How is employability approached within education? - Health Care

Time for reflection

How has employability been addressed within your education?
It is important to consider how employability is approached within education in order to understand the dynamics between education and employability and the potential impact on students. An example of this is presented in Chapter 3 relating to the University of East Anglia (UEA) professionalism charter. Enhancing graduate employability has been part of a wider UK government policy strategy (Harvey, 2000) and does assume a priority within education (Yorke, 2006). It is recognised that subject discipline achievements, such as core clinical skills, are important but it is equally as important to demonstrate achievements outside of a student’s subject discipline (Yorke, 2006), such as extracurricular clubs, volunteering and committees and so on. Higher education institutions need to contribute to student employability in a comprehensive manner and not be limited to focusing on specific skills or work experience (Atkins, 1999). However, the focus of employability still remains with skills and attributes (Holmes, 2006) rather than using a holistic approach. Despite attempts to recognise the importance of experiences outside of the degree programme with the introduction of the Higher Education Achievement Report (Pegg et al., 2012), employability does not appear to be fully embraced by staff or students. You need to engage with the concept of employability very early on in your education careers in order to maximise your employability potential. Academics need to be made aware of the importance of employability and the relationship that it has with the curriculum and potential employment.
Within a competitive work market place, employment is not guaranteed (Holmes, 2006) and you need to focus on producing evidence to demonstrate your employability. The focus on education establishments for employability tends to be on the performance league tables, which measure the first destination of graduate employment at six months post-graduation (Smith, McKnight and Naylor, 2000). The focus on employment post-graduation when referring to employability reinforces the confusion between the concepts of employability and employment. The performance league tables are actually measuring employment rather than employability – as we have already ascertained, there is a difference between the two concepts. The performance league tables are important in influencing whether a student will decide to apply to study at a particular university. However, employability is about more than determining consumer choice, despite this being of increasing interest to students and their parents (Maher, 2011). There is a concern that this focus on performance league tables distracts academics from the importance of employability throughout your studies – as purely an outcome rather than a process concept. The role of academics in the development of employability within the curriculum is essential for it to be truly embedded within the university experience, rather than being tagged onto the end of your university experience, when employment becomes the focus for students. Therefore, although you need to take ownership of your own employability, it essential that there is an understanding and support from academic staff as to the importance and application of employability in your student experience from day one.
Some institutions have attempted to assist academics in the translation of employability within the curriculum. The UCLan employability framework (Day, 2009) provides a tool for all of those involved in student education, breaking down employability into 14 areas. These areas have all been allocated a code and are used to badge material presented to students. This system of badging the material that students are exposed to reinforces and highlights employability within the curriculum for students and academics. Employability should be part of the language of students and academics, and the use of employability frameworks is useful in focusing attention and provides a common language for students and academics to use, thereby making employability an explicit part of the student experience. The implementation of employability frameworks within the curriculum does not need to impact on the subject-specific learning but provides some indication on how that learning can evidence a student’s employability and translate into the world of work.
It does need to be recognised that a single model of employability, such as the UCLan framework, may not be relevant for all universities, and that there are a number of variables that influence embedding employability within the curriculum (Yorke and Knight, 2006). What universities can do, though, is to take the principles of employability models to apply within their own situations. Engagement of students and academics is key in the process, which has been shown to be problematic in the past (Higher Education Academy, 2012). Clarity in the importance and concepts of employability is key in there being buy-in from already busy academics and students who may not see employability as a priority, to increase engagement and ownership, which is critical for true embedding of employability (Graves, 2011). Realistically, though, the acceptance and application of the concept of employability into everyday life and language is likely to take time for academics and students to adopt (Harvey and Knight, 2003).

Maximising your own employability potential

As a result of the discussion over employability within higher education, a concept of a graduate identity approach has arisen (Holmes, 2001) that is owned by the graduate (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011). It is suggested that it is made up of the four strands of development previously discussed: values, intellect, performance and engagement. Graduate identity and potential are maximised by graduates providing evidence of engagement in a wide range of activities, experiences and organisations. The generation of evidence to maximise graduate identity will enable employers to judge the ability for a particular graduate to fulfil and develop within the requirements of the work situation with greater confidence. This concept is encouraging individuals to demonstrate what they can offer based on evidence to date. The importance of evidencing employability is critical in order to be able to demonstrate to employers not what you have done in the past but what your future potential may be (Holmes, 2001; Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011). The process of gaining employment involves a process of judgement on the behalf of the employer – it is not purely a process of measuring a person and matching them to a job (Holmes, 2006). On occasions it may be possible that employers lack clarity about exactly who or what they want and are also making a judgement of the future potential of individuals too. Being able to evidence who you are and what you can bring to a job situation with confidence and enthusiasm is critical for your success.
There should be a partnership between the skills and attributes approach to employability and a graduate identity approach, and should consider at the time of graduation how a graduate will articulate their employability and potential in order to gain employment as a graduate (Holmes, 2001, 2006). This reinforces the argument presented in this chapter that consideration of employability needs to start at the beginning of your student experience to provide a focus on employability throughout your studies. Embedding employability will enable you to genuinely evidence and confidently articulate your employability at the point of graduation and beyond. This argument relates to individuals at any point of their employability journey – not just at the point of graduation.

Time for reflection
How can you best demonstrate the potential that you have got to employers? What have you got to bring to that job situation?
The key message from both the graduate identity approach and the psychosocial construct of employability is an awareness of the world of work and employer expectations, as explored further in Chapter 2. Without an understanding of what is required, there may be a resulting disconnect between your employability and the employability required by the employing organisation.