for example, a num-
ber of well-known Swedish academics (Broberg et al., 2008) protesting the employability
focus in the Bologna agreement, arguing that universities should devote their energy to
what they are good at – creating analytic and critical-thinking graduates with broad
knowledge in space and time – rather than trying to anticipate and accommodate the vola-
tile desires of potential future employers.
Notwithstanding, most students in political science programmes will not go on to work
in academia (Trueb, 2013). Furthermore, there are obvious connections between the skill-
building focus of the employability agenda and the pedagogical and didactical aspects of,
for instance, internships (Sosland and Lowenthal, 2017), work placement learning (Curtis,
2012), service-learning (Battistoni and Hudson, 1997), and career-preparation and advice
(Despeaux et al., 2014) – attributes and activities not foreign to most political science
programmes. Such themes are also related to the debate on whether political science edu-
cation should encourage civic engagement and/or activism by making students engage in
real-world problems and duties (Isacoff, 2014).
According to Maurer and Mawdsley (2014: 36), the employability and skills agenda
might therefore not be that different from how many social scientists already teach.
Rather, an increased focus on generic and transferable skills might, for example, corre-
spond well with an active learning approach to teaching social sciences. As, for instance,
516
Politics 39(4)
Clark (2011) shows, by working intensively with actual research problems, students
develop both a deeper understanding of a subject and higher levels of critical thinking. In
addition, a focus on transferable skills might increase student enjoyment and enhance the
general learning experience. Similarly, as, for example, Pennock (2011) and Trueb (2013)
argue, incorporating skill-building assignments, such as writing policy papers in other-
wise traditional courses, can improve not only the students’ skills in terms of writing for
professional life but also their general understanding of the theoretical components in the
course. This means, in line with Clark and Martin (2016: 393), that employability does
not necessarily stand in contrast to academic capacities. Rather, many of the skills that
future employers will demand, such as teamwork, self-management, writing, presenta-
tion, and not least methodological knowledge, are actually skills that most successful
academics need to acquire. Therefore, delivering transferable skills is largely about mak-
ing students better scholars.
Furthermore, employability has been argued to be an integral aspect of the general
goal of widening participation in higher education to what are sometimes called ‘non-
traditional learners’ (e.g. European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2014; Thomas and
Jones, 2007). In this sense, employability might be as much about explaining and realiz-
ing which competences one actually holds after a successful graduation and how these
competences can be used in professional life as about developing specific ‘employment
skills’. As Clark and Martin (2016) show, UK politics departments already actually do a
pretty good job in providing students with a range of transferable skills that will be of
great use for their future employers but that the discipline could do more when it comes
to telling the students what they get out of their courses.
Taken together, preparing students for a future career outside academia is, on one
hand, a task that is politically encouraged, or even required, by higher education institu-
tions. Since the incorporation of skill-building learning activities and employability con-
cerns into educational programmes is increasingly becoming a demand from students, as
well as a target of audits and a source for ranking educational institutions (e.g. Clark and
Martin, 2016), it is simply something that universities and teachers have to deal with. On
the other hand, it also represents a way of teaching that, if handled wisely, might improve
students’ general motivation and learning, to the benefit of their performance both inside
and outside academia. This points to the importance of finding, evaluating, and sharing
innovative ways of including skill-building and activities promoting employability into
non-vocational education programmes such as political science.
Developing a career-preparation module
The specific demand for a more practice-based and skill-building module at the
Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg largely came from the
student...
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