Yet another December paper is out – Hepi’s Employability: degrees of value. This paper is quite interesting in that it raises a key point in the ongoing discussion about what universities actually offer, how students benefit and what they can actually hope to get out of higher education.
Plenty of focus has been afforded to HE’s direct link with employment: the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey, for example, records how many students are in employment six months after graduation. This is actually one of the proposed metrics to be used for assessing ‘excellence’ in the TEF. But author Johnny Rich says we should rather focus on employability, and not confuse (the quantity of) employment with (the quality of) employability. The idea behind the report is to identify the real attributes students need for employability, so that academia can help develop these traits.
The paper proposes three elements for understanding employability: knowledge, social capital, and skills. In developing these areas, both students and academics need to be more aware of how employability can be obtained, how it can be embedded into programmes, and how awareness can be raised toward distinguishing progressing in careers with simple employment.