Ask a student who helped them most during their time at university and you will rarely get a tidy answer. It was a careers adviser who noticed they were struggling, or a wellbeing team who nudged them towards an opportunity, or a tutor who made an introduction. Support, when it works, tends to cross the lines that institutions draw between departments.
The trouble is that most universities are still organised around those lines. Careers sits over here. Wellbeing sits over there. Disability advice, counselling, mental health and student money each have their own forms, their own systems and their own view of the student. Every team is doing valuable work, and very few of them can see what the others are doing, or even agree on what the shared words mean.
That last point is more corrosive than it sounds. Mark Burns, Systems Technologist Coordinator at Leeds Beckett University, described trying to build a single report on when a student was engaging with a service. He put the question to a room of colleagues and got a different answer from each. As he tells it, "there were six people in the room" and every one of them defined the starting point differently, from completing an application form, to filling in a self-registration form, to seeing an adviser and discussing adjustments. Six people, six definitions of the same basic idea. If a single team cannot agree, an institution split across silos has no chance.
Leeds Beckett's response is a useful model for what joining up actually looks like in practice, because it did not start with the student-facing shopfront. It started with the plumbing. The team used the CareerHub API to automate the flow of data out of the platform and into one place, cleaned and ready to use. Every morning at five, the process collects submissions from around 32 different forms across the university, wipes the old table and replaces it with fresh data.
Crucially, this is not a careers-only exercise. As Burns is careful to point out, everything he presented came "from Student Services," spanning "student wellbeing, disability advice, student money" and student advice. The automation treats the student as one person moving across services, not as a set of unconnected records.
The payoff is both practical and strategic. On the practical side, work that used to swallow whole afternoons now takes minutes. A Freedom of Information request that "would have taken me a good few hours took me about 15 minutes to complete," because the data was already sitting there, automated and consistent. On the strategic side, a single source of truth changes the conversations that leaders are able to have. Burns describes his director using appointment and wellbeing engagement data in a challenge over spend in student services. Because the facts were to hand, "that conversation stopped incredibly quickly because we immediately showed the worth of the service." The same data settles disputes over room allocation with the estates team and lets the service shape staffing around demand, heavy-loading the busy October and late-January peaks and moving to project work when things quieten.
Employability is where the value of all this becomes most visible, because a student's readiness for work is shaped by almost everything else. Confidence built through wellbeing support. Adjustments that let a disabled student take up a placement on equal terms. Financial stability that makes it possible to stay on the course at all. When the data behind these services is connected, a careers team is no longer working blind. It can see engagement across the whole student journey and act on it.
Whole-student support does not mean merging departments or flattening specialisms. Careers advisers should remain careers advisers. It means giving teams a shared, trustworthy view of the student so the right conversation can happen at the right moment. Leeds Beckett even uses the same engagement data to recognise the work of individual practitioners, spotting who has supported which groups of students and feeding that into professional development. That is what a single source of truth makes possible. It turns a set of good but separate services into genuine, connected support.
There is a cultural shift underneath this too. Working in silos is comfortable. Each team has its remit, its targets and its sense of ownership. Joining up requires trust, shared definitions and a willingness to accept that a good outcome for a student rarely belongs to a single department. Burns's advice to institutions just starting out is refreshingly unromantic. Start with a vision of what you want to achieve, start small, and remember you probably already have some of the tools.
The universities that get this right will not necessarily be the ones with the biggest teams or the most funding. They will be the ones willing to organise around the student rather than around themselves. Employability is not a standalone service. It is the outcome of everything working together, and it deserves to be treated that way.