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HERDSA Review of Higher Education, Vol. 5 2018
www.herdsa.org.au/herdsa-review-higher-education-vol-5/31-61
Graduate employability and higher
education: Past, present and future
Dawn Bennett
*
School of Education, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
The question of how to prepare higher education students for employment is at
the forefront of higher education, yet in many respects it is the wrong question.
This review article poses an alternative question: how might we prepare higher
education students to navigate an increasingly complex world and labour market
in which they will need to think for a living? I begin by considering the labour
market environment into which graduates transition. I align this with
contemporary definitions of employability before revisiting my employability and
related research undertaken over the past 20 years. In voicing possible solutions, I
structure the article’s latter sections according to the four challenges posed by the
Australian Deputy Vice-Chancellors for response in the 2019 HERD Review:
namely, university funding; commitment to change by university staff; dealing with
complexity; and building capacity.
Keywords: Graduate outcomes, graduate attributes, graduate labour market,
university, graduate work, career development learning, work integrated learning,
higher education policy
1. Why is employability such a hot topic?
Global secondary and higher education engagement is predicted to reach
seven billion people by the year 2100, representing a ten-fold increase since
1970 (Roser & Nagdy, 2018). The enormity of this is brought into
perspective when considering that the total world population in early 2019 is
7.68 billion people. In the Australian context, the 30 years since the 1987-
1991 Dawkins reforms and the subsequent introduction of a unified national
system have seen course completions more than triple and student numbers
*
Email: dawn.bennett@curtin.edu.au
Dawn Bennett
32
rise some 270%, to 1,082,000. Krause (2017, p. 55) notes a concomitant
“expansion of multiple pathways to and through tertiary education that
typify a mass higher education system”.
In 2019, almost half the Australian population engages in higher
education (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017) together with over 431,000
international students who choose to study in Australia (Department of
Education and Training, 2018). Twenty years ago, however, Coffield (1999,
p. 485) warned that unless there was a “corresponding expansion of elite
jobs”, the value of a degree would fall as more people gained graduate
status. In fact, traditional employer relationships in the form of full-time
positions with a single employer—Coffield’s “elite jobs”—are fast
disappearing in a labour market that values organisational agility. At a time of
technological change, skills shortages and an ageing workforce, the number
of part-time, casual and multiple job-holding workers has never been higher.
Neither has the workforce been as mobile: in Australia each year, two
million people start new jobs and half a million change industry (Department
of Jobs and Small Business, 2018).
No-one could have predicted the rapid growth in higher education
engagement over the past 30 years; neither could we have foreseen the
rapidity of labour market change. In one sense, an oversupply of graduates
has its economic benefits: fierce competition for work, for example,
compels workers to work beyond their brief, limits wage-growth, and
creates opportunities for small enterprises to flourish by providing cheap
labour (see Bennett, 2019). However, higher education does not exist to
enable a purely economic mission. Moreover, precarious or poorly designed
work erodes worker retention, motivation, productivity and innovation (see
Parker, Ohly, Kanfer, Chen, & Pritchard, 2008; Raja & Johns, 2010; Taylor,
Marsh, Nicol, & Broadbent, 2017). If employability is to align with the
broader purposes of higher education, it must be redefined.
At the current time, the terms employment and employability are often
conflated; indeed, governments persist in measuring crude employment
outcomes and reporting these as graduate employability. As Wilton (2011, p.
87) writes, it “is possible to be employable, yet unemployed or
underemployed”. This is particularly true in times of recession and rapid
labour market change. The uses and definitions of employability, then, must
distinguish between job-getting (employment) and the ability to create and
sustain work over time (employability): between “being employable or not,
to a consideration of employability as having a dynamic adaptive nature”
(Williams, Dood, Steele, & Randall, 2016, p. 877, drawing on Grazier’s 1999
report work for the European Commission).
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Realistic and strength-based conceptualisations of employability use
language that has relevance to both the current and future workforce. These
include “the ability to find, create and sustain meaningful work across the
career lifespan” (Bennett, 2018, p. i); having the “skills, knowledge,
understanding and personal attributes that make a person more likely to
choose and secure occupations in which they can be satisfied and successful”
(Dacre-Pool & Sewell, 2007, p. 280) ; and “being capable of making well-
informed plans for the future and having the ability to execute them in a
changing world” (Gilworth, interviewed in Grove, 2018, n. p).
Employability should also speak to the need for work that has both
personal meaning and societal worth. Over 40 years ago, in 1976, UK Prime
Minister Jim Callaghan emphasised the need for education to elicit both
social citizenship and economic (employability) worth. He said:
The goals [of education] are to equip children to the best
of their ability for a lively, constructive, place in society,
and also to fit them to do a job of work. Not one or the
other but both. … There is no virtue in producing socially
well-adjusted members of society who are unemployed
because they do not have the skills. Nor at the other
extreme must they be technically efficient robots.
(Callaghan, 1976, n. p)
Callaghan’s words are relevant today, and yet the current policy
environment ignores the societal benefits of higher education to focus its
measurement almost entirely on economic outcomes. These policies are at
odds with the nature of contemporary work and the social mission of higher
education.
The brief overview presented above sets the scene for a discussion of
current work relating to employability development and graduate
employability. I begin by considering the labour market environment into
which graduates transition. I align this work with contemporary definitions
of employability before reviewing employability development and labour
market research I have undertaken over the past 20 years. In voicing
possible solutions, I structure the article’s latter sections around four
challenges posed for the 2019 HERD Review by the Australian Deputy Vice-
Chancellors: university funding; commitment to change by university staff;
dealing with complexity; and building capacity.
Dawn Bennett
34
2. How do graduates experience employability?
Employability within the context of higher education relates to the process
by which we prepare students to negotiate graduate life and work. To shape
this process, we need to understand the characteristics and future of work. I
draw here on my previous research in the arts, which highlights the
portfolio and non-linear basis of creative work.
Although precarious work has been a feature of arts work for centuries,
the growth of insecure or precarious work across the labour market is now
ubiquitous. The Australian Council of Engineering Deans (ACED, 2018;
2018a), for example, reports that engineering graduates enter a labour
market in which rapid global change and advances in digital technology are
accelerating and the economic downturn has reduced the availability of both
employment and internships. Engineers Australia (EA, 2017) reports that
less than 75% of new engineering graduates can find full time work, 12%
settle for part-time work and 15% are unemployed. As a result, the
recruitment and retention of engineering graduates is a significant challenge
and there are increasing calls for engineering education to be
“comprehensively engaged with practice” (Male, King, & Hargreaves, 2016,
n. p).
Graduates take longer to establish their careers in this complex labour
market (Challice, 2018) and many of them encounter “professional and
personal identity revision” as they make multiple attempts to become
established (Bennett & Bridgstock, 2015, p. 333). EA (2017, p. 92)
emphasises the longer-term implications of disrupted transitions to work in
that “new graduates who cannot find full time work cannot begin on-the-job
professional formation”; similar concerns are expressed across multiple
sectors of industry (see, for example, Jackson, 2015).
With this in mind, careers in the arts present an unrivalled opportunity
to study the implications of precarity. My workforce research has focussed
largely on the creative industries workforce and is housed within the
Creative Workforce Initiative (CWI). CWI has since 2010 provided an
“umbrella” for diverse funded and unfunded research. Reported in almost
100 articles, CWI researchers have come to understand the nature of
precarious work, the influence of career calling on career decision making
and the ability of higher education to mitigate many of the challenges faced
by graduates (see also Comunian, Faggian, & Jewell, 2011).
CWI studies have targeted job security, initial and on-going training and
education, career decision-making, identity, and access to benefits and
protection. We have probed the nature and implications of non-standard
HERDSA Review of Higher Education
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forms of employment, multiple roles across and beyond the creative
industries, the impacts of enforced transition and the persistence of
precarious work across the career lifespan. I note that respondents have
been generally critical of the lack of career development learning within
higher education, particularly in relation to understanding how to manage
their practice, assert their rights and establish a business (see Hennekam &
Bennett, 2017a).
CWI findings have relevance across multiple sectors of industry where
the automation of routine tasks leaves workers to manage complex, skilled
or non-routine low-skilled work for which dynamic and multi-level work
design (individual, team and context – see Johns, 2006) is crucial. The
demands of employability work across the career lifespan and the associated
need for transformative work design are highlighted by Parker, Morgeson
and Johns (2017, p. 416):
… individuals routinely craft their own work, implying
change (Morgeson et al., 2005); novel and disruptive
events can exert a significant impact on work (Morgeson,
Mitchell, & Liu, 2015); individuals often work across
multiple, and frequently changing, teams, with work
characteristics varying across these teams; and the
external context can shape work design (Dierdorff &
Morgeson, 2007).
Over the years, scholars have become increasingly aware that people
who engage in precarious and/or non-traditional forms of work need to
adapt across the career lifespan. Pro-active engagements with non-
traditional work might include the adoption of short-term contracts or
home-based work as a lifestyle preference or in order to meet other
commitments, whereas reactive engagements often include the adoption of
precarious work because of a lack of secure traditional, full-time roles.
These “enforced entrepreneurs” must by necessity create and manage their
own work to meet their personal and professional needs. When Ruth
Bridgstock and I (2015) compared the career projections of graduating
creative arts students with the realities of graduate life four years later,
enforced entrepreneurship emerged as the typical graduate experience.
Career decision-making is particularly complex within professions such
as the arts, where work is precarious and career calling is strong. In these
sectors, career decisions can impact psychological well-being and identity as
much as they impact individuals’ work and career. In 2017, I worked with
Sophie Hennekam to examine the careers of 693 creative industries
workers who had used the CWI primary survey tool to create in-depth
Dawn Bennett
36
reflections on career decision-making (Bennett & Hennekam, 2018a). We
employed the theoretical model of self-authorship (Baxter Magolda, 2004)
to understand how these workers interpreted and analysed their
experiences along epistemological, intrapersonal and interpersonal
dimensions. Self-authorship, most often described as a linear process,
emerged as a complex, non-linear and consistent feature of career decision-
making. The study exposed contemporaneous authorship of both visible and
covert multiple selves prompted by proactive and reactive identity work.
To explore this in more depth, we applied selection, optimisation and
compensation (SOC) theory to multiple accounts of musicians’ careers in
early, mid and late career (Hennekam & Bennett, 2018b). We looked
specifically at the three SOC adaptive strategies with which individuals align
their existing resources and resource demands (Baltes & Baltes, 1990) to
facilitate effective functioning, adaptation and development. Although
performance goals dominated the early career musicians’ narratives, the
musicians had quickly sought to optimise their potential by rethinking career
success in terms other than performance. In mid-career, musicians reported
that their earlier performance focus and lack of career awareness had
limited their ability to maximise their potential. Mid-careerists frequently
reported declining income, for which they compensated by leaving music or
by adopting multiple roles and learning new skills within and beyond music.
Highlighting inadequate access to professional development, 80% of the mid-
career musicians had changed their career goals at least once. By late career,
musicians were applying their broad skills and experience to roles within and
outside music; however, the roles were most likely to be the result of
enforced transitions. As such, late-careerists encountered increased
precarity with roles which were often entrepreneurial and self-employed.
Of interest, we found that musicians do not always seek to resolve
incompatible multiple identities or psychological stress. Instead, their
behaviour tends towards Beech et al.’s (2016, p. 506) notion of identity
work as “continuing struggles which do not achieve a secure sense of self”.
Rather than self-affirming actions, we identified multiple accounts of self-
questioning identity work in which identity tensions form a career-long and
arguably fundamental aspect of professional identity. We concluded that self-
questioning identity work can be fundamental to an individual’s work and
sense of self and that this promotes non-linear aesthetic and economic
decision-making including the non-sequential use of SOC strategies.
In sum, there is compelling evidence from higher education and future of
work researchers that labour market precarity and fluidity, combined with
individual workers who resist the traditional norms of work and career
HERDSA Review of Higher Education
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advancement, demands a different type of graduate than ever before.
Alongside this is evidence that precarity, competition and lack of regulation
exacerbates inequalities with respect to gender, race and class. Implications
include the need to advocate for sector-specific research and guidelines,
sensitivity training, and further work with unions and professional
associations to provide the worker protection strategies traditionally
undertaken by organisations.
3. Are employability outcomes equal for all students?
The question of whether or not disadvantaged students realise the same
benefits from higher education as their peers is central to employability
discussions. Despite this, equity policy has focused on access to higher
education rather than on graduate outcomes. In 2016, I joined a team of
researchers to investigate the relationship between disadvantage and
graduate outcomes. Having mined the raw data from 142,647 graduates who
responded to the 2014 Australian Graduate Survey, we found clear evidence
that higher education disadvantage persists for many students after they
graduate. We have since added our voices to the calls for governments to
focus on pathways and success and to measure and scrutinise achievement
towards public policy objectives (Pitman, Roberts, Bennett, & Richardson,
2018; see also Richardson, Bennett, & Roberts, 2016). Binder et al. (2016)
warn that institutional careers services can inadvertently reproduce social
inequality by matching elite students with elite jobs and vice-versa. The same
could be said about multiple aspects of students’ higher education
experiences, from work-integrated-learning (WIL) contexts through to
admissions procedures. Spence (2018, n. p.) agrees, cautioning that the
pursuit of graduate employability “might not be a welfare-neutral or welfare-
enhancing enterprise when viewed from a wider socio-economic vantage
point”.
I first reported gender inequity in 2008, when a study into the working
patterns of 152 classically trained musicians revealed marked differences
between the work of men and women (Bennett, 2008). Female musicians,
for example, were found to be more likely to teach and less likely to hold
leadership positions or to sustain performance positions. The women
attributed career differences to the difficulties of managing family and other
commitments whilst maintaining an uninterrupted career, which is essential
to retaining technical proficiency as well as to more general advancement.
Some years later, Hennekam and myself asked 32 women in the
Netherlands creative industries to describe their experience of being hired
or recruited for work (Hennekam & Bennett, 2017b). We found sexual
Dawn Bennett
38
harassment to be so prevalent that many women considered it part of their
occupational culture and career advancement. The factors that influenced
this phenomenon feature in multiple economic sectors: specifically,
competition for work, industry culture, gendered power relations and the
importance of informal networks. We have since called for effective sexual
harassment prevention at the individual, educational, sectoral and
governmental levels, beginning with public conversations to convey the
message that sexual harassment is never acceptable. Six months after our
study was completed, the “Me Too” movement brought this issue into
prominence and helped to raise awareness through several short articles
including a piece in the LSE Business Review. Hennekam and Syed (2018)
went on to examine the factors influencing institutional racism in the film
industry, highlighting multilevel racism and emphasising the power of
individual agency in its mitigation.
Most recently, CWI colleagues in Europe and Australia partnered to
investigate the careers and identities of female art music (classical music)
composers. The gendered nature of careers in music composition has
attracted scholarly attention for some 25 years, but the strategies employed
by female composers to manage their identity had remained largely
unaddressed. Our study highlighted the persistent marginalisation of female
composers, as a result of which the female gender was reported to be a
career disadvantage. The intersection of gender and age was a contributing
factor.
In our first article from the study (Bennett, Hennekam, Macarthur, Hope,
& Goh, 2018) we considered female composers’ management of gender
identity and found that they lessened the impact of gender by employing the
passing tactics of concealment and fabrication. These are tactics usually
associated as identity management techniques for invisible stigmatised
identities. Many women repeated previously unsuccessful tactics because of
the severity of the image discrepancy and the lack of viable alternatives.
We next considered the findings from a feminist perspective (Macarthur,
Bennett, Hennekam, Goh, & Hope, 2017). Although the female composers
had different investments in gender, they reinforced the male habitus
because the female habitus occupied a subordinate position. The women
classified themselves and others according to gendered norms, which only
perpetuated the male-dominated social order in music.
Bringing our research back to higher education (Bennett, Macarthur,
Hope, Goh, & Hennekam, 2018), we noted that whilst recent decades have
seen gender and feminist research emerge as major fields of enquiry in
musicology, little had been written in music education. As a result, increased
HERDSA Review of Higher Education
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awareness of the issues confronting women and other marginalised groups
has not prompted either the pedagogical practices or curricular design that
might support aspiring women and raise awareness across the whole
student body. Some of the solutions we proposed are remarkably simple:
for example, the inclusion of music that is representative of both gender and
the cultures in which institutions and their communities reside; curriculum
that engages students in professional practice; and greater awareness of
inequality and worker rights and responsibilities. Representation, real-world
learning and increased awareness have broad applicability across higher
education and could be considered more explictly across all disciplines.
4. How do students learn to be employable?
Employability development is not at the core of the curriculum because it
has been poorly defined as the development of generic or “soft” skills that
are unrelated to the core business of learning a discipline (see also
Andrewartha & Harvey, 2017). Employability development is not limited to
discipline skills, knowledge and practices. Rather, it develops students’
abilities to conceptualise their future lives and work by learning the practice
of the discipline and developing their metacognition. As McIlveen (2018, p.
2) asserts, “employability is not knowledge and skills per se; it is the
propensity to understand their personal value and act toward their
acquisition for deployment in a specific context”.
Outlined in the previous sections, employability is inadequately described
by outdated language such as skill, job, employer and employment. The
developmental role of higher education is better described in terms of
students’ cognitive and social development as capable and informed
individuals, professionals and social citizens (Bennett, in press). I call this
“employABILITY thinking” and it is operationalised as a strengths-based,
metacognitive approach to employability development, delivered in the
existing curriculum without the need for additional time, expertise or
resources. EmployABILITY thinking focusses on ability, for which reason
ABILITY is capitalised. The approach is grounded in social-cognitive theory
and it prompts students to understand why they think the way they think,
how to critique and learn the unfamiliar and how their values, beliefs and
assumptions can inform and be informed by their learning, lives and careers.
It is through this metacognitive process that students learn how to create
and sustain meaningful work across the career lifespan (Bennett, 2018).
A central and neglected component of employability development is
identity. In a social constructivist (Stryker, 1980) or social ecology (Wenger,
1998) view of identity development, people create personal realities as they
Dawn Bennett
40
interact with others. Student identity is a fundamental aspect of higher
education learning and teaching, constructed socially and within the fields of
higher education, industry and community. These realities influence, reshape
and reinforce each other in a continuous cycle.
Employability strategies that include a focus on individual development
can align with identity development through self-authorship (see Barber,
King, & Baxter Magolda, 2013; Bennett & Hennekam, 2018a for self-
authorship within the workforce; Bennett & Male, 2017 for self-authorship
amongst undergraduate engineers). The rationale for exploring students’
individual, socio-cultural and professional identities within a social
constructivist frame (see Bennett, 2013) is that as students
“(re)conceptualise their strengths, interests and goals” (Bennett, 2012, p. 27)
in relation to self and career, there is a corresponding increase in career
curiosity, student engagement, the capacity for creativity and problem
solving, increased learner agency, and motivation to learn.
Students’ attitudes and subjective norms and their behavioural intentions
are crucial to their decision making, from choosing and changing their major
(Soria & Stebleton, 2013) to assessing their career prospects and potential
salary (Malgwi, Howe, & Burnaby, 2005) and engaging with graduate
attributes statements (see Pitman & Broomhall, 2009). Only by
communicating the expectations we have of students and the experiences
that will be provided can we ensure that students develop “more complex
and sophisticated expectations of university and of their own roles and
responsibilities” (James, 2002, p. 81; see also Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen,
2018).
Realistic expectations of higher education studies and graduate
employability are created for students through appropriate, sufficient and
consistent information. In the employability context, students’ expectations
relate to their perceptions of how well they are being prepared to find
graduate-level work. Many students anticipate a difficult transition into the
labour market, but early (as yet unpublished) findings from our longitudinal
research on students’ employABILITY thinking indicate that students’
employability development strategies are dominated by attempts to achieve
a high grade point average (GPA). These strategies are largely out of sync
with industry recruitment and employer feedback and they emphasise the
need for meaningful engagement with industry.
Authentic WIL experiences—from formal internships to simulated and
virtual learning—play an important role in the development of employability,
and Australia’s national WIL strategy (Edwards et al., 2015) leads the way
internationally. However, few institutions would be able to claim that every
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WIL experience is centrally recorded or that it is quality controlled to the
same extent. Despite Australia’s WIL expertise, compelling empirical
evidence and a world-leading national WIL strategy, it also doesn’t take long
to locate Australian WIL experiences that finish on the last day of semester
(eliminating the chance of post-placement debriefs); fail to include regular
opportunities for dialogue; and feature ineffective feedback and assessment
mechanisms. These highlight the urgent need for greater action at the
institutional level.
The WIL studies in which I have been involved view WIL as a cyclical
process of reflection on, and in, action that impacts future action (Schön,
1991). As researchers, this prompts us to remain reflexive practitioners and
learners as we seek to understand each individual context and to reform
our practice accordingly: precisely the process required to sustain
employability. Here, I highlight three projects in which we investigated the
WIL experiences of international students (Barton et al., 2017), women in
engineering (Male et al., 2015) and media, journalism and arts students
(Bartleet et al., 2014).
The primary study motivation for many internationally mobile students is
enhanced employability (see Kelly, Bennett, Girindharan, & Rosenwax,
2018). The challenges specific to international students are well
documented, but these students are also often highly motivated to succeed
and to overcome adversity. Indeed, Clements and Cord (2013) have found
that international students align workplace learning in an unfamiliar cultural
context with increasing the likelihood of long-term global mobility.
For Sonia Ferns and myself (2017), the starting point for our project with
occupational therapy students was Billett’s (2010) work on the mindful
relationship between self and work and its impact on learners’ self-identity,
self-awareness and personal agency. Our thinking about student
development during WIL was informed by Knight’s (1999) competency,
activity and ethos approaches to internationalisation and by my
metacognitive approach to employability development.
We employed Krathwohl’s 2002 revision of Bloom’s taxonomy to
explore the functional and cognitive aspects of employability—students’
functional knowledge and cognitive process development—over the course
of a placement. Summarised at Figure 1, Krathwohl separates the noun and
verb aspects of an educational objective to form two dimensions in which
the noun relates to knowledge and the verb relates to the cognitive process.
Krathwohl recognises metacognition as a fourth category within the
knowledge dimension.
Dawn Bennett
42
The cognitive process dimension
The knowledge dimension
Factual knowledge
Conceptual knowledge
Procedural knowledge
Metacognitive knowledge
Figure 1: Krathwohl’s revision of Bloom’s taxonomy (2002, p. 214), summarised in
Ferns & Bennett (2017, p. 207).
Using this process, we charted students’ cognitive and functional
development towards metacognitive knowledge and understanding. Student
progression through the functional and cognitive dimensions consistently
showed advancement from foundational skills to the more complex skills of
analysis and critical thinking. As they became more proficient, students’
confidence and resilience grew and, as expected, they were more likely to
attempt complex tasks.
Research with Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Anne Power and Naomi Sunderland
reconceptualised critical service learning as a form of higher education WIL
encompassing deep concepts of sustainability. Our OLT-funded work with
Australia’s First Peoples was possibly the most rewarding project I have ever
engaged in. Between 2011 and 2013, our research incorporated critical
service-learning programs with regional and metropolitan Aboriginal
communities in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Central
Australia. We learned how partnerships transform students’ and academics’
understandings of Australia’s First Peoples’ cultures and we explored the
centrality of relationship building, decolonising education, colonial guilt and
Otherness. The multi-site programs informed a Framework for working
respectfully with Indigenous communities using the four concepts of
relationships, reciprocity, reflexivity and representation (Bartleet, Bennett,
Marsh, Power, & Sunderland, 2014 ).
The Framework has since been used in multiple countries and in
contexts as diverse as the training of prison service staff (see Bartleet,
Bennett, Power & Sunderland, 2014 ). It has also informed employability
development that is mindful of Indigenous cultural awareness. This includes
with journalism students, who have been supported to challenge exclusions,
stereotyping and the misrepresentation of Aboriginal people by large-scale
Australian media and to take these practices of critically reflexive learning
into their professional lives (see Johnston, Bennett, Mason, & Thomson,
2016; Mason, Thomson, Bennett, & Johnston, 2016; Thomson, Mason,
Bennett, & Johnston, 2016).
Remember
Understand
Apply
Analyse
Evaluate
Create
The
functional
dimension
HERDSA Review of Higher Education
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The research in journalism is one of several projects to explore the role
of capital in employability development (see Arthur, Claman and DeFillippi
(1995) and Fugate, Kinicki and Ashforth (2004) for early discussions on
capital and Marginson (2014) and Tomlinson (2018) for more recent
thinking). We have regularly employed Bourdieu’s theory of practice and
Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) work on reflexivity to identify, map and
examine power relations, positions and other field structures and dynamics.
We found that in journalism, the field struggle operates
via sub-field and field, to society, and that heterodox
collaborative practices can contribute to challenging
broader, misrecognised power relations of dominance
between Australian settler and colonised peoples”
(Mason, Thomson, Bennett, & Johnston, 2018, p. 135)
In the creative industries, we identified the multiple human capital career
creativities needed to create and sustain careers that are commonly protean
and boundaryless:
the former, emphasising capital expansion as an output of
human capital career creativities where the facilitative
skills and practices transcend those of a portfolio career;
and the latter, emphasising work that transcends fields,
digital boundaries, economic sector, and employment
type. (Bennett & Burnard, 2016, p. 123)
Through a broad range of WIL experiences, then, students can begin to
create meaning, challenge dominant world-views, and begin making
“intelligent decisions about how to move ahead with their learning needs”
(Helyer, 2015, p. 16). However, negotiating and understanding a workplace,
its expectations and organisational structure (including relationships) can be
complex, difficult and time consuming.
Although many WIL students experience a shift in thinking, other
students voice a complex relation of modalities and they need help to make
meaning of each experience (see Bennett, Reid, & Rowley, 2017). Students’
participation in multiple communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), from the
learning and peer communities in which they are experts to the professional
communities in which they are novices (Reid et al., 2011), highlights the
individual autonomy and reflective behaviour they enact and observe in
different situations. The importance of Billett’s (2010) preparation for,
scaffolding of and reflection on work-integrated learning cannot be over-
emphasised. Neither can Smith, Ferns and Russell’s (2014) five elements of a
quality WIL curriculum: authenticity; preparation and induction processes;
debriefing sessions that enable reflection; quality supervision; and
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44
appropriate learning outcomes with scaffolded skill development and robust
feedback.
Students, then, need to become reflexive practitioners who create
meaning from their study and non-study, university and industry-based
experiences. If they are to present as capable graduates, they need to learn
how to recognise, articulate and provide evidence of their abilities and how
to strengthen areas in need of development. Multiple educational studies
using developmental e-portfolios have confirmed the efficacy of ePortfolios
in this regard and across the student lifecycle:
… for submission and assessment of students’ work; to
encourage collaborative peer interaction; for self-
promotion in professional settings; for accreditation; for
archiving and curation of learning; for longitudinal
representation of the outcomes of an academic program;
as an influence on curriculum; as a vehicle for encouraging
self-realisation and reflection; and for requiring continual
updating of staff and student skills in working through
forms of digital technology. (Rowley & Bennett, 2016, p.
16)
E-portfolios, from cloud-based folders such as Dropbox through to
complex commercial platforms, provide a vehicle for self-realisation and
reflection. In simple terms and through a continuum of collect, critique and
curate – the 3Cs process (Blackley, Bennett, & Sheffield, 2017, 2018)—
students begin to self-author by making informed, future-oriented decisions
about their strengths and developmental needs. As they do so, the content
of their portfolios transitions “from archive to self-portrait” (Bennett,
Rowley, Dunbar-Hall, Hitchcock, & Blom, 2016, p. 107). Within a
metacognitive employability framework, e-portfolios emerge as a necessary
component of employability development within higher education.
5. Reimagining graduate employability
… we are in economic trouble because our universities
are not producing the ‘work-ready’ employees we need;
they [universities] must be required to do better in this
regard; doing better will be judged by metrics developed
from outside the academy; failings will be laid at the door
of academics. … the notion of ‘excellence’ in this context
is largely rhetorical and acts as an empty idiom of
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consensus in terms of what the system might achieve.
(Frankham 2017, p. 637)
In the article cited above, Frankham makes the compelling case that the
performative culture of higher education is implicated in “not preparing
students for the workplace” (p. 628, author’s emphasis). With this challenge
in mind, I turn now to the future and reimagine graduate employability. The
following sections are structured in line with the four challenges posed by
the Australian Deputy Vice-Chancellors for response in the 2019 HERD
Review: university funding, with a focus on policy and purpose; commitment
to change by university staff; dealing with complexity; and building capacity.
Reimagining graduate employability: Policy and purpose
Degrees guarantee nothing about their value at the point
at which they are cashed in. (Liu, 2011, p. 9)
In Driving Innovation, Fairness and Excellence in HE (Department of Education
and Training, 2016), the Australian Government asked the higher education
sector to attend to fairness and equity in the development of innovative,
evidence-based and research-led approaches to employability development.
The Government has also demanded the development of graduates who as
members of the skilled workforce are entrepreneurial, creative, responsive
to change and engaged in learning (Innovation and Science Australia, 2017).
Indeed, the Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation plan’s first imperative
is to “Respond to the changing nature of work by equipping all Australians
with skills relevant to 2030” (Cawood, 2018, p. 26). And yet the
Government in Australia, as elsewhere, continues to measure employment
rather than employability.
In Australia, student funding models and economic uncertainly have
positioned graduate employability at the centre of the Higher Education
policy agenda and have enhanced both the sector’s utilitarian mission and
the shift towards governance (for the UK and European contexts see Pegg,
Waldock, Hendy-Isaac, & Lawton, 2012; Sin, 2015; and Tomlinson, 2017).
The result is that employability is now firmly entrenched within a
reductionist graduate outcomes discourse rather than in the developmental
domain that defines higher education. As Clegg writes (2010, p. 346), “the
‘present future’ implied by the discourse of employability does not even
extend to old age, much less to generations beyond”.
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Graduate employability will be addressed only through the delivery of
employability as part of the core curriculum, and at this point in time the
integration of employability demands institutional action despite policy and
measurement rather than in line with it. I argued recently (Bennett, 2019)
that a strategic government would support universities to redirect the
considerable budget expended on maximising the results of rankings and
retrospective measures towards achieving their research and teaching
priorities.
Rankings and policy influence institutional behaviours from where to
publish and who to hire through to which programs to offer. In this respect,
the Australian higher education sector must evidence both its economic and
its social value if it is to shape policy reform and regain its autonomy.
Research with national datasets including the Graduate Outcomes Survey
(GOS), Student Experience Survey (SES), Employer Satisfaction Survey (ESS),
Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and Labour
Force Survey and Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD) has the
potential to generate sample sets for analysis alongside longitudinal,
empirical data from our student and graduate populations. Research of this
kind would create a unique understanding of student development including
from individual, cohort and discipline perspectives and in line with
demographic variables such as equity and gender.
To be at the forefront of this research and to ensure that the societal
benefits of higher education are reported alongside economic impact, the
higher education sector will need to leverage the expertise of researchers
across multiple disciplines. The datasets will provide unparalleled
opportunities to understand the longitudinal career trajectories and
decision-making processes of graduates, to support students in anticipation
of these activities and to rethink our engagement with alumni.
Rankings exercises and intrusive steering mechanisms promote self-
interest and status competition ahead of public good. Australia could
prioritise a “networked and potentially more egalitarian university world
patterned by communications, collegiality, linkages, partnerships and global
consortia”, as proposed by Marginson (2011, p. 422). Coombe (2015, p.
141) adds that a sound policy solution “would enable a radical whole-of-
system reform that recognises and funds the different types of educational
institutions to better reflect their purpose and the type of education
outcomes they deliver to students”. With the caveat of not classifying (or
funding) institutions as either teaching or research, Coombe’s solution
would enable employability development to be prioritised as a core and
cognitive aspect of curriculum.
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Reimagining graduate employability: Commitment to change by
university staff
Most employability development is co-curricular and attracts the students
who need it least. Conversely, initiatives located within the curriculum tend
to be unpopular because they are separated from the discipline-focussed
study in which students want to engage. Employability development is most
effective when it is aligned with disciplinary knowledge, skills and practices
so that it forms a core part of the student experience and leverages the
interests that prompted students to enrol in the first place. This is possible
only if university staff commit to change.
The academic workforce, however, epitomises workforce
transformation as it is experienced across the labour market. Hourly paid
and temporary faculty deliver the majority of university teaching at the
undergraduate level and undertake an increasing number of coordination
roles (see Loveday, 2018; May, Peetz, & Strachan, 2013; Richardson,
Wardale, & Lord, 2018). The profile of staffing within institutional careers
services has similarly changed and this comes at the same time as careers
services begin to transition from the delivery of traditional, centralised
career counselling to research-informed, in-faculty personal and career
development (see Chan & Derry, 2013).
The impact of policy was evidenced in research with colleagues on the
impact of the Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) exercise and short-
lived journal rankings. Our research (Bennett, Genoni, & Haddow, 2011;
Hughes & Bennett, 2013) demonstrated that ERA quickly subverted
publishing behaviour among the most vulnerable academic staff. Similarly, the
inclusion of creative works within ERA assessments highlighted the
disruption of creative practice to meet the demands of the metrics rather
than the best interests of the practice, research or teaching (Bennett,
Wright, & Blom, 2010; Wright, Bennett, & Blom, 2010).
Later studies on the work of teaching-research academics have
questioned whether it is feasible for academics to meet the demands made
of them, particularly given that the parameters for success change so quickly
(see Bennett, 2012). In 2018, Lynne Roberts, Michelle Broughton and myself
reported a study on the impact of introducing teaching-focussed (teaching
only) roles across a university. Highlighting the perceived low value of the
teaching role and confusion about what that role might entail, we
emphasised the uncertainty surrounding career paths for teaching academics
alongside concerns about developing the traditional academic skillset
required to transition between roles and institutions.
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In this environment, it is hardly surprising that academics resist calls to
add to their teaching work. Rather, institutional employability strategies
must address the three ubiquitous challenges expressed by educators:
Lack of time due to overcrowded curricula, content-heavy programs
and the misperception that embedding employability means to do
more.
Lack of resources: the need to develop appropriate teaching resources
and to understand the theoretical basis of that work.
Lack of expertise. Few educators are careers professionals and career
education is a distinct field of speciality. It is unrealistic to expect of
academic staff both a nuanced understanding of the discipline, career
education and contemporary industry.
EmployABILITY thinking (see https://developingemployability.edu.au/
about/) has proven to be effective because it recognises teachers as the
most important and influential people in students’ journeys, addresses their
three ubiquitous challenges, and places them at the centre of educational
reform. The approach illustrates that employability development can form
part of the core curriculum by leveraging the discipline expertise and
interests of staff and students in partnership with the career education
expertise of careers services professionals. This is not simply a matter of
employing “people with a commitment to their mission and a clear sense of
what matters” (Davis, 2017, p. 45); it demands wholescale change in
academic pathways and career progression to ensure that teaching and
research are equally funded and respected. Combined with in-curricular
employability development initiatives, there is enormous and as-yet unmet
potential to engage university staff in employability development and related
research.
Reimagining graduate employability: Dealing with complexity
Engaging students in employability development is one of the sector’s most
pressing challenges. Students’ reluctance to engage lies in the poor alignment
between learner identity, career preview and goals, and the perceived
relevance of learning to future lives and work. Lack of relevance features
strongly in accounts of non-performance and attrition: attrition of student
engineers, for example, has in part been attributed to students entering
engineering without understanding the realities of either their degree
program or engineering work (Bennett & Male, 2017; Male et al., 2015).
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Caruana and Ploner (2010, p. 97) agree that students are “at the very least
ambivalent about how their learning experience relates to either
employability in global labour markets and local culturally diverse
workplaces and/or to the development of affective skills in broader cross-
cultural contexts”.
Student engagement in employability development needs to establish
explicit relevance and it must create cognitive links. This can be achieved
only by helping students to find the relevance between the learning we
assign them and their expectations for their future lives and work. Properly
defined, students are interested in developing their employability. Although
most students ignore “Career Development 101” courses, they flock to
courses which help them to “Create your Future” (see, for example the
Stanford Designing your Life elective, in Burnett & Evans, 2016). New
approaches must adopt a broader definition which communicates to
students and faculty that employability requires work throughout the career
lifespan rather than being complete at the point of graduation. They must
confirm also the need for a metacognitive orientation which is mindful of
self, profession and society. Terms such as work-ready, job-ready and
career-ready are insufficient for the task.
Holmes’s (2013) framework of university employability perspectives
enables approaches to be classified as possessional (the possession of
employability attributes), positional (the presence of capital) or processual (a
focus on the process of employability development). In 2017, content
analysis of 107 research-intensive universities in Australia, Canada, the
United Kingdom and the United States (Bennett et al., 2017) revealed that
the public (website) face of employability development strategies is mostly
positional or possessional. Positional approaches are prevalent among
research-intensive universities and they rely on social and human capitals;
however, these approaches perpetuate inequity unless sufficient individual
agency is at hand. Positional approaches are also limited, because the
completion of higher education does not necessarily heighten students’
social or cultural capital unless they come from advantaged social
backgrounds (see also Farenga and Quinlan’s 2016 discussion of “hands-off”
and other approaches). Website messaging is often mis-aligned with
institutional practice (see Bennett, Knight, Divan, & Bell, 2019). Although
this is a problem in itself, the larger concern is that the possessional
approach, which remains the most common approach to graduate
employability, is also the most out of sync with the diverse student body and
the demands of contemporary work.
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50
The development of employability is most effective through a processual
approach in which the responsibility for employability development is shared
by institution, industry and student. Co-curricular initiatives recorded in the
form of awards, micro-credentials and for-credit activities can all emphasise
the students’ responsibility for ensuring graduate success (Burke, Scurry,
Blenkinsopp, & Graley, 2017). Process is central to employability
development because it recognises students’ need to develop, in advance
and across their careers, “a set of person-centred constructs that involve
individual proactivity and reflexivity relating to career identity, personal
adaptability, and social and human capital” (Bennett et al., 2017, p. 59; see
also Fugate, Kinicki, & Ashforth, 2004). This demands a pedagogical shift
towards process and relevance through reflection, engagement and
experiential learning. Industry concerns that graduates lack the attitudes,
emotional intelligence, inter- and intra-personal skills and metacognitive
capacities to be successful in the labour market (see Cumming, 2010) could
be negated if students learned to be agentic, active learners who know how
to learn and how to predict what to learn.
The higher education sector must identify and operationalise the type
and extent of change needed to prepare graduates of all disciplines for their
social and economic engagement. Far from covering everything a graduate is
ever likely to need, this focus privileges the development of mindful
metacognition. Agreement on the requisite graduate learning outcomes
depends on consensus about the purpose of higher education and the
meaning of learning (Barrie, Hughes, Crisp, & Bennison, 2014). All learning
should have relevance to possible disciplinary, societal, personal and/or
professional futures of students. If the learning we ask of students is
relevant, we should articulate its relevance. If it is not relevant, we should
stop teaching it. This is a challenge not to make every program vocational,
but to make every program developmental and relevant.
Reimagining graduate employability: Building capacity
This final section focusses on building the capacity to meet the challenges
and opportunities outlined in the review article. Figure 2 illustrates the four
forces which impact contemporary higher education, adapted to the context
of employability development from Peter Goodyear’s model of ‘design for
learning’. Goodyear emphasises that “Part of graduating as a lifelong learner
is knowing how to design for one’s own learning, and for the learning of
one’s workmates: learning how to create better environments in which to
think for a living” (2015, p. 45). My adaptation of Goodyear’s model to the
context of employability development seeks to maximise our ability to
HERDSA Review of Higher Education
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engage stakeholders in “knowledgeable, design-led change” (Goodyear,
2015, p. 37).
Figure 2: Drivers of change: ‘employability as design’ as a means of resolving
conflicting forces shaping employability development in contemporary education.
Adapted from Goodyear (2015, p. 37).
A good example of employability as design is the potential involvement
of alumni as industry experts, placement hosts and returning students (see
the work of Jess Vandelerlie at http://www.engagingalumni.com).
Accelerated labour market change demands career-wide learning. Career-
wide learning as a component of employability necessitates knowledge
breadth as well as knowledge depth, with the result that graduates and
established workers are as likely to complete first-year units as they are to
enrol in graduate study. However, universities have largely failed to capitalise
on this opportunity, leaving other providers to meet the needs of industry.
The additional of unit- or module-based professional learning
opportunities would enable the higher education sector to broaden its core
business and meet the need for just-in-time and career-wide professional
learning. It would create new opportunities to build capacity in the form of
Dawn Bennett
52
whole-of-career professional learning for alumni and the broader
community. Professional learning initiatives might incorporate a range of
“payment” options from monetary payment through to institutional service
in the form of guest lectures, hosted placements, community engagement,
mentorships, industry advisory roles and membership of program review
committees. The inclusion of alumni in undergraduate courses would enable
students to engage with graduates on an informal, peer-to-peer basis,
helping students to challenge and extend their perceptions of graduate
pathways. And engaging students in the design of professional learning
initiatives would expose them to the design thinking they need to manage
their own careers. EmployABILITY thinking is derived from this approach.
6. Concluding comments and recommendations
The question of how to prepare higher education students for employment
is at the forefront of higher education, yet in many respects it is the wrong
question. This review article posed an alternative question: how might we
prepare higher education students to navigate an increasingly complex world
and labour market in which they will need to think for a living? The higher
education landscape has shifted from who does and does not get to
participate to what happens within the academy (Bexley, 2016). If we are to
educate for employability rather than employment, for life rather than for a
job, our concern should move beyond graduate employment to focus on the
development of graduates who are prepared to meet the demands of life
and work well beyond their discipline. Employability must focus on ability,
must form the centre of the curriculum, must embrace diversity, and must
integrate the metacognitive capacities with which higher education graduates
are not only ready for work, but ready to learn.
7. Acknowledgements
It is rare to be asked to review and reflect on one’s own work, as is the task
assigned to HERD Review authors. The studies cited in this article were
successful only because of the expertise, energy and leadership of many
wonderful colleagues. I would like to thank those colleagues and to
acknowledge especially Dr Elizabeth Knight and Mr Kenton Bell, whose
review of my research created the objective view needed to create this
article. I also acknowledge the funding bodies who have supported the
studies cited here. Finally, my thanks go to Joy Higgs and Geoffrey Crisp for
permission to use material from my recent chapter (Bennett, 2019) in the
policy framing of this review.
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