Comment by Professor Shelley Kinash, Executive Principal, Student Experience.
If you ask most students why they decided to go to university, the number one reason they will give is to improve their career prospects.
A group of colleagues and I have a hot-off-the-press published journal article about employability, and I’m writing this Pulse piece to share the key information from that article.
Kinash, S., Male, S., Mouat, C., McDougall, K., Thomas, J., Spagnoli, D., & Mortimer, C. (2021). Defining and enabling scholarship of teaching, learning and employability (SoTLE) through a multi-institution faculty learning community. Learning Communities Journal, 13(1), 81-103. http://celt.miamioh.edu/lcj/issue.php?v=13&n=1
What is employability?
Employability scholars such as Knight and Yorke wrote that universities ascribe three overlapping meanings to employability.
- Employment of graduates in their first post-degree job or career promotion for a graduate who was employed prior to, or during, the completion of a degree;
- Approaches and strategies carried-out by universities to support their students for future career success; and
- Capabilities of graduates, also called Graduate Attributes in Australia, which are broader than the specific degree or industry of study.
Can universities be held accountable for students’ employability?
Because universities cannot control the labour market, they cannot guarantee employment to graduates. However, universities ARE responsible for increasing the likelihood of graduates achieving career success – that is, enhanced employability.
Who’s responsibility is employability development within universities?
Graduate career success is both the business and responsibility of educators. Most university academics are experts in the careers associated with their disciplines. They can therefore make curriculum relevant to careers, talk to students about those careers, design learning activities – including assessment – which develop students’ employability skills, and create networking opportunities.
The next part of this summary presents the key definitions from the article.
Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Employability (SoTLE) = rigorous, empirical research and practice-application in the curricular (including embedded, co-curricular and extra-curricular) processes, outcomes and impact of career-oriented approaches to student and graduate success.
Online Faculty Learning Community (oFLC) = a scholarly community of university staff (at a single or from two or more universities) who find multiple ways of connecting, via synchronous and asynchronous means, to collaborate on focused and bounded fields of inquiry about which each member is passionate, curious and courageous.
Curricular Employability = “The design and delivery of employment focused modules, units or subjects and of the many activities throughout a course or program that connect students to the education-employment pathways on which they are travelling” (Lock & Kelly, 2020, p.24).
Co-curricular Employability = University-organised student experiences that take place primarily outside of (but alongside) regular coursework expectations and formal study and are designed to support students’ progress toward graduate success, including post-graduation employment and long-term careers.
Has the Author read the recent Conversation piece “Fair access to university depends on much more than making students ‘job-ready’”?
That article seems to suggest that non-traditional university students (i.e., a large proportion of UNE students) don’t value higher-education simply for employment, but rather, see its “inherent value”. If this is true at UNE, that would negate your major premise given in the first sentence. Has this actually been tested for UNE students, or is it an assumption applied to all students?
Of course, it is probably also discipline-dependent.
Peter Loxley
Congratulations for the publication!