Perceptions of Employability

What is the purpose of a higher education, and how should academics deliver their curricula? ‘Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel,’ according to Socrates, but with increasing pressures on universities with regards graduate outcomes, and higher-education institutions (HEIs) being beaten with a metric-driven stick, the ‘volume of vessels’ (the grades awarded to students) are easier to measure than kindling flames (a cultivation of curiosity).

This book explores the notion of employability: specifically, its increasing prevalence in higher-education curricula. The better jobs a graduate gets, a better reflection of the quality of a course the university receives. Initiatives to embed employability within the structured, formal curriculum have been observed under one, two or all three of the ‘E’s that fall under the graduate-outcome banner: Employability, enterprise, and entrepreneurship. This book focuses on employability, acknowledging that a definition of employability that encompasses the readiness of a graduate to contribute on a socio-economic level will also acknowledge the salience of enterprising skills and entrepreneurship.

Employability means different things to different people, and in terms of what employers are looking for in a graduate, it often can be reduced down to mindset skills, collaborative skills, communication skills and tenaciousness. Is the development of those skills, however, the responsibility of the university to develop, and is something ‘lost’ on the way of developing employability skills?