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Careers Liaison Tutor
As a Careers Liaison Tutor (CLT), your role is to work alongside a Careers Consultant (CC) to support students in your department with their career goals.
On this page, you will find a range of resources to support you as a CLT, from an exploration of the key principles underpinning the role, to video testimonials from current CLTs and practical guides on the careers support available at UCL and the Pillars of Employability.
Every department is required to have an academic colleague assigned to the role of Careers Liaison Tutor.
The role is a key link for HEDS (Careers), enabling the development of departmental careers provision to complement the HEDS (Careers) central provision of one-to-one services, events, and online resources.
While the CLT is not expected to be a careers expert, the role is an important one, working with the Careers Consultant assigned to the department to raise students’ awareness of their career options, alongside the development of skills with which they can manage their own career progression.
In practice, the CLT collaborates with the Careers Consultant to develop a local careers education programme, facilitate communication to students, enable Careers Consultant connection with the wider department, and build their understanding of the various employability-related data sets and their potential usage.
An introduction to the CLT role
The introductory video below aims to support prospective and current CLTs to understand the main principles of the CLT role and includes testimonials from current CLTs.
Hear more from our featured CLTs
Our three featured CLTs tell us more about their experiences in the role:
CLT testimonial: Joanna Strange
CLT testimonial: Dr Pawel Bukowski
CLT testimonial: Valentina Giordano
The six key principles of the CLT role
HEDS (Careers) root the CLT role in six principles that support effective collaboration between Careers and academic departments (or a Faculty):
- 1. Facilitate Careers-Department collaboration
Facilitate a positive and collaborative working relationship between HEDS (Careers) and academic department for the benefit of the students in that department.
- 2. Advocate for embedded careers provision
Promote career development learning and the importance of embedded careers education/provision for students, aligned to UCL’s Pillars of Employability.
- 3. Support the development of careers provision that is data-informed and locally tailored
Help to ensure that careers provision is informed by relevant data (e.g. student satisfaction, careers registration and graduate employment data) and provide contextual insight into the department/faculty and student cohort to support this.
- 4. Promote career learning activities to students
Help to ensure that there are clear local communications channels to promote career learning events or opportunities to students.
- 5. Facilitate alumni-student connections
Help to leverage the department’s alumni connections, where appropriate, for the benefit of current students.
- 6. Support for strategic projects
Provide departmental input and advice in relation to the careers-related aspects of education strategic projects at UCL.
You can hear more about these principles in the video above, or read about them in more detail in the CLT Role Description, below.
Additional resources
- CLT Role Description
The CLT Role Description summarises the core responsibilities of the role, as outlined in the introductory video above, under each of the 6 principles:
- HEDS (Careers) Support Overview
This support overview has been developed to support Personal Academic Tutors, to enable them to familiarise themselves with HEDS (Careers) central provision, as well as view some typical student questions, along with suggested answers:
P 1-3: Overview of central services and online resources
P 4-6: Frequently Asked Questions
- Pillars of Employability
The Pillars of Employability was initiated in 2021 and has been recently refreshed in 2024. The research-based Pillars model is UCL’s definition of employability, and provides a structured overview, for both staff and students, of the range of areas (and potential actions relating to each) that can be considered by a UCL student to help them prepare for their future.
Via MyUCLCareers, students can complete a Pillars Skills Assessment to assess their skills competency relating to the Pillars, can record their skills reflections via Pillars Skills Statements, and can further their knowledge via Pillars Pathways. The Pillars model is also used to support staff to embed employability into their programmes.
The ‘Employability Curriculum Map’ tool is rooted in the Pillars model and is aimed at helping academics to review their programmes, and to embed the themes of the various pillars into their programmes, modules, and co-curricular activities.
