When the Resource Leaves the Room

The graduate jobs market is harder than it has been in a long time. High Fliers Research reports that recruitment at the UK's leading graduate employers has fallen by 24.5% since 2022, a steeper drop than during the pandemic or the 2008 recession. At the same time, AI is changing how applications are written, screened and assessed. A student can now produce a polished cover letter in seconds. Whether they know what they want it to say is another matter entirely.

That question sits underneath my interest in Career Storytelling for the SDGs, a project led by Dr Karen Cripps at Oxford Brookes University, and it is the reason I wanted to bring it to Liverpool Business School.

What is Career Storytelling for the SDGs?

Karen has been developing the project since 2023, after it received funding through the PRME UKI Chapter competition for Developing Innovative Pedagogic Approaches and Teaching Practices. It brings employability and sustainability into the same conversation, using the SOAR employability framework alongside the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Students begin with an SDG that matters to them and work outwards from there: their skills and experiences, the opportunities they might pursue, and how they might tell that story in an application or interview. The session is built on a storytelling structure that runs from Call to Adventure through to Seizing the Treasure, and it stretches or condenses to fit the time available. Ours was a three-act version. Students leave with a completed storyboard and a career narrative they can keep developing.

What I value most is the order of things. So much employability support starts from the job description and asks students to fit themselves to it. Karen's approach starts with what students care about and asks what kind of work might make room for that. In a contracting market I think that order matters more, though I hold some unease about it too. A shrinking market puts pressure on students to perform a version of themselves that sells, and a values-led career story can be absorbed into that performance as easily as anything else. Karen is alert to this. The storyline borrows from the Hero's Journey, but she deliberately drops the word hero, wary of its gendered and individualistic baggage, and she is open about it being a Western structure that won't suit every student. Much depends on whether the story is something students work out for themselves or something they are coached to produce. Karen's storyboard leans firmly towards the first.

She has now delivered the session at more than twenty universities, testing and refining it as she goes. The next challenge was moving it beyond her own delivery. When we spoke, we kept returning to the same question: what does it take for a teaching resource to work without its creator in the room?

I think about this a lot in my own practice. Higher education is full of brilliant resources that live and die with the person who made them. They work because of the person delivering them and the instincts that person has built up over years. When someone else picks them up, they often arrive as a set of slides and a facilitator's guide, stripped of whatever made them come alive. Moving a resource on means trusting other educators to make it their own, and accepting that it will change when they do.

Career storytelling at Liverpool Business School

There was an obvious home for this at LJMU. At Liverpool Business School, Dr Konstantina Skritsovali and I co-lead the Sustainability Accelerator, which brings colleagues together around sustainability in teaching and curriculum. My wider work in Responsible Management Education is concerned with how the SDGs can be embedded in ways that make sense within different disciplines, which is harder than it sounds. Across the university, that work sits alongside LiRICS, the Liverpool Research Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Karen's resource gave us something concrete to put into that space.

In June 2026, Karen came to Liverpool Business School to run the session at our School Forum and Development Day. Around 100 colleagues took part, and she later ran it again online with colleagues from our international partnerships. We framed it as a 'pick up and go' resource. Colleagues worked through the session exactly as students would, choosing an SDG and reflecting on their own values and career choices before thinking about where it might sit in their teaching. It matters to have sat with those questions yourself before you ask students to.

Authentic career stories when AI writes the application

The timing produced a connection none of us had planned. Karen's session followed an industry panel on AI, where part of the conversation had turned to recruitment and the limits of AI-generated applications. Karen reflected afterwards:

"My session with staff followed on from a fascinating industry panel discussion on the integration of AI, and without any intentional planning, this made for a really smooth transition. The panel discussion included the limitations of AI-generated applications, thus emphasising the importance of preparing students for authentic communication. It was also fun to work with colleagues in an experiential format through encouraging reflection on our own career values and choices."

That has stayed with me. When an application can be generated in seconds, the harder work happens earlier: working out what matters to you, what you have done, what you learnt from it and where you might want to take it next. The storytelling approach gives students room to do that thinking before they ever reach the application form. What they come away with is a story they recognise as their own, and no tool can hand them that.

Where the resource goes next

The real test was whether colleagues could see themselves using it. The early signs are encouraging. Colleagues have expressed interest in taking it into HR teaching, employability modules and a Life Sciences pathway at the International Study Centre. Those are very different settings, which is exactly what makes them useful. Each one will ask something different of the resource and show us what holds and what has to bend.

So that is where the work goes next. We want to follow colleagues as they take it into their own teaching, paying attention to what they change and what support they need before they feel confident running it on their own. What we learn will go back to Karen and into the next version.

The ambition was always for Career Storytelling for the SDGs to travel beyond Karen's own sessions. Liverpool is one of the first places testing what that looks like, and I suspect the version that eventually goes back to her will be different from the one she brought.

Before you take it to students: try the exercise yourself

The masterclass ends with an exercise we didn't do in June. Students answer an interview-style question about their story, out loud, to one partner after another, and the story shifts a little with each telling. If you want to know whether this belongs in your teaching, try it with colleagues first. Pick the SDG you care about most, think about what you have actually done that connects to it, then answer a question about it to three or four different people in turn. Notice what happens to the story between the first telling and the last. Karen's full session plan and worksheet are free on the project website, and the thinking behind the design is set out in her open-access paper with Milena Bobeva in the International Journal of Management Education.