Employability in higher education: what it is – what it is not

Employability as a concept, if not an actual term has been long been a key concern for higher education. Questions around what employability means, what it does not mean and whose responsibility it is to ensure that our students have ‘employability’ are questions which we should always be asking. Student employability is a key priority at the university and for the sector as a whole.

In the first of a series of blog posts about employability I will revisit the question of what employability is with reference to the work of Mantz Yorke published in 2004. Although 17 years old now, Yorke’s report has aged well in my view and still represents a good starting point for thinking about student and graduate employability.

When Mantz Yorke wrote about the meaning of employability in the early 2000s, he was as interested is what employability isn’t as much as he was interested in what employability is – so much so that he called his booklet ‘Employability in higher education: what it is –what it is not’. For Yorke, employability is not about getting a job after graduation (not even a good graduate job with a good salary). It is not even about key skills, core skills, transferable skills or work experience – instead it about the student being able to learning from these:

“It is a mistake to assume that provision of experience, whether within higher education or without, is a sufficient condition for enhanced employability. To have work experience, say,does not, of itself, ensure that the student develops (further) the various prerequisites(cognitive, social, practical, etc.) for success in employment. The same argument applies to whole curricula. The curricular process may facilitate the development of prerequisites appropriate to employment, but does not guarantee it. Hence it is inappropriate to assume that students are highly employable on the basis of curricular provision alone: it may be a good harbinger but it is not an assurance of employability. Employability derives from the ways in which the student learns from his or her experiences”. (Yorke 2004: 7).

Yorke’s key message about employability is its complexity. Employability is not just about individuals, but also influenced by regional and national labour markets as well as structural inequalities and prejudices in society. Unfortunately, this message of complexity is frequently lost in our metrics driven environment. In 2019, then Education Secretary Damian Hinds called for an end to what he called ‘low value’ degrees. Five years after graduation a high percentage of these graduates were not earning enough to states paying back their student loans. He states “… it isn’t right that institutions benefit from student loan funded fee income for delivering poor value courses, as students and taxpayers are the ones that suffer.” 15 months after graduation, the Graduate Outcomes Survey questions graduates about their job role, salaries and well-being. Directly or indirectly these quantitative measures are regarded as a reflection of the quality of education at a given university or on a particular course. Interesting, although the survey asks and publishes about wellbeing, these data are rarely discussed.

Employability and ‘real world’ learning represent key dimensions of our refresh of the Curriculum Design Framework and the new Graduate Attributes and Employability skills framework which are in development. We at the Hub are currently working across the university with the Careers Service (led by Clare Dawson) to examine employability in the curriculum across the university. I will reporting on this work in future blog posts. If you would like to know more or would like to share a case study of how you work with your students, please contact:

John Canning

Principal Lecturer in Learning and Teaching

Reference

Yorke, Mantz (2004) Employability in higher education: what it is –what it is not. York: Higher Education Academy(reprinted 2006).

HESA (nd) Graduate Outcomes website Accessed 26/6/21.

Department for Education (2019) Education secretary calls for end to low value degrees. Accessed 26/6/21

Find out more please contact John Canning