Employability : realising the potential of a university education

Universities worldwide are being subjected to increasingly strident calls to provide employable graduates. Such calls are not new, dating as they do from the early 1960s; however, the increasingly explicit linking of higher education to economic prosperity by many governments, the trend (not least by students themselves) to position students as consumers of higher education, and the rise of vocationally orientated university degrees all lend weight to the demand for employable graduates. Despite nearly four decades of university and government interest in producing employable graduates, employability itself is not necessarily a well-understood concept, even by its advocates, and is approached in a variety of ways. In both the United Kingdom and Australia, approaches to employability often conflate it with concepts such as career development skills or the outcomes of particular pedagogical and curriculum initiatives such as work-integrated learning or personal development planning. Many 283 of these approaches effectively position employability as something that exists outside of the mainstream curriculum and as being primarily the responsibility of careers services or dedicated professional development subjects. Other understandings of the concept of employability see it as an integral and highly practical dimension of the purpose of higher education and, as such, something that everybody in universities should contribute to fostering.