Students’ reflections on an employability skills provision

Abstract

For many years, a key driver for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has been ensuring that students are prepared for employment post-graduation. This has often resulted in HEIs providing specific modules of study focussing on employability and soft skills. The existing research literature presents a variety of strategies for embedding employability within curricula, often focusing on frameworks to review the provision of employability opportunities within a degree programme. The authors have previously investigated an employability module within an Undergraduate Chemistry Programme at their UK HEI, particularly focusing on students' perceptions -these coalesced around the themes of personal progression, relevance of the module and interactions. However, before using these findings to further develop the module, it was deemed necessary to investigate the module in a different context. This study investigates the employability module in an Australian HEI and its delivery to undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of different disciplines. Free text comments from questionnaires answered by 85 participants were subjected to thematic analysis in order to understand students' perceptions of the module in this new context. The new thematic map was compared to that from the original study to reveal several key similarities and differences between students' perceptions. However, the most important finding is thast employability modules should be tailored to a specific cohort to ensure they are aligned with their needs. This suggests that Central University employability module providers should work closely with individual departments to maximise the impact of these for students. ARTICLE HISTORY

Employability skills framework: a tripartite approach

“…Interestingly, learning is a democratic and self-directed personal initiative aimed at constructing knowledge rather than disseminating it (Gurukkal, 2019). Therefore, examining students' opinions on the significance of identified employability skills is also needed (Scott and Willison, 2021) for identifying perceived skill gaps as there has been a paradigm shift in higher education from a focus on imparting skills to a focus on learning.…”

Graduate Employability of Business Students

“…This is partly because the topic has attracted researchers from different disciplines, such as management, human resources management, accounting, career studies, vocational and organisational psychology. Definitions of graduate employability has kept evolving in the literature (Scott and Willison 2021;Romgens et al 2020). For this study, an augmented definition is used.…”

“…In this study, terms such as generic skills, soft skills, 21st century skills, and employability skills are used interchangeably. There is now a growing realisation that having a degree with good grades and technical knowledge (discipline-specific knowledge) is not enough for new graduates to succeed in today's dynamic labour markets (Pinto and He 2019;Dolce et al 2020;Tomlinson 2008;Scott and Willison 2021;McArthur et al 2017). For example, a graduate who has excellent academic grades but has poor interpersonal, teamwork, critical thinking, and communication skills is unlikely to be successful in their first graduate-level job.…”

“…For example, a graduate who has excellent academic grades but has poor interpersonal, teamwork, critical thinking, and communication skills is unlikely to be successful in their first graduate-level job. Graduates need to develop additional soft/generic/employability skills needed to stand out and navigate inevitable challenges associated with transiting from school into the world of work, and to progress in their chosen careers (Succi and Canovi 2020;Suleman 2018;Okolie et al 2020;Scott and Willison 2021).…”

Building Soft-Employability Skills (SES-KIT): Reliability, Face Validity and Content Validity Testing

“…As Rust (2016) mentioned, assessing oneself is crucial to employability as it allows students to describe their strengths and weaknesses. In a recent study, Scott and Willison (2021) echoes the sentiment by reporting that graduates who are more reflective are likely to be more sought after.…”