Seeking input from clients on environmental issues

  • Target group: Primary, Secondary, VET, Higher education, Adults, Unemployed
  • Activity: Feeding back and shaping systems
  • Form: Individual
  • Duration: 30 minutes

This tool provides some ideas about how you can seek input from clients on environmental issues. It includes ideas for routine record keeping and a suggestion for a short survey that you could do with your clients. This is designed to support some rethinking about record keeping and gathering client input. This could include a range of activities that take different amounts of time.

Inspiration for the tool

This tool was developed by the Exploring Green Guidance project team. We drew on the work of Solveig Børresen in the development of the survey.

Rationale: Why is this needed?

Gathering feedback from clients is a key aspect of green guidance. Effective practice is built on having a strong understanding of your clients’ and students’ needs. Green guidance also encourages you to get involved in feeding back your clients’ issues into wider systems e.g. to employers or the training or benefits systems. To do this you need to have a good understanding of where your clients are coming from.

Objectives

This tool will support career development practitioners to:

  • Capture insights that come up through guidance practice
  • Gather feedback on environmental issues from their clients

Resources needed

It would be possible to undertake all of these activities using paper and pencils. But they would generally be supported by a variety of IT tools such as customer/client management systems and online surveying tools.

Activities

Collecting environmental data as part of routine client monitoring

When you are undertaking any kind of guidance activities it is good practice to keep records. These records should normally include things like who has attended, what was discussed and potentially any information any kinds of student or client evaluations. It would be good if  you can add some additional questions which address environmental issues. It is important to keep this simple, so something like.

  • Did any students/clients raise any environmental issues or express an interest in green careers? Yes/No
  • Can you provide further details of what they raised?

Collecting this sort of data will allow you to quantify the level of interest in environmental issues amongst your clients. It will also allow you to dig further into what issues they are raising.

These kinds of insights can support both your service development and the way that you represent student and client perspectives to stakeholders and organisations that you are engaging with.

Surveying clients

Periodically it might be useful to survey your students or clients to gain a deeper understanding of their perspective on environmental issues. The following questions might be a good starting point for such a survey. You can ask participants to tick all of the statements that they agree with, or offer them a five point scale as follows (1. Strongly disagree, 2. Disagree, 3. Neither agree nor disagree, 4. Agree, 5. Strongly disagree).  

Belief in climate change

  1. I believe that climate change is real.
  2. The main causes of climate change are human activity.
  3. Climate change will have serious negative consequences.
  4. My local area will be affected by climate change.
  5. It will take a long time for the consequences of climate change to be felt.

Feelings about climate change and career

  • I have experienced/experience stress and worry related to climate change (climate anxiety).
  • I take climate and the environment into account when I assess my educational and professional career.
  • I am concerned with finding sustainable work.
  • I am committed to having a sustainable lifestyle.

Support with career and climate change

  1. I would like more information about careers and climate change
  2. I would like more help in thinking about how my career might need to respond to climate change
  3. I belief that career guidance should support me to think about climate and environmental issues
  4. I expect career guidance practitioners to be informed about the impact of climate and environment issues on career

You are free to adapt these questions to your need and may benefit from also asking some qualitative questions (e.g. say more about what support you would find useful).

Conducting this kind of research can provide you with a really strong understanding of where your students and clients are on these key issues.

Reflections and use of data

Collecting this kind of data can be really useful as part of your service development. Understanding what your students and clients care about (and don’t care about) is a critical part of building a green guidance approach that resonates with the people that you are working with.

Data can also be a critical tool when you are trying to feed back to organisations and systems and influence their behaviour. Being able to quantify your clients concerns and beliefs strengthens your ability to advocate on their behalf and influence systems.