Learning, Curriculum and

Employability in Higher
Education

How can universities ensure that they are

preparing their students for today ’s
competitive job market?
The rapid growth of Higher Education over the past fifty years has seen expectations
increasing, and governments seeking to widen participation. There is now an urgent
need for the government and higher education institutions to address the issue of
graduate employability.
With insight and clarity, the authors of this timely and insightful book encourage
a pro-active stance to this topic by offering a ground-breaking model that can be
easily implemented in institutions to make low-cost, high-gain improvements to
students’ employability. They discuss how an employability-friendly curriculum
can be developed, even in subjects that might not be characterised as vocational
and cover a range of topics covered including:

• the challenge of employability;

• case studies from four disciplinary areas;
• the enhancement of practice;
• assessing for employability;
• the Skills plus project.

This book draws on a set of over 200 in-depth interviews with graduates in
employment, and includes a unique account of the meanings of employability in
the workplace. Anyone with a responsibility for curriculum development or policy
making within higher education, who wants to advance learning and promote
student employability, will find this book essential reading.

Peter Knight is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University. Mantz Yorke is Professor
of Higher Education at Liverpool John Moores University.
Learning, Curriculum
and Employability in
Higher Education

Peter Knight and

Mantz Yorke
First published 2004
by RoutledgeFalmer
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeFalmer
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2004 Peter Knight and Mantz Yorke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 0-203-46527-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-47207-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–30342–7 (hb)
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Contents

List of illustrations vii

Contributors ix

Introduction 1

PART I
Employability 5

1 The challenge of employability 7

2 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 22
3 A new view of employability 36
4 A research study of employability 50
5 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 69
P H I L I P M A RT I N A N D J A N E G AW T H RO P E

PART II
To w a r d s t h e e n h a n c e m e n t o f p r a c t i c e 85

6 How we can develop employability 87

7 Engaging students with the worlds of work 102
8 Assessing for employability 120
9 The Skills plus project and nursing 141
GERALDINE LYTE

10 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme

at Liverpool John Moores University 154
ALED WILLIAMS
vi Contents

11 Employability and social science 165

M A R G A R E T E D WA R D S A N D C H R I S M C G O L D R I C K

12 Principles and practices for enhancing employability at

programme or departmental level 178
13 An institutional perspective on employability 196

Envoi 219
References 221
Index 234
 Illustrations vii

Illustrations

Figures
3.1 The taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessment 40
8.1 A programme overview of assessment for employability 134
8.2 Three faces of reporting achievement 135
9.1 The BN curriculum framework, showing the mental health
nursing option 148
9.2 The USEM framework from Skills plus adapted for undergraduate
nursing 150
13.1 Factors influencing the implementation of an innovation 205

Ta b l e s
1.1 Reasons for seeing employability as a challenge to academic values 20
2.1 Seven meanings of ‘employability’ 25
3.1 The USEM account of employability 38
3.2 Four aspects of human thought, Marzano (1998) 39
3.3 Objections to the USEM account of employability 44
3.4 A dynamic view of employability 47
6.1 Some theoretical contributions to the ‘E’ of USEM 89
9.1 Core modules and units of learning in the BN programme 144
9.2 Range of learning, teaching or assessment activities in one mixed
theory/practice unit of learning 145
9.3 Problem-based learning applied in the Manchester BN programme 152
11.1 Liverpool JMU: first destination returns to the Higher Education
Statistics Agency, for the year 2000 168
11.2 Curricular development in Sociology which was encouraged by
Social Science at Work and Skills plus 174
12.1 Learning, teaching and assessment methods in the key modules of
an undergraduate programme 186
viii Illustrations

B oxe s
1.1 The Skills plus project, 2000–2 12
2.1 Aspects of employability 27
2.2 Skills: a critique 32
8.1 The Skills plus programme assessment principles 131
12.1 Departments’ favourable comments on Skills plus, June 2002 182
12.2 Principles of good teaching that are consistent with the
development of employability 189
13.1 Opportunities for promoting employability 214
Contributors

Margaret Edwards is the Director of the School of Social Science at Liverpool

John Moores University. Her academic background is in Sociology which she
has taught for a number of years (and continues to teach) at the university. Her
teaching experience also includes work in FE and with the Open University.
Dr Edwards’s research interests include HE management, including change
management, and HE curricular issues, such as employability, assessment, and
the widening of participation in HE. She currently holds advisory roles,
especially in learning and teaching developments, with Merseyside FE/HE
consortia and within the university.
Jane Gawthrope is Manager of the Learning Teaching Support Network English
Subject Centre (whose role is to serve and support teaching and learning in the
discipline across UK higher education), and is responsible for planning,
operations and financial control. She also takes the lead on employability
projects within the Subject Centre. Jane completed a first degree in Management
Sciences and then an MA in Librarianship, before embarking on a career in
academic libraries. She was formerly Deputy Head of Library Services at Brunel
University.
Peter Knight works in the Open University where he advises on the development
of curricula and assessment strategies. He has a long-standing interest in
curriculum, especially in learning, teaching and assessment. Lately, this interest
has mainly been expressed through work on higher education. His role in the
Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Enhancing Student Employ-
ability Co-ordination Team has given him a unique opportunity to extend this
work.
Geraldine Lyte is Lecturer in Nursing at the School of Nursing, Midwifery and
Health Visiting at the University of Manchester, UK. For more than ten years
she has been developing a profile of research and development to promote the
application of clinical assessment and situation/problem-solving in under-
graduate nursing curricula, using problem-based learning. Since 2001 Geraldine
has been co-ordinating the introduction of problem-based learning in under-
graduate programmes at Manchester. She also has an established profile of
research in children’s nursing, her clinical specialty.
x Contributors

Philip Martin is Dean of Humanities at De Montfort University. Until March

2003 he was Director of the Learning Teaching Support Network English
Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London, and he has also held
posts at the University of Gloucestershire, King Alfred’s, Winchester, and the
University of Exeter. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on
Romantic Literature, and he has also published on the teaching of the
Humanities. He is editor of the journal, Literature & History, a past President
of the British Association for Romantic Studies, and the current chair of the
Council for College and University English.
Chris McGoldrick has wide-ranging teaching and research experience. She
teaches Geography at Liverpool John Moores University, with an emphasis on
socio-economic issues. Her current research and consultancy interests include
the higher education curriculum, policies for disadvantaged people, and minority
ethnic business development.
Aled Williams, of the School of Construction and Property Management at the
University of Salford, is Subject Co-ordinator for Construction, Surveying and
Real Estate in the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network’s Centre for
Education in the Built Environment. He spent over eight years as a Lecturer in
the School of the Built Environment at Liverpool John Moores University,
where his duties included leading the BSc (Hons) programme in Property
Management. He was instrumental in mapping the Skills plus project onto the
Construction Management curricula.
Mantz Yorke is Professor of Higher Education at Liverpool John Moores Uni-
versity. His early career was in teaching and teacher education, after which he
turned to staff development and educational research at Manchester Polytechnic.
He then spent six years as a senior manager at Liverpool Polytechnic followed
by two years on secondment as Director of Quality Enhancement at the Higher
Education Quality Council. Since returning to his institution he has researched
and reflected on various aspects of the student experience, including employ-
ability. He is a member of the Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination
Team funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
 Introduction 1

Introduction

Employability: a theme of contemporary

international significance
‘Employability’ may be a British term, but the concern with higher education’s
contribution to the graduate labour market is international. The case we develop
here has significant implications for higher education practices across the world,
although our examples are mainly from the UK; however, our set of references
shows that we have been informed by work published elsewhere. Although we
appreciate the danger of over-generalizing from distinctive UK concerns and its
unique higher education system, we do consider that our arguments transcend the
examples. We invite readers to appraise what we have to say in the light of their
own particular situations.

Employability: concern and action

We find no shortage of projects to help students develop the ‘assets’ that employers
value, to identify suitable job opportunities and to present themselves to best
advantage. There is a sense, though, that these activities, valuable though they
are, occupy the margins of higher education. Consider an unpublished analysis of
the ways in which the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network’s 24 subject
centres stood in regard to employability early in 2002: about half the centres
claimed that employability was on their agenda but it was found that ‘the level of
activity reported did not appear to reflect this … the actual level of interest and
work related to employability across the centres can only be described as low’.

Employability and academic values

One explanation for a low level of engagement with employability might be that,
in the absence of a common definition of employability, higher education teachers
interpret it as an intrusion on the proper concerns of academic life. In contrast,
our central claim is that a concern for employability aligns with a concern for
academic values and the promotion of good learning. We do not mean this in a
trivial sense but argue that promoting employability means highlighting and then
2 Introduction

taking seriously goals of higher education that have often been left to look after
themselves. For example, it is often said that higher education develops learner
autonomy, but it is not always clear what autonomy amounts to nor how it is
fostered. Again, higher education often claims to develop self-management,
although there are problems in reconciling this with the carefully-structured
arrangements that many programmes have developed to support students and
maximize achievement. Enhancing employability means, then, taking seriously
many of the long-established goals of higher education and devising arrangements
likely to help most students to make stronger, convincing claims to achievement
in respect of them. This, we shall argue, involves looking at the design of academic
programmes,1 while being necessarily sensitive to module or course design and
appreciative of the enrichment provided by elective courses, curriculum enhance-
ments, optional internships, placements and other work experience, as well as the
contributions of careers advisers and other student support and guidance services.
It is a complicated and ambitious approach to a complex and ambitious goal, for
enhancing employability implies enhancing the quality of learning, teaching and
assessment.

Employability and subsidiarity

Weick (1976) distinguished between tight-coupled organizations, like a factory,
in which inputs are turned into predictable outputs through closely-linked and
exact processes, and loose-coupled ones in which inputs, processes and outputs
are characterized by degrees of uncertainty. Universities tend towards the loose-
coupled end: inputs (students, for example) vary, the processes that affect them
(teaching, for instance) are not standardized and the outcomes tend to be
unpredictable, especially if we look beyond grade point averages or degree classes.
Universities are not wholly loose-coupled, for there are elements of tight-coupling
– rules, expectations, systems and, to some extent, shared values. At best they are
tight on principles and core purposes and more permissive, or loose-coupled, when
it comes to the means of fulfilling them.
Our analysis of the development in students of employability is best expressed
in terms of subsidiarity, which is a concept used in the European Union to demarcate
between central and national powers. Decisions taken by the EU are to be
implemented at the lowest possible level in ways that are both faithful to the
directive or legislation and appropriate to local circumstances. The concept
resembles ‘loose-tight coupling’ (Morgan, 1997), which refers to organizations
that set values and priorities centrally and insist that the whole organization adhere
to them while leaving questions of implementation to the discretion of workers
and workgroups. So, too, with employability in higher education. We argue that
complex outcomes of learning, such as those covered by ‘employability’ need to
be seen as programme-level achievements and that arrangements to foster them
need to be seen as programme-level concerns. Although learning intentions need
to be set at programme level and although programme teams need to make sure
 Introduction 3

that the teaching, learning and assessment arrangements in the component parts
come together sufficiently to make the learning intentions realistic, creativity and
academic freedom need not be stifled in the process. Following the principle of
subsidiarity, teachers are free to engage learners with important subject matter in
ways that are consistent with the programme goals and with the demands of the
material itself. Plainly, there would need to be some degree of negotiation to
make sure that the modules in a programme form a coherent set, but within this
framework teachers would have considerable freedom.

Audience
We address the concerns of colleagues at a number of levels within the higher
education system. Readers are most likely to be those who have an active engage-
ment in curriculum design and implementation, since they are likely to need to
follow through our argument in a fair degree of detail. Some of these readers will
be programme or departmental leaders, careers officers, educational development
staff or other change agents; some will be responsible for course components,
such as modules; and others will be engaged in reflection on their practice as
individual teachers, perhaps as part of their work towards a qualification as a
teacher in higher education.

Navigating this book

We anticipate that readers will want to engage with the issue of employability in
a variety of ways, depending on where they stand. Some, such as Pro-Vice-
Chancellors with institutional responsibilities for curriculum matters, may want
to concentrate their attention on the general background to employability covered
in Chapters 1–3 and on the strategic considerations discussed in Chapters 12 and
13, whilst dipping into other chapters for ‘infill’ detail. Those who are faced more
directly with the development and implementation of curricula will probably feel
the need to read more extensively in the book in order to marry the theoretical
arguments of the early chapters with the more practical evidence and suggestions
that are to be found particularly in Chapters 6–8 and 12. Chapters 5 and 9–11
contain accounts from colleagues who have grappled in different ways with the
issue of employability, and illustrate a number of points made elsewhere in the
text. For those who have an interest in a workplace perspective on employability
that does not emanate from the rarefied heights of the human resources manager
in a large organization, Chapter 4 provides some evidence from newly-appointed
graduates and from their work colleagues of longer-standing experience.

Note
1 We distinguish between ‘programmes’ that lead to named awards, such as an honours
degree or a higher national diploma, and components of programmes which are often
termed ‘modules’ or ‘courses’.
4 Introduction
Part I Part I: employability 5

Employability

The first five chapters share a common concern to describe what is commonly
being done to enhance employability while also developing an account of it that
has some conceptual and empirical weight behind it.
There is nothing remarkable about the actions being taken in England to enhance
employability – they are to be found in the curriculum and co-curriculum in many
countries. Only in England, though, has a major government agency, in this case
the Higher Education Funding Council for England, sponsored national work to
raise awareness of what higher education institutions might do to enhance student
employability, which means that English innovations are relatively well
documented. Our choice of English examples to illustrate developments that can
be identified around the world is one of convenience and not a claim that only in
England is employability a concern.
Indeed, the account of employability that we develop, particularly in Chapters
2 and 3, emphasizes that this is an international concern. We argue that many of
the outcomes and processes that are often reckoned to be characteristic of good
higher education are highly conducive to strong claims to employability. So far
from a care for employability being toxic to academic values, as is vulgarly often
supposed, we see considerable overlap between what employers say they value in
new graduate hires and what are regarded as hallmarks of good higher education.
We say that insofar as there is some international agreement about the outcomes
and processes associated with good higher education, then there is also, in practice,
a concern for those things widely valued by employers. In short, higher education,
at its best, contributes powerfully to well-based claims to employability because
it proceeds by those processes and promotes those outcomes that researchers across
the world have found to be valued in the graduate labour markets.
In Part I we describe practices that enrich these contributions, paying particular
attention to the role played by the co-curriculum – by voluntary, elective and
extra-curricular activities. However, we argue that valuable though good co-
curricular arrangements are, good mainstream curricula have the greater potential.
We rest our view of ‘good higher education’ and ‘good mainstream curricula’ on
educational and psychological research sources that are seldom used in discussions
of employability, which are often so under-theorized as to be quite vulnerable to
challenge.
6 Part I: employability
Chapter 1 The challenge of employability 7

The challenge of
employability

Where’s the problem?

In England, where government figures show that almost all higher education
institutions see over 90 per cent of new graduates in employment or taking further
courses six months after graduation, academic staff are likely to wonder why
anything needs to be done about employability. The 2003 White Paper (DfES,
2003) also notes that graduates in England have enjoyed a substantial lifetime
wage premium. Elsewhere in the world premiums may be smaller and there may
be greater concern about graduate employment rates, but it still seems necessary
to explain what the problem is.
Three responses are as follows:

1 Many policy-makers believe that post-industrial countries will flourish

according to their success in competing with other ‘knowledge economies’:
the EC envisages Europe becoming the world’s leading knowledge economy
by 2010 (Bourgeois, 2002), which depends upon new graduates being highly
employable. It is not enough that they can find some work – it needs to be
work that adds to the knowledge economy (Leadbeater, 2000; Reich, 2002).
Governments, employers and other stakeholders have come to expect higher
education to contribute to the development of a variety of complex ‘skills’1
as well as ensuring an advanced command of worthwhile subjects. They tend
to say that this enhances the stock of human capital and makes for national
economic well-being; the idea is that educational success is an engine of
wealth creation, especially in the knowledge economies of successful
capitalism. In the words of a UK Government report:

Human capital directly increases productivity by raising the productive

potential of employees. […] Improving skills and human capital is important
in promoting growth, both as an input to production and by aiding tech-
nological progress. This has been recognized both in endogenous growth
theory and also in empirical studies comparing growth in different countries.
(HM Treasury, 2000: 26, 32)
8 Employability

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK are now charged with

promoting graduate employability – contributing directly to the stock of human
capital – and their performances are monitored. Although no other country
has acted as decisively as this, there is a concern in the states and provinces
of the USA, Australia and Canada that higher education should give value for
money by contributing highly-employable graduates to their economies.
2 Many governments are concerned to get high participation rates in higher
education. However, strategies for widening participation need to be comple-
mented by strategies for enhancing employability, not least because if new
graduates fail to find jobs they consider worthy of their achievements, then
there is a disincentive to others to participate. In England there are some
signs that the lifetime earnings premium for a first degree is declining as the
number of graduates entering the labour force increases.
3 What we commend as employability-enhancing practices are also practices
that should be attractive to universities and colleges committed to enhancing
the quality of learning, teaching and assessment: the principles of good
learning and those for enhancing employability tend to be congruent.

The first two lines of argument are common, although vulnerable to claims
that there is a demand-side problem with the notion of employability. Coleman
and Keep (2001) argue that advanced Anglo-Saxon economies are too reliant on
low-skill enterprises and that while employers may say they want graduates they
often do not (Wolf, 2002) or cannot use them fully. The argument that there are
skills gaps and shortages is often heard, as in this case:

According to the Conference Board of Canada …, 8 out of 10 organizations

said that graduates should have better interpersonal skills, writing, presenta-
tion, listening and teamwork skills. A recent federal report card on the
knowledge economy concluded, ‘Canadians have outstanding technical skills,
but can’t work in teams, solve “real world” business problems and need to
work on expressing themselves clearly’.
(Knowledge House, 2000: 3)

As an economic strategy, supply-side interventions to enhance graduate

employability may promise more than can be delivered when the demand side is
weak and when, whatever they say, enterprises do not capitalize upon the graduates
they recruit. We do not need to take sides because we consider the third point
persuasive by itself. Together the three points constitute a claim that the sorts of
attainments valued by employers actually align quite well with educational values
and admired practices. Despite the name, ‘employability’ can be understood as a
concern with learning that has benefits for citizenship, continued learning and
life in general. This position is endorsed by the Work Experience Group (2002:
9): ‘Many of the skills required for success in work are the same as those needed
for success in life more generally’.
 The challenge of employability 9

Consequently, we follow the description of employability used by the Generic

Centre of the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN)2 and its
associated Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination Team (ESECT).3 They
see employability as a set of achievements, understandings and personal attributes
that make individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their
chosen occupations.
In later chapters we shall be developing the theme that good higher education
practices make for strong claims to employability. First, we need to distinguish
between employability and employment.

Employment and employability are different concepts

Employability, understood as suitability for graduate employment, is clearly not
the same as graduate employment rates. In the UK, data are collected on whether
graduates are employed six months after graduation (see HEFCE, 2002: 115ff).
Although these data identify universities, colleges and subject areas associated
with unusually low employment rates, and although there is a temptation to assume
that low rates are evidence of poor institutional performance, we resist the inference
that employment rates six months after graduation are valid indicators of
employability. For example, researchers on the Access to What? project comment
that:

In general, the findings support other studies which indicate that success in
the labour market is to some extent associated with the background charac-
teristics of the graduates. However, there are differences according to the
various dimensions of employment success. There are also gender differences
in the effects of background characteristics.

In the case of lower socio-economic background (as measured by parental

occupation and parental education), both men and women graduates from
lower socio-economic backgrounds received lower average salaries than
graduates from more advantaged social backgrounds … In addition, male
graduates from these backgrounds were more likely to have experienced a
period of unemployment and were less likely to be in managerial and profes-
sional jobs than their middle-class counterparts …

… Asian men were less likely than other male graduates to characterise their
jobs as ones which provided good opportunities to use their knowledge and
skills. This was not the case, however, for Asian women who were also more
likely to have a graduate job and to find their work challenging. Asian graduates
of both genders were more likely than other graduates to be in managerial or
professional jobs although these positive employment outcomes were not
reflected in higher salaries or greater job satisfaction. In general, Higher
Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data indicated that graduates from ethnic
10 Employability

minorities face greater difficulties in obtaining an initial job but are not less
likely than other graduates to be in graduate level jobs. Substantially higher
proportions of graduates among each black minority group and among both
Indian and Pakistani groups were still seeking employment or training (without
having any other main activity) six months after graduation. The same was
true for Bangladeshi men. However, unemployment levels were only slightly
above those of white graduates for Chinese and other Asian groups, and among
Bangladeshi women.
(CHERI, 2002: 1, 2)

Harvey (2001: 103) develops these points, with Little (2001: 126) observing
that ‘… the impact of social and cultural capital (independent of education) on
the operation of the labour market varies by country’. Rhem (1998) says that
working class students in the USA, rather like their English counterparts, are
more likely to lack self-confidence as students, have fewer academic skills and
not know how to ‘work the system’.
This is an important reason why we distinguish between ‘employability’, which
refers to fitness, and employment rates, which reflect the operation of labour
markets (Linke, 1991) that tend to compound the disadvantage experienced by
certain groups of graduates. Nor do labour markets place all employable graduates
in graduate jobs:4 ‘employability’ may improve graduates’ chances of getting
graduate jobs but it does not assure them. There is the question of demand for
graduate labour to consider as well. For example we will shortly address claims
that Anglo-Saxon economies tend to rely on low skills, low profit enterprises and
that there might be less of an employability problem than of an employment
problem. Our reading of Maharasoa and Hay (2001) is that this is recognizable in
South Africa, especially for Arts and Humanities graduates.
The question that dominates this book is how achievements appropriate to
graduate jobs may be promoted. In the next section we offer an answer in terms of
learning to make transitions, and translations, which implies some transformation
of students during their undergraduate years. We will extend this rather high-level
analysis with more concrete suggestions in later chapters.

Tr a n s i t i o n s , t r a n s l a t i o n s a n d t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s
Our analysis implies that many higher education institutions will need to change.
We will not develop the organizational side here, concentrating instead on the
implications for students. Nevertheless, we insist that many departments,
universities and colleges will need to re-form themselves, in some cases to
transform themselves, if they are to provide the programmes and undergraduate
experiences that make for employability; they have transitions to make from being
concerned only with academic practices into being organizations concerned to
promote a range of achievements through good academic practices; and they need
to translate their goals and contributions to ‘the knowledge economy’ into terms
 The challenge of employability 11

that are readily understood by participants (students and teachers) and consumers
(employers, graduate schools and funders). And, as we shall argue in the next
section, each of these three processes is complex or supercomplex, resistant to the
application of the rational planning practices that are appropriate to more
determinate, less dynamic and smaller-scale projects. We hint here, then, at the
desirability of breaking from some of the more formulaic thinking about higher
education that has, internationally, seeped into the sector in the past couple of
decades.
That said, we turn to the ways in which these processes relate to students’
planned undergraduate experiences.

Tr a n s i t i o n s
Employer organizations often criticize the standard of new graduates, saying that
they leave higher education without enough business sense, understanding of the
real world and readiness for work.5 Is this evidence of a failing in higher education?
Teachers in higher education often complain about the standard of new students,
saying that they lack ‘the basics’, are accustomed to being spoon-fed and are not
used to thinking hard enough. Is this evidence of a failing in schools and colleges?
Of course, the teachers who complain about new students seem to be proud of
their graduates and defensive when criticized by employers. And interviews we
did in the Skills plus project (which is summarized in Box 1.1) found employers
of recent graduates to be quite satisfied with them once they had six months or so
to their credit. One interpretation is that the impact of employability development
in the undergraduate years may be greatest in the first few months of graduates’
careers, smoothing them through the transition.
Transitions are hard. In developmental psychology, we know that transition
from one ‘stage’ to a higher one is often preceded by a drop in performance (van
Geert, 1994). But the mechanisms van Geert uses to explain developmental
transitions6 do not explain the difficulty of transition from school to college or
from college to higher education. Our explanation uses the concept of ‘practical
intelligence’, as developed by Sternberg and colleagues (2000) who

… present a number of studies showing dissociations between academic and

practical intelligence … our argument is that academic intelligence is not
enough and that successful prediction and, more importantly, understanding
of performance in the everyday world require assessment of practical as well
as academic intelligence.
(Sternberg et al., 2000: xiii)

Central to practical intelligence is tacit knowledge. Sternberg’s team ‘found

that individuals who exhibit the ability to acquire and use tacit knowledge are
more effective in their respective performance domains’ (p. 223). By ‘tacit
knowledge’ they mean
12 Employability

Box 1.1 The Skills plus project, 2000–2

The project had two main streams of activity. The research side used quali-
tative methods to explore what employability meant to 97 recent graduates
and 117 of their supervisors, mentors and co-workers. Chapter 4 sum-
marizes the findings. There was also a survey of first and final year students’
efficacy beliefs and a pilot study of employability as seen through the eyes
of ten recent graduates who had failed to find jobs six months after
graduation (Knight and Knight, 2002).
The development side involved work with 17 departments representing
subjects from Pharmacology, through Environmental Science to History,
drawn from two research universities and two post-1992 universities. This
work was underpinned by:

• The USEM account of employability (see Chapter 3), which had been
constructed by the project principals as a description that was consistent
with research literatures and expansive enough to envelop non-cognitive
elements as well as understanding and skilful practices.
• A conviction that whatever the strengths of other approaches to
enhancing employability, it needed to be understood as a curriculum
issue.
• The belief that employability could be honestly presented as something
that could be legitimately fostered in any programme in any university.

This position was set out in the project’s first paper, Tuning the Under-
graduate Curriculum.7 It described teaching, learning and assessment practices
that were suited to the sorts of learning described by USEM and set out a
low cost, high gain approach to existing curricula that should considerably
enhance their contribution to employability. Relying on series of audits,
‘tuning’ and negotiation, this approach was refined and developed by 16 of
the 17 departments. Some of the outcomes are described in Chapters 9,
10 and 11.
Assessment issues had to be addressed, which led to the development
of a differentiated account of programme assessment systems (see Knight
and Yorke, 2003b and Chapter 8).8
The project also showed how important it was that students understood
that the goals of a programme were wider than academic achievement
alone and appreciated the ways in which the work they did could lead to
strong claims to employability. In the words of the project, students needed
to be ‘knowing students’.
 The challenge of employability 13

The procedural knowledge one learns in everyday life that is usually not taught9
and often is not even verbalized. Tacit knowledge includes things like knowing
what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for
maximum effect.
(Sternberg et al., 2000: ix)

They add that ‘tacit knowledge is needed to successfully adapt to, select, or
shape real-world environments’ (p. 104), noting that ‘experience in a particular
domain is important in the acquisition of tacit knowledge’ (p. 223). They note that

[Researchers] found evidence that older managers who performed at the

highest levels on average had high levels of tacit knowledge, even though on
average they had relatively low scores on psychometric reasoning measures.
(Sternberg et al., 2000: 44)

The significance of knowledge of the specific can be seen in their analysis of

problem-solving in which familiarity with the setting is important, partly because
problem definition has to be contexted (the way the problem is understood has to
relate to a particular circumstance) as do the strategies chosen to address it. So,
too, in their analysis of wisdom, which they saw as ‘a higher-level outgrowth of
practical intelligence’ (p. 59). Their analysis uses a distinction between fluid
abilities (those required to deal with novelty) and crystallized ones (situated and
based on accumulated knowledge). They then claim that wisdom, ‘seems to behave
more like crystallized than like fluid intelligence in its development over the life
course’ (p. 59). Their analysis of the five components of wisdom recognizes the
importance of the general: ‘life-span contextualism … knowledge about differences
in values, goals and priorities … knowledge about the relative indeterminacy and
unpredictability of life and ways to manage them’ (p. 59). They also emphasize
‘rich factual knowledge … rich procedural knowledge’ (p. 59), both of which
need a good grasp of the specifics of a role, context and time. Much of this knowl-
edge is tacit. This is in a chapter headed ‘the specificity of practical intelligence’.
There is an interesting similarity between these ideas and those developed by
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) in their account of the development of expertise.
Their case cannot be quickly and faithfully summarized but its main features
include:

• An emphasis on knowledge: experts are steeped in their domain, perhaps for

some 10,000 hours.
• A discussion of the limits of formal or ‘book’ knowledge. They say:

The obvious kinds [of knowledge] … are procedural knowledge (skill) and
formal knowledge (as in ‘book learning’). Expertise also depends on a great
body of less obvious knowledge … informal knowledge, which is the expert’s
elaborated and specialized form of common sense, … impressionistic
14 Employability

knowledge [and] … Finally there is self-regulatory knowledge – self

knowledge relevant to functioning in a domain.
(Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993: 74)

• The proposition that expertise is a process, a way of going about things.

• An insistence that problem-solving is central to expertise, but only as long as
problems include those ‘at the edge of competence’ – ‘tame’ problems do not
count.
• A distinction between experts and experienced non-experts. The experienced
non-experts lack the commitment to learning and lack the flexibility and
creativity that come from non-routine problem-solving.
• The idea that experts have expert careers, which is to say they remain
committed to learning and problem-solving.

… we have found it more useful to think of expertise as a characteristic of

careers rather than as a characteristic of people. The problem then is how to
get people to pursue expert careers and to sustain them in those careers.
(Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993: 18)

• A claim that expertise is a social achievement as well as an individual one. It

may also be promoted by the quality of the social environment.

We suggest that this account of practical intelligence, which puts a lot of weight
on knowing the rules of the game (rather than of games in general), illuminates
the transition to work in two ways. First, by implying that most people will have
a period of non-competence in their first job because they will lack explicit and –
especially – tacit knowledge of ‘what we do around here’: they will be culturally
naïve, reliant on any explicit and formal declarations they can find, whereas the
reality of communities of practice is one of tacit knowledge, ‘work-arounds’ and
local practices (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986; Wenger, 1998; Brown and Duguid,
2000). Second, because the formal, negotiable and de-contexted knowledge
(Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993) typically rewarded by higher education is quite
different from the practical intelligence, or expert-like behaviour, that is likely to
be more significant in the workplace. The work on expertise points in similar
directions. Both lines of research suggest that expertise and practical intelligence
will transfer to the extent that they are learned dispositions with accompanying
heuristics and that there will be difficulties – workgroups may be dominated by
experienced non-experts, there is fresh tacit knowledge to acquire, there is a flood
of temporarily-novel problems to cope with and new rules of the game to be
learnt.
A similar analysis can be done for the transition into higher education, recog-
nizing that it will be particularly disconcerting for students whose experiences
are quite different from the cultures that predominate in higher education. These
students may have social, intellectual and cultural capital aplenty but their capitals
 The challenge of employability 15

may not be the ones dominating a particular subject, university or college. Fair
access – making higher education really open to all who can benefit from it –
does not guarantee the kinds of experiences in higher education that help those
who are short of it to acquire the cultural capital that enhances employment and
the chances of getting it. Hodkinson and Bloomer (2003) have suggested that
shortages of appropriate cultural capital can powerfully interact with circumstances
and choices to limit career trajectories. However, the significance of cultural capital
is, they suggest, often unrecognized.
There are significant implications here for employability. We do not claim that
transitions can be made Teflon-smooth, nor do we expect to stop employers
complaining because new graduates hit the ground limping rather than running.
We do believe that higher education can help students to prepare for transition to
the workplace. For instance, Sternberg and colleagues argue that people can learn
strategies to help them acquire tacit knowledge more effectively, arguing that it
helps to learn from stories, as in the study of cases and with role-playing and
simulations, where they emphasize the importance of giving plentiful feedback to
participants. We hear echoes of metacognition in their proposal that

Individuals can be asked to evaluate the case studies individually or in groups.

They can assess the situation, evaluate the course of action taken and assess
the consequences of action. They can consider what they might have done
differently in the situation and what alternative outcomes might have resulted.
(Sternberg et al., 2000: 214)

Transitions may also be easier when students have followed programmes10 that
help them to develop what has been called ‘the skill of transfer’ (Bridges, 1993).

Tr a n s l a t i o n
There is also a task of translation to be done. Students on well-conceived pro-
grammes often have many striking achievements but unless they can translate
achievements into a language that resonates with employers, then their intellectual,
social and cultural capital may be unrealized. For example, it is widely appreciated
that work experience – as an intern, term-time employee in the retail sector,
voluntary worker, or on a work placement – is attractive to employers. The mistake
is to assume that the experience is intrinsically attractive. Employers are interested
in the learning and achievements associated with the experience. Successful
students translate the experience into the language of achievement (‘I showed
creativity by …’) and of learning (‘I learnt how to work with older people who
were less educated and was able to …’). Or take the degree itself: a small study of
unemployed recent graduates (Knight and Knight, 2002) said that

These graduates’ answers almost all seem to convey the view that their
qualification bears some kind of objective worth that, significantly, employers
16 Employability

will clearly recognise. Only two [of the ten] graduates suggested that at least
some of the burden of proving their degree could form a good match with the
demands of a specific job lay with them. Arguably, in terms of employment,
a degree is little more than a label for an often ambiguous skill set that the
holder must aim to present as effectively as possible. By failing to recognise
this, it is possible that many of these graduates are not doing all they could to
show employers that their qualification holds practical value.
(Knight and Knight, 2002: 4)

In other words, the award itself needs to be translated into terms that employers
recognize and value. In Chapter 8 we shall argue that claims-making, primarily
through a personal development planning process, is a way of helping students to
translate what they do during their undergraduate years into a language that appeals
to employers. Without good translation and the fluent presentation that goes with
it, transitions are less likely to happen, never mind be smooth.

Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n
In the account of employability set out in Chapters 2 and 3 we shall argue that it
is a complex set of diverse achievements and qualities that goes far beyond
mainstream academic achievement. ‘Soft’ skills, personal qualities, dispositions
and other achievements are valued. An implication is that the undergraduate years
need to be years of transformation (Harvey and Knight, 1996). This is not saying
that new students are bereft of ‘soft’ skills, lacking autonomy, short on creativity
or prone to idleness. It is saying that:

• Students should be transformed academically, by becoming expert-like

(Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993) in a subject area; distinctly developing a
set of academic practices; and becoming poised in working with advanced
concepts.
• They should be transformed by recognizing that academic achievements are
not the only ones that matter. Others are legitimate and necessary – ‘soft’
skills, for example.
• They should be transformed in their ability to represent the range of their
achievements which will often imply that they will be adding achievements
to their roster – teamwork, working autonomously, self-management, con-
fidence in enacting a graduate identity, metacognition, for example.

For some, coming from backgrounds where the practices and values of higher
education are not paramount, these transformations will be threatening and their
undergraduate careers may be short. For others, it would be better to speak of
consolidation of the high levels of social, intellectual and cultural capital they
brought with them to university. We need not haver about the transformation:
consolidation ratio since our point is that the curriculum needs to be designed to
 The challenge of employability 17

support transformation which will, in turn, support consolidation as well. This, as

we argue in Chapter 12, certainly means that the curriculum should have a good
range of learning intentions and be accompanied by tasks, teaching and assessment
arrangements that are likely to advance them. It also implies that there is
progression – arrangements to build in the second year or level on the achievements
of the first, and so on. Practice is also necessary because transformations take
time.

( S u p e r ) c o m p l ex i t y
Suppose that our analysis is persuasive. What might we do? The assumption is, of
course, that this is an area in which actions can be chosen in some certainty that
they will have known and desired effects. Yet Barnett (2000) has characterized
this as an age of ‘supercomplexity’, in which the only certainty is that there are no
certainties. Although his book is largely written at the level of ‘the university’, the
arguments can easily be extended to teaching and learning processes. Fullan, a
commentator of international standing, has repeatedly argued (1999, 2001) that
these are uncertain processes that resist being managed in a traditional tight-coupled
way. In a similar way, Claxton (1998) says that the outcomes of learning are often
uncertain, sometimes slow to emerge and frequently unpredictable. Popular inter-
pretations of the psychological concept ‘constructivism’, which say that individuals
create their own meanings, point in a similar direction, because we may not
determine the meanings a person will construct. We do know that ‘alternative
conceptual frameworks’ are readily constructed (Knight, 1989) along with more
acceptable ones. The implications for the design of curriculum and its learning
arrangements are quite important, mainly because they suggest that when it comes
to developing something as complex and ‘fuzzy’ as ‘employability’, we work
with complexity: loose-coupling and uncertainty are the watchwords. When we
try to design good connections between learning, teaching and assessment we
need to accept there is no great problem with trying to improve the chances that
students will learn x: the problem is being certain that any particular student will
learn x to order. There are, though, substantial problems in bastardizing Biggs’
(2003) helpful notion of ‘constructive alignment’ and imagining that we can make
a tight-coupled set of arrangements. In education, tight-coupling is less feasible
the more indeterminate and complex the intended outcomes of learning. Here we
follow Goodyear (2002) in distinguishing between tasks (which teachers set) and
activities (which are what students do in response to those tasks). The two tend to
be different and complex activities are particularly likely to stimulate a whole
range of tasks – complex activities are liable to lead to a greater range of outcomes
than simple ones. To put it another way: following an older tradition of curriculum
studies, we are saying that there is a difference between the planned and created
curriculum (what we teachers do) and again between the created and the understood
curriculum (what students learn). Slippages are endemic.
18 Employability

What does this mean for curriculum design? It certainly disturbs the assumptions
of rational curriculum planning and those who expect a tight-coupling between
teaching, resources, tasks, learning and judgements of achievement. An alternative
approach to curriculum design is suggested by Ganesan and colleagues (2002).
They argue that we should think in terms of creating opportunities (or affordances)
that support the sorts of learning we intend to happen. We should not assume that
those intentions will be fulfilled immediately, measurably or, in some cases, at
all. This, then, is a view of constructive alignment as an exercise in loose-coupling,
as the creation of learning possibilities by bringing together favourable affordances
– teaching, resources, tasks, and judgements of achievement.

I s e m p l o y a b i l i t y h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n’ s j o b ?
We close this chapter by noting that some colleagues are suspicious of the idea
that higher education can or should contribute to student employability, apart
from qualifying them with an academic award. One concern is that this project is
unrealistic. For example, Hillage and Pollard report that

Pascale … argued that

Employability envisions an arrangement in which both parties accept that

work is unlikely to be the long-term proposition it once was. In exchange
for the employees’ dedicated effort in the shorter-term employment
relationship, the company pays higher wages and invests in employees’
development. This makes them more marketable when it is time to move
on.

A year later Pascale was arguing that employability was ‘wishful thinking
masquerading as a concept’.
(Hillage and Pollard, 1998: 5).

Bourgeois and colleagues (1999), writing from a pan-European perspective,

are also sceptical, emphasizing, like Murphy (1995), Coleman and Keep (2001),
Guile (2002) and Wolf (2002), uncertainties about the capacity of the economy to
provide enough (graduate) employment:

If, however, the [students’] quest is above all for reliable and good employ-
ment, then … In a world of global economics, a shorter half-life to much
knowledge, and high systemic unemployment and insecurity, expectations
placed upon the university may be unattainable, its mission impossible for
many of the more conventional, let alone its new non-traditional, students.
(Bourgeois et al., 1999: 162)
 The challenge of employability 19

While more open to the project of enhancing employability, Atkins, who has
advised the English Employment Department, has reservations about its feasibility,
writing that

Learning and learning how to learn in the context of disciplinary study in HE

certainly seems a long way distant from learning and learning how to learn in
many work contexts … This may mean that there is a limit to the extent to
which traditional academic study skills can be effectively used in employment
and, conversely, a limit to the extent to which the generic process skills of
employment can usefully be embedded in the traditional curriculum.
(Atkins, 1999: 276)

There is also a concern, often expressed by academic staff, that the discourse
of employability could jeopardize the established quest for wisdom (Barnett, 1994)
and related academic values. Honeybone says that a

… skills agenda, to a large extent externally imposed and predominantly aimed

at the application of skills outside HE is no longer the best way forward, if it
ever was … skills development as then [in the 1980s and early 1990s] was
frequently viewed by academics as an unwelcome addition to the purposes of
HE and a diversion from the study of the disciplines’.
(Honeybone, 2002: 7)

Teichler, writing as a leading researcher into European practices, considers

that

There is widespread concern that intellectual enhancement for all and equality
of opportunity is being forfeited to presumed industrial demands … and that
teaching and learning in higher education might be geared to such an extent
to immediate needs that higher education will lose its function of fostering
critical thinking, preparing for indeterminate vocational tasks and contributing
to innovation.
(Teichler, 2000: 90–1)

Another concern is that the interpersonal might be neglected, with Honeybone

(2002) worried that developments in employability ‘may serve to remind us that
continuing work is required if Higher Education is to be a “properly balanced
system” with a plurality of aims’ (p. 9). He asks ‘should there not be an equally
strong sociability agenda to set alongside that of employability?’ (p. 9).
Last of all, there is a fear, alluded to earlier in this chapter, that employability
cannot be separated from the person and that patterns of disadvantage will be
perpetuated – ‘Employability is also a function of someone’s personal circum-
stances (e.g. their age, caring responsibilities, ethnicity etc.)’ (Hillage and Pollard,
1998: 11). Indeed, one critique of the term ‘employability’ argues that it shifts the
20 Employability

Table 1.1 Reasons for seeing employability as a challenge to academic values

Challenge A response
Universities exist to promote truth, It is easiest to understand this threat in the case
wisdom, scholarship and qualities of of corporate universities, set up to prepare
mind. The world of work has quite people for working in a particular company.
different values, values that are anti- Compared to mainland Europe, employers in
pathetic to universities’ missions. the UK are often relaxed about the subject of
graduates’ degrees, as long as applicants are
literate, articulate and have the other general
achievements represented on the wish-lists.1
It means doing what employers say. There seems to be no obvious reason to object
to most of what is in these lists and there is a
case for being quite enthusiastic about much of it.
It means giving students time to go Quite possibly.
on placements and work experience, Work experiences may address programme
which reduces the time for academic learning intentions that are not easily addressed
study. in the classroom. Co-operative and sandwich
programmes often say this is one of their great
strengths.
My job is to teach the material and This is a common complaint which is also often
there’s already too little time to made when teachers are encouraged to enlarge
cover it. If I have to teach skills as their range of teaching techniques and displace
well, things will be impossible. more didactic approaches. In some subjects the
problem is critical, although outsiders are prone
to wonder why there is such emphasis on
conveying information. Alternatives would be:
• The emphasis in problem-based learning on
learning how to acquire, evaluate and use
information.
• Developing an understanding of the field that
makes it easier to add new information as it is
needed. For example, the Engineering
Professors’ Council’s Output Standards (2000)
portrays Engineering as a process of enquiry
and not as a body of information to be
learned.
• Focusing on the quality, rather than the
quantity, of students’ learning.
We’ll have to spend more time See above.
counselling and advising students. Besides, in England, the introduction of Progress
Files is supposed to make this necessary by 2005.

Note
1 This is not to say they have no interest in degree subjects. Brennan et al. (2001) show that they
do have views on subject specialisms but to a lesser extent than employers in other countries.
 The challenge of employability 21

blame for unemployment from employers and the management of the economy to
individuals, potentially leading to a ‘blame the victim’ scenario (A. Taylor, 1998).
Table 1.1 brings together a number of these concerns. An implication of this
table and other expressions of concern is that there is a major job to be done in
persuading academic staff to adopt employability as a concern. Given the scope
they, like staff in most loose-tight coupled organizations, have for resisting,
subverting and ignoring innovations they do not like (Trowler, 1998), evidence of
the intensification of academic work (Altbach, 1996), and a reluctance to take on
work that is not directly concerned with teaching students or doing research (Knight
and Trowler, 2000), we conclude that this will not be easy and is likely to be
impossible unless they, the teachers, see a concern for employability as a benign
concern. Teichler’s words, above, clearly indicate that this will be a substantial
task.
It is one we have taken on in this book.

Notes
1 A distinctive feature of this book is our unease with the common term ‘skills’. We
shall later argue that ‘skills’ is a misleading term and suggest ‘skilful practices’ as an
alternative.
2 At the time of writing the shape of quality enhancement arrangements in the UK was
being discussed. The LTSN brand may or may not continue but we are confident that
it and its Generic Centre will have some continuing representation in new quality
enhancement arrangements.
3 ESECT is a 30 month project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for
England until March 2005.
4 There is a question about what counts as a ‘graduate job’. Harvey and colleagues
(1997) argue that graduates can ‘grow’ non-graduate jobs into graduate ones, so any
job could, in theory, potentially be a graduate job. Mason (2002) distinguishes between
graduate and non-graduate jobs in the service industries and finds little evidence of
graduates turning non-graduate jobs into graduate ones. One thing is clear, though: if
it is possible to separate graduate from non-graduate jobs, then students in some
subjects and at some universities are far more successful in getting graduate jobs
than those in other subjects and institutions (Jobbins, 2003).
5 It should be appreciated that UK employers accept more responsibility for training
newer graduates than do their European counterparts, who seem to expect graduates
to emerge from longer degree courses prepared to slide into professional roles
(Brennan, 2003).
6 His argument is that resources which would normally be used in task performance
are occupied by the (tacit) processes that are creating the new structures of the next
developmental stage.
7 The June 2002 revision is at http://www.open.ac.uk/cobe/pdfDocs/docs-skill%2B/
ANewIntroSkills.pdf (accessed 11 July 2003).
8 And also Assessment and Employability at http://www.open.ac.uk/cobe/pdfDocs/docs-
skill%2B/ProjPaper4.pdf (accessed 11 July 2003).
9 There is growing interest in non-formal and informal learning. For a brief summary,
see Knight (2002a).
10 Another distinctive feature of this book is our insistence that much of what we recom-
mend needs to be approached as programme concerns. Courses or modules are too
short.
Chapter 2
22 Employability

Employability
More than skills and wish-lists

Are skills the issue?

In this chapter we begin to set out the thinking behind our description of employ-
ability as a set of achievements, understandings and personal attributes that make
individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen
occupations. First comes a description of what seems to be the international default
discourse, the language of skills, followed by the claim that either it is inadequate
or that the term ‘skills’ has to be so loosely interpreted as to render it meaningless.
The chapter concludes with a summary of ways in which employers and other
international stakeholders have described employability. Seeing difficulties with
their accounts, we develop our own account in Chapter 3. Before criticizing skills-
based accounts of employability, there are two points that need attention:
First, we insist that the outcomes that employers generally value and the learning
that stimulates them are, in our view, intrinsically worthwhile. Both enhance what
has been called ‘capability’ (Stephenson, 1998), which we understand to be an
overarching construct that embraces diverse achievements that can enhance
citizenship, career and life in general. It will be seen that we have no truck with
‘education or employability’ thinking and that we will keep arguing that good
learning enhances career, citizenship and more besides.
Second, we need to distance ourselves from assumptions that higher education
can rectify labour market problems and from easy beliefs that employers know
best. To repeat a point made in Chapter 1, graduate employment rates might have
little to do with higher education. If employers benefit enough to increase their
share of global trade, then there may be more graduate jobs available, which is
good for home graduates, unless employers decide it is better to invest overseas
where graduate labour costs may be five times cheaper than in a Western economy.
Although we write about the supply of highly-employable graduates, we recognize
that supply without demand will not invigorate economies. The point is that

… a full explanation of employability is not just about what people need to

get and keep a job, but should take explicit account of the level of demand for
employment and the way employers articulate their demand.
(Hillage and Pollard, 1998: 11)
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 23

We have also referred earlier to Coleman and Keep’s work (2001). If they are
right and employers talk the language of high-profit, high-skills enterprises but
run low-skills, low-profit ones, then we should be careful with employer views of
what the economy needs. Wolf (2002) is particularly critical of the Confederation
of British Industry’s contribution to educational policy, and ‘how’, asked the Chair
at The Learning and Skills Sector conference at Westminster, 24 April 2003, ‘do
you raise demand [for skills] in parts of the economy where employers don’t give
a monkey’s about raising skills?’ Or, in words attributed to David Blunkett when
English Secretary of State for Education and Employment, ‘employers take
everything and give nothing’.
Keep’s (2003) view is that the UK, like the USA, has reached a low skills
equilibrium, where a lot of employers, notably in the great retailing growth sector,
neither demand nor can make best use of many highly skilled people, preferring
to ‘grow’ through mergers and acquisitions instead of adopting high skill, high
added value strategies. He adds that ‘skills supply is not a good starting point for
policy interventions … skills are a fourth order issue’, continuing that ‘… many
jobs are too circumscribed for a doubling of skills levels to make a difference’.1
Mason (2002) develops the theme with an analysis of graduate employment in
service industries. Beginning with data indicative of under-employment, he uses
evidence from retailing, computer services, transport and communication industries
to show that ‘a sizeable minority of graduates employed in retailing are in non-
professional and non-managerial sales and clerical positions’ (p. 444). His
concluding remarks include:

• By some, though not all measures of qualification and skill requirements, a

substantial number of graduates are over-educated and/or their skills are under-
utilised in their jobs during the first few years after graduation …
• … over-educated graduates now represent a substantially larger proportion
of the workforce than they did before the transition to mass HE.

(Mason: 2002: 452)

In short, supply is outstripping demand. Keep (2002: 458), saying that there is
a need for policy-makers to ‘be willing and able to open up the black box of the
firm, and seek to create therein an environment that is both rich in its potential for
learning and demands and uses high levels of skill in the productive process’,
considers that ‘there are some signs that the demand side is starting to emerge as
an issue’.
Later in this chapter we shall describe employer wish-lists and identify a number
of themes to take seriously, but in the belief it is for higher education to consider
how far it could respond while maintaining its essential mission. They are not, in
our view, to be regarded as shibboleths, notwithstanding the tendency of
governments around the world to believe that employers have privileged access to
special wisdom. Morley adds that
24 Employability

… the employability discourse is a one-way gaze with truth claims that

problematise the capital of students while leaving the cultural and social capital
and employment practices of employers untouched.
(Morley, 2001: 137)

Skills-based views of ‘employability ’

In Chapter 1 we offered a brief description of employability and contrasted it
with ‘employment’, a concept with which it is often confused. Here we complicate
matters by identifying other notions of employability, summarized in Table 2.1.
We shall not review them one by one, concentrating instead on view 3, the
widespread belief that employability is assured by the possession of skills. It is
not. We make this case by showing that the language of skills is more like a
babble; that there is more to employability than ‘skills’; and that there are sub-
stantial theoretical objections to the idea that there are skills (save in a relatively
trivial sense), as well as to the corollary that they are transferable.

Employability as skills
As Table 2.1 indicates, skills were blessed by the Dearing report (NCIHE, 1997)
and the 2003 English White Paper on higher education was produced by the
Department of Education and Skills. One way of challenging this preoccupation
is to see what their proponents mean by ‘skills’, which is done here through a
series of quotations suggesting that they tend to mean different things. For example,
there is a rift between those following Dearing’s advocacy of ‘key’ skills and
others, such as ‘generic’ and ‘soft’ skills. The UK Cabinet Office distinguishes

… three categories of skills:

Generic Skills: the transferable skills that can be used across all occupational
groups. These include what have already been defined as Key Skills –
communication, application of numbers, problem solving, team working, IT
and improving own learning and performance … [and] reasoning skills, work
process management skills, and personal values and attitudes such as
motivation, discipline, judgement, leadership and initiative.
By ‘vocational skills’ we mean the specific ‘technical’ skills needed to
work within an occupation or occupational group …
… a number of job-specific skills may also be included. These might include
local functional skills … or employer-wide skills …
(PIU, 2001: 119, emphasis added)

However, teachers in higher education are not necessarily using the same
language, nor referring to the same things, as Bibbings shows.
Table 2.1 Seven meanings of ‘employability’

What is employability? Notes Comment

1 Getting a (graduate) job Employment figures are taken as a No necessary connection between fitness for employment
robust indicator of employability. and getting a job. The labour market is not perfect and the
economic cycle means that some groups of graduates find
it harder to get jobs at some times – at the time of writing
there appears to be a glut in the UK of supposedly-
employable IT graduates.
2 Possession of vocational degree Vocational degrees are seen as passports
to employment, not always rightly.
3 Possession of ‘key skills’ or The Dearing Report said all students This assertion may help, although it is far from clear what
suchlike should develop four ‘key skills’, amongst ‘skills’ count as ‘key’ skills.
others. It is becoming common to talk Brown and Hesketh’s current research on graduate
of other ‘soft’ or ‘generic’ skills. In some recruitment led Hesketh to say emphatically that human
quarters there is scepticism about the capital – attractiveness in the labour market – does not lie
whole ‘skills’ enterprise. in skills.
4 Formal work experience Work experience consistently Extremely important when it is used to support claims to
correlates with success in the labour achievement. By itself, experience is inert. The claims are
market. what matter.
5 Good use of non-formal The Student Volunteering UK and There may be some tendency for employers to prefer work
work experience and/or CRAC Insight Plus initiatives help experience in business sectors that are close to theirs,
voluntary work students to represent these which means that claims based on part-time bar work may
experiences in ways that are not carry as well as claims based on formal work
likely to attract employers. experience in the sector.
6 Skilful career planning and Employability is in part about knowing Important and pretty empty without good claims supported
interview technique the rules of the job-seeking game. by plenty of evidence and appropriate experience. Canny
Most of the unemployed graduates technique is no substitute for substance, which comes from
interviewed in the Skills plus project engagements in well-designed programmes.
had fallen down here.
7 A mix of cognitive and non- A set of achievements, understanding This view is developed in the next section, which lays out
cognitive achievements and and personal attributes that make the USEM account of employability.
representations individuals more likely to gain
Employability: more than skills and wish-lists

employment and be successful in

their chosen occupations.
25

Note: Darker shading indicates the descriptions of employability that have the greatest appeal to us.
26 Employability

… feedback from employers of students on work placement suggests that

key skills are the most important elements in making students employable. If
they are capable of getting their degrees then they are capable of learning the
knowledge they need to be able to do their jobs well, but in order to be quickly
useful in the workplace they need competence in the key skills of com-
munication … working independently, being able to meet deadlines and
manage their time, and being able to make presentations suitable for specific
audiences.
(Bibbings, 2001: 13)

The Keynote Project also took to the idea of ‘key’ skills. For our purposes, the
interesting thing about this extract from its evaluation report is that although there
seemed to be agreement that key skills matter, there was a lack of agreement
about what they are:

The aim of the Keynote Project is to identify, disseminate and develop the
key skills of textiles, fashion and printing students, thereby enhancing their
employability whilst promoting the skills of lifelong learning … 64 per cent
of the sample [of 14 departments] had agreed definitions for key skills. Within
this group, 14 per cent used the skills identified by Dearing whilst the
remainder had devised lists internally … There was a significant lack of
agreement about the definition of key skills in institutions which did not use
the Dearing skills list.
(Keynote Project, 2002: 2, 4)

In Canada, employability is related to nine ‘essential skills’: reading text,

document use, numeracy, writing, oral communication, working with others,
computer use, continuous learning, and thinking skills (Human Resources Develop-
ment Canada, 2002). For other commentators, ‘transferable’ skills is the term of
choice, neatly ignoring the view amongst psychologists that learning is transferred
with effort and not necessarily with success.

Five years on from the Dearing Report … the employability agenda has shifted
its focus from numbers of graduates leaving university with work experience
onto … the acquisition, recognition and articulation of transferable skills.
(Pownall and Rimmer, 2002: 15)

These lists are at least short, but most people trying to list the ‘skills’ of employ-
ability end up with long – and lengthening – lists. Box 2.1 is a list we have used as
a heuristic, a set of prompts to help colleagues analyze their programmes. In a
similar vein, Dickerson and Green (2002) identified 36 activities that cover the
tasks carried out in a wide range of jobs. They then used factor analysis to reduce
the 36 to ‘a taxonomy of generic skills’ (p. 8), comprising literacy skills; physical
skills; number skills; technical know-how; high-level communication; planning
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 27

Box 2.1 Aspects of employability, with elaborative comments. The

acquisition of disciplinary understanding and skills is assumed: note
that their application is listed at 30.3
A. Personal qualities
1 Malleable self-theory: (belief that attributes [for example, intelligence]
are not fixed and can be developed)
2 Self-awareness: (awareness of own strengths and weaknesses, aims
and values)
3 Self-confidence: (confidence in dealing with the challenges that employ-
ment and life throw up)
4 Independence: (ability to work without supervision)
5 Emotional intelligence: (sensitivity to others’ emotions and the effects
that they can have)
6 Adaptability: (ability to respond positively to changing circumstances
and new challenges)
7 Stress tolerance: (ability to retain effectiveness under pressure)
8 Initiative: (ability to take action unprompted)
9 Willingness to learn: (commitment to ongoing learning to meet the
needs of employment and life)
10 Reflectiveness: (the disposition to reflect evaluatively on the perfor-
mance of oneself and others)
B. Core skills
11 Reading effectiveness: (the recognition and retention of key points)
12 Numeracy: (ability to use numbers at an appropriate level of accuracy)
13 Information retrieval: (ability to access different sources)
14 Language skills: (possession of more than a single language)
15 Self-management: (ability to work in an efficient and structured manner)
16 Critical analysis: (ability to ‘deconstruct’ a problem or situation)
17 Creativity: (ability to be original or inventive and to apply lateral thinking)
18 Listening: (focused attention in which key points are recognized)
19 Written communication: (clear reports, letters etc. written specifically
for the reader)
20 Oral presentations: (clear and confident presentation of information
to a group [also 21, 35])
21 Explaining: (orally and in writing [see also 20, 35])
22 Global awareness: (in terms of both cultures and economics)
C. Process skills
23 Computer literacy: (ability to use a range of software)
24 Commercial awareness: (understanding of business issues and priorities)

continued…
28 Employability

Box 2.1 continued

25 Political sensitivity: (appreciates how organizations actually work and
acts accordingly)
26 Ability to work cross-culturally: (both within and beyond the UK)
27 Ethical sensitivity: (appreciates ethical aspects of employment and acts
accordingly)
28 Prioritizing: (ability to rank tasks according to importance)
29 Planning: (setting of achievable goals and structuring action)
30 Applying subject understanding: (use of disciplinary understanding from
the HE programme)
31 Acting morally: (has a moral code and acts accordingly)
32 Coping with ambiguity and complexity: (ability to handle ambiguous
and complex situations)
33 Problem-solving: (selection and use of appropriate methods to find
solutions)
34 Influencing: (convincing others of the validity of one’s point of view)
35 Arguing for and/or justifying a point of view or a course of action: (see
also 20, 21)
36 Resolving conflict: (both intra-personally and in relationships with others)
37 Decision making: (choice of the best option from a range of alternatives)
38 Negotiating: (discussion to achieve mutually satisfactory resolution of
contentious issues)
39 Teamwork: (can work constructively with others on a common task)

skills; client communication; horizontal communication; problem-solving;

checking skills – noticing and checking for errors.
Yet, despite the statistical apparatus, the claim that this list is taxonomic is
hard to take seriously,2 particularly as the authors point out that they could have
collapsed the ten into a set of eight without doing violence to the data.
Our objection to ‘skills’ is not simply that, as it is used, the concept is muddled
but also that it is hard to label as ‘skills’ many of the things that employers say
they want. This is not simply a matter of semantic purity, because calling something
a skill puts it in a certain class with other things which, presumably, have similar
qualities, similar applications and are to be developed in similar ways. Guile (2002:
252) makes a similar point when claiming that the concept of ‘generic skill is a
much more complex issue than has been acknowledged and therefore presents
curriculum planners with considerable problems’. However, as we shall show in
the next section, the range of employability ‘desirables’ is so great that to call
them all skills, implying that they are all of the same order, seems imprudent. Let
us illustrate the point with reference to Guile’s analysis of generic skills (2002).
He argues that the term, as widely used, refers to:
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 29

• conceptions that see generic skill as a property of the individual;

• conceptions that see it as a relationship between an individual and a work
context;
• skills that are called for when working on routine or ‘tame’ tasks;
• skills needed when working on ‘in-the-wild’ or novel tasks.

It is not obvious that these four are members of the same family, although it is
clear that different learning, teaching, assessment arrangements and opportunities
are needed for their development. If this is a fair analysis of generic skills – and
we are rather sceptical about the notion itself, preferring to talk of generic practices
– then there is all the more reason for unease at the familiar view that
employability = skills.

Employability is more than ‘skills’

We first make the point that employability is more than skills by way of five
paragraphs that report employers looking for a series of qualities and achievements
that can only be called ‘skills’ by turning the term into a vacuous ‘hooray’ word.

1 A survey by the London Financial Times and the Association of Graduate

Recruiters showed that ‘the country’s top graduate employers’ identified ten
‘secrets of career success’. In rank order (with mean scores out of 10 in
parentheses) the ten factors were: interpersonal skills (9.07); other (8.7);
propensity for further training (8.45); numeracy/IT skills (7.73); appropriate
work experience (6.87); type of degree (5.89); gap year (4.84); foreign
language (4.61); university awarding the degree (4.53); degree studied away
from home (3.59) (Kelly, 2002).
2 In Hong Kong the University Grants Committee asks employers about their
satisfaction with graduates under the following headings:
• Chinese language proficiency
• English language proficiency
• Numerical competency
• Information technology literacy
• Analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Work attitude
• Interpersonal skills
• Management skills.
3 Teichler (2000: 87), reflecting on his analyses of ‘the wealth of proposals
made in various countries by employers, committees considering the future
of higher education and the majority of researchers analysing the connections
between higher education and work’, concluded that employable graduates
should:
• Be flexible
• Be able and willing to contribute to innovation and be creative
30 Employability

• Be able to cope with uncertainties

• Be interested in and prepared for life-long learning
• Have acquired social sensitivity and communicative skills
• Be able to work in teams
• Be willing to take on responsibilities
• Become entrepreneurial
• Prepare themselves for the internationalization of the labour market
through an understanding of various cultures, and
• Be versatile in generic skills which cut across different disciplines, and
be literate in areas of knowledge which form the basis for various
professional skills, for example in new technologies (Teichler, 2000: 87).
4 Something of this can be seen in recruitment documents from KPMG, the
accountancy and consulting firm. In the 2000–1 in-tray exercise used to select
new graduate hires they were looking for evidence of the following
‘competency areas’: personal effectiveness, communication, teamwork,
business awareness, and career motivation. Evidence in respect of a further
four was valued: leadership, client orientation, task management, and problem-
solving and innovation (KPMG, 2000). This set was the outcome of a job
analysis questionnaire enquiry of 100 KPMG staff including partners, HR
staff and graduates. ‘The findings were clear’ (KPMG, 2000: A-4).
5 A leading British retailer, Tesco, found leadership a scarce commodity and
identified other qualities:

Other vital attributes include self-sufficiency, innovation, team-working and

brave thinking. ‘We need people who have helicopter vision, who can rise
above everything and see the whole picture’, Ms. Aspinall said, adding that
her company also looked for ‘drive, empathy, adaptability, communication
skills, definitely not indecision’.
(Utley, 2002: 10)

The claim that the language of skills is not sufficient is concisely made by
Bennett and colleagues:

The discourse on generic skills, and all its variants, is confused, confusing
and under-conceptualized … Allied to the above is evidence of the lack of a
common language of skills between higher education and employers.
(Bennett et al., 2000: 175).

One reason for this may be methodological and stem from fundamental
difficulties in capturing practice and then adducing categories, such as lists of
skills, from those imperfect representations:

… workers and supervisors typically simplified and clarified the complexity

of work. Accordingly, job analyses based on verbal accounts by workers or
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 31

supervisors must be approached with caution … the concept of skills

requirements … simplified and distorted our understanding of the work that
occurred on the production floor.
(Darrah, 1997: 267–8)

This hints at ideas that attach to the notion of practical intelligence, which was
introduced in Chapter 1. Practical intelligence is related to specific and contexted
knowledge which is often tacit and resistant to capture. One implication is that
abstraction and generalization may be understandable but they invariably lose
contextual and specific attachments which are significant. Another is that the task
will never totally succeed because some tacit knowledge remains outside our ability
to verbalize (Polanyi, 1967; Donnelly, 1999). In this view, problems with the
language of skills partly stem from the assumption that we can produce useful,
general and detached descriptions of competence and achievement. There are
philosophical and psychological reasons for thinking that success in generalizing
will always be limited and may be outweighed by failures.
Holmes (2001) refers to the significance of context when he talks about the
recruitment process, arguing that

The skills agenda provides little help in understanding the complexity of post-
graduation career trajectories, for it assumes that the process of gaining a job
is simply a matter of matching skills required and skills possessed … what is
also needed is a way of framing … the international processes by which a
graduate and employer engage with each other … of graduates getting in and
getting on.
(Holmes, 2001: 112)

This coincides with Hesketh’s summary of a study of ‘blue-chip’ employers’

graduate recruitment – ‘human capital,’ he said to one of us, ‘is emphatically not
skills’ (Knight, 2002b: 35). His work showed how much depended on the
contingencies of recruitment processes and drew attention to the role of things
other than skills. Cappelli, for example, points to the significance of attitudes.

… recent [US] evidence suggest that some assumptions underlying the

academic skills gap are shaky … surveys suggest that employers see the most
important considerations in hiring and the biggest deficit among new
workforce entrants as being the attitudes concerning work that they bring
with them to their jobs.
(Cappelli, 1995: 109–10)

This quotation suggests that even if the language of skills has some value (and
in Box 2.2 we argue that it does not), it needs to be supplemented, which directs
us to other accounts of employability.
32 Employability

Box 2.2 Skills: a critique

1 The language is overextended. Lists of ‘skills’ contain qualities and
achievements that are not skills. According to the Shorter Oxford
Dictionary, a skill is ‘[T]he ability to do something (esp. manual or
physical) well’ (1993: 2,882). This is important because learning to do
something well is different from learning to be a certain kind of person,
for example. This complicates attempts to assess skills.
2 Like the behavioural objectives they replace, ‘skills’ proliferate. Behavioural
objectives were fashionable from time to time in the twentieth century.
One problem was that it seemed possible to decompose any behaviour
into many component behaviours. Objectives tended to breed. So too
with ‘skills’. Lists burgeon and become unusable.
3 Nouns and verbs. To say that there is a skill of communication is to imply
that there is an object called ‘communication’. When people then talk
of having a skill, objectification is complete. The implicit message is
that there are objects – skills – to be ‘had’. An alternative is to use the
verb, ‘communicate’ and recognize it as a social practice. We do not
‘have’ practices but, as the word implies, we continue to work at perfor-
mances that are contexted and contingent. Successful performance at
one time, in one place and social setting is not a warrant of similar
success elsewhere and elsewhen.
4 Ontological and epistemological issues. The semantic issue is a mani-
festation of philosophical problems. In what sense can ‘skills’ be thought
of as real? If they are in some sense real, what sort of things are they?
Are there to be agreed meanings or are ‘skills’ just local terms of
convenience? How might we know about them? This latter question is
important when it comes to thinking about assessing and developing
‘skills’, whatever they might be.
5 Problems with transfer. The semantic issue is a manifestation of psycho-
logical issues – how far is cognition, for instance, stable and general, as
opposed to situated and contingent? If we follow modern developments
in psychology which have shown that thinking, doing and being vary
from time to time, place to place and context to context, then it is
difficult to suppose that transfer is easy, or even that it is common. See
for instance, Perkins and Saloman’s (1989) critique of accounts that
privilege general cognitive skills. The idea of ‘transferable’ skills ignores
this work. Even if not prefixed with ‘transferable’ the notion of having
a skill still implies it.
In conversation, the psychologist Kurt Fischer agreed that ‘skills’ is
not an ideal term. He recognizes that they are dynamic, not necessarily
stable, and observes that the French have no word for ‘skills’, using
continued…
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 33

Box 2.2 continued

‘competence’ in translation. Psychologists distinguish between com-
petence (can do) and performance (does do). The French phrase invites
this distinction, whereas the English talk of ‘having skills’, without
appreciating the shortfalls that typify performance. Yet Fischer sees it
as a useful word to denote a concern for action (point 3 above) and
context. Whatever the intention, we feel that the contextedness of
skills tends to get overlooked.
6 Generalization: context-free statements. If ‘skills’ is a poor way of referring
to situated practices, then what would it need before we could
generalize from here and now to future performances? How much
sense would it make to produce un-contexted descriptions of
performance? Earlier we doubted (footnote 2) whether it is possible
to produce taxonomies, such as sets of level statements, that insist that
one performance (analysis, for example) is invariably superior to another
(comprehension).

Other views of employability

Not only is there a lack of agreement about what should go in any account of
employability – in a skills-centred account, for instance – but Table 2.1 also
indicates that there is a range of competing accounts. Kelly (2002), for example,
shows that employers in different sectors have different priorities, even when
asked to rank the same set of employability factors, and the Skills plus project
found differences between the public and private sectors which we associated
with the predominance of people/care work in the sample of public sector
employers. Before trying to clarify this babble we want to return to a point made
in Chapter 1, that employability is a relative concept, not an absolute one. As the
labour market fluctuates, so does competition, which means that achievements
that might have been good preparation for employability – web design, for one –
might lose their appeal because of a collapse in one sector of the economy. Hillage
and Pollard capture something of this in their four elements description of employ-
ability as:

• What people have to offer employers – i.e. their ‘assets’ in terms of knowledge,
skills and attitudes
• The extent to which they are aware of what they have got and how they choose
to use it – ‘deployment’
• How they present themselves to employers, and
• The context in which they seek employment.
(Hillage and Pollard, 1998: 12)
34 Employability

The account of employability that we shall develop in the next chapter con-
centrates mainly on their first point, although it recognizes the importance of
awareness of one’s achievements and previews the idea of claimsmaking, which
is introduced in Chapter 8 and has affinities with Hillage and Pollard’s presentation
element. Both deployment and presentation are elaborated in later chapters. Of
the context element we shall say little more, since neither higher education nor
students can do much about the demand for graduate labour.

Higher education and employers’ wish-lists

Suppose that a group of teachers in higher education were given the following list
and told that it was a research-based list of outcomes of the undergraduate years
that teachers in higher education value:

initiative; working independently; working under pressure; oral communi-

cation skills; accuracy, attention to detail; time management; adaptability;
working in a team; taking responsibility and decisions; planning, coordinating
and organizing.
(Brennan et al., 2001: 25)

Would they say that these outcomes4 are at odds with the outcomes they would
like their students to achieve? There might be some reservations but, by and large,
the things that graduates say they need in their workplace and that employers
want are things that teachers – certainly those participating in the Skills plus
project – value. Academics recognize that good learning depends upon some of
these valued achievements and that many of them are likely outcomes of the full
engagements we intend our students to have with complex and worthwhile subject
matter. In later chapters we shall consolidate this claim that there is a great deal of
common ground between the accounts of employability that we favour and the
outcomes we wish our students to display on graduation by arguing that the
pedagogies for employability are congruent with those for good learning in most,
probably all, subject areas.
We accept that vocational, occupational and professional programmes will be
sensitive to employers’ and professional bodies’ views on what students should
learn. We reject claims that there is a basic tension between the achievements that
employers want and those valued by teachers in higher education. Academics’
fears, as summarized in Table 1.1, may be legitimate where employability is under-
stood as the intrusion of ‘skills’ into the curriculum. In Chapter 3 we elaborate the
brief description of employability with which we began in Chapter 1 and, in so
doing, identify similarities between academic values and a concern for employ-
ability, while trying to offer an account that clarifies the proliferation of lists that
has characterized this chapter.
 Employability: more than skills and wish-lists 35

Notes
1 He says elsewhere that ‘in transport and communications, the proportion of graduates
classified to occupations below professional level in 1998 was one in three, up from
26 per cent ten years earlier’ (2002: 453).
2 Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) is the usual point of reference when thinking about
educational hierarchies but it is open to severe, arguably fatal, philosophical and
psychological challenge (Anderson and Sosniak, 1994). ‘Bloom’s framework only
approaches a taxonomy’ (Marzano, 1998: 64). A revised version (Anderson and
Krathwohl, 2001) provides a useful set of loose generalizations about the levels of
demand that tend to be associated with different tasks and processes. If reservations
are valid when applied to internationally-respected work, care should be taken before
accepting lesser claims to have mapped levels, sequences and hierarchies. The common
sense which infuses the UK Quality Assurance Agency’s subject benchmarks may be
mistaken for expertise, to use a distinction drawn by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993).
3 This list was developed from a questionnaire prepared by Dr Ray Wolfenden of the
University of Manchester.
4 These are the ten competencies that graduates said were needed in their current work
in ten European countries.
Chapter 3
36 Employability

A new view of employability

Beyond skills
Until now we have treated employability as a set of achievements, understanding
and personal attributes that make individuals more likely to gain employment and
be successful in their chosen occupations. But what are these achievements?
Consider an influential North American view. Reich (2002) argued that
advanced economies need two sorts of high-level expertise: one emphasizing
discovery and the other focusing on exploiting the discoveries of others through
market-related intelligence and the application of interpersonal skills. In an earlier
book (Reich, 1991) he argued that such professionals, whom he described as
‘symbolic analysts’, shared a series of achievements. ‘Symbolic analysts’, he said,
are imaginative and creative, have at their fingertips relevant disciplinary
understanding and skills and the ‘soft’ or generic skills that enable the disciplinary
base to be deployed to optimal effect. Higher education’s key contribution to
national prosperity lies in development of graduates with such achievements at
their disposal. This means that undergraduate programmes should be concerned
with four areas in particular:

• abstraction (theorizing and/or relating empirical data to theory, and/or using

formulae, equations, models and metaphors);
• system thinking (seeing the part in the context of the wider whole);
• experimentation (intuitively or analytically); and
• collaboration (involving communication and team-working skills).

Educational institutions are not always successful in preparing learners for the
complexity inherent in the symbolic analyst’s role, for learners are often expected
to learn what is put in front of them and to work individually and competitively;
and subject matter may be compartmentalized. Plainly, the education of symbolic
analysts (who are likely to be at the leading edge of economic developments of
one kind or another) challenges some higher education pedagogic practices.
Higher education is emphatically not, however, only about the education of
symbolic analysts. There are other ways in which it can contribute to economic
development: as well as preparing young graduates for employment-related roles,
 A new view of employability 37

it has an acknowledged role in life-long learning – such as in educating further

the middle manager so that they can manage more effectively, in upskilling the
teacher or process worker, and in facilitating the development of active citizenship.
Whatever the strengths of Reich’s account, it is couched in terms of the cognitive
face of employability, although in Chapter 2 we noticed that a number of non-
cognitive elements are associated with employability.
Consider instead the USEM description produced in the Skills plus project,
which used a coarse level of analysis to suggest that employability consisted of
making convincing1 claims in four areas:

• Understanding,
• Skilful practices,2
• Efficacy beliefs, and
• Metacognition.3

Table 3.1 outlines the logic of this analysis, which we elaborate in Chapter 6.
Behind it is an attempt to put thinking about employability on a more scientific
basis, partly because of the need to appeal to academic staff on their own terms by
referring to research evidence and theory, and partly in response to the view that

Policy makers are concerned with the skills and competencies required for
young people to succeed in school or work and to be active participants in
their communities. Linking research findings to such goals will enhance their
value to policy makers.
(Donovan et al., 2000: 28)

The USEM account is an attempt to do just that, to base action to enhance

employability on research findings.

Educational research and the face validity of

USEM
Although unknown to the Skills plus team until 2002, the USEM model aligns
well with work reported by Marzano (1998). He performed a meta-analysis that
used over 4,000 reported effect sizes (an effect size is a standardized measure of
the impact of an intervention, such as a new teaching programme) involving an
estimated 1,237,000 subjects, ranging from kindergarten to college students.4 His
analysis

posits the interaction of four aspects of human thought operating in most, if

not all, situations: (1) knowledge (2) the cognitive system (3) the metacognitive
system (4) the self-system.
(Marzano, 1998: 8)
 38
Table 3.1 The USEM account of employability

Element Explanation Comments

U
Understanding of subject Propositional knowledge in the form of ‘Understanding’ is preferred to ‘knowledge’ because
matter mastery of the subject matter of the degree. knowledge is often confused with retention of information.
Employability

In some 50 per cent of cases, employers are indifferent to the

subject of the degree – they use subject-matter understanding,
symbolized by good grades or degree classes, as a proxy for
critical thinking, perseverance, information-handling, etc.
They tend to use a threshold criterion such as an upper second
class degree but, even where they specify a degree subject,
they often use the other three elements [SEM] when choosing
amongst short-listed applicants.
S
Skilful practices What are often called ‘generic skills’ as well Although ‘skills’ is a widely used term, it may be invalid. The
as subject-specific skills. These can be language encourages at least two fallacies: that one can ‘have’
characterized as procedural knowledge. skills and that they are transferable.
What are often called ‘skills’ are better seen as practices,
situated, not necessarily transferable, improved through
repetition and assessed with difficulty.
E
Efficacy beliefs Belief that one generally can make some Beliefs affect one’s willingness to act. Dweck (1999) refers to
impact on situations and events. This self-theories, a class of beliefs that affect the ways in which
dispositional element can be loosely people, even high achievers, respond to new and difficult
interpreted to refer to other aspects of problems.5
personality. Associated with these self-theories are other beliefs about
what sorts of persons we are and what we can do and can be.
M
Metacognition Awareness of what one knows and can do, ‘Reflection’, which is a metacognitive process, is widely
and of how one learns more. associated with superior performances.
Metacognition is about being mindful and disposed to keep
learning.
 A new view of employability 39

One conclusion of the meta-analysis was that ‘… the constructs of the self-
system, metacognitive system, cognitive system and the knowledge domains appear
to be useful organizers for the research on instruction’ (1998: 128). The analysis
centred on ‘the effect of classroom instructional techniques … defined as alterable
behaviours on the part of teachers or students’ (1998: 66). Although some
differential effects across the grade levels were identified in the meta-analysis,
‘none of these differences was significant (p<0.05, two-tailed)’ (1998: 83). His
conclusions are summarized in Table 3.2.
Marzano concludes that there needs to be clarity about the goals of instruction;
general instructional routines with high power to stimulate learning should be
adopted; and specific instructional techniques should be matched closely to
instructional goals. A later publication (Marzano et al., 2000), drawing upon the
meta-analysis, advises on eleven broad approaches to classroom instruction,
concentrating on fruitful sorts of learning activity.

Table 3.2 Four aspects of human thought, Marzano (1998)

System description Effect of interventions addressing this system

‘The self-system consists of an inter- ‘The five categories of beliefs within the self-
related system of beliefs and processes system appear to control all other aspects of
… the self-system determines whether human thought and action. One’s beliefs can
an individual will engage in or disengage affect the functioning of the metacognitive
in a specific task’ (p. 57). and cognitive systems as well as the
knowledge domains’ (p. 126).
‘The metacognitive system can control ‘The metacognitive system appears to be the
any and all aspects of the knowledge primary vehicle for learning. Specifically,
domains and the cognitive system… it instructional techniques that employed the
has been described as responsible for metacognitive system had strong effects
the “executive control” of all processes’ whether they intended to enhance the
(p. 54). knowledge domains, the mental processes
within the cognitive system, the beliefs and
processes within the self-system, or the
processes within the metacognitive system
itself’ (p. 127).
‘The processes within the cognitive ‘The overall effect for techniques that utilize
system can be organized into four the cognitive system are not as impressive as
categories: (1) storage and retrieval the overall effect size for techniques that
(2) information processing (3) input/ utilize the metacognitive and the self-
output and (4) knowledge utilization. systems’ (p. 106). ‘The metacognitive system
These mental processes act on the seems to be the “engine” for enhancement of
knowledge in the knowledge domains’ the mental processes within the cognitive
(p. 36). system’ (p. 116).
‘The element of human thought that has Knowledge domains enhanced mainly by
been referred to … as knowledge, is techniques that develop cognitive,
comprised of [sic] the information, metacognitive or self-systems.
mental processes and psychomotor
processes that are specific to a given
subject matter (p. 29).
40 Employability

There is a resemblance between the Skills plus USEM summary of research

into employability and Marzano’s scientific analysis of thousands of instructional
interventions. Marzano’s emphasis on metacognition and self-systems, which maps
on to the E and M of USEM, is particularly significant. Since discussion of
employability in the UK has largely been confined to thinking about the content
relevance of degrees and, post-Dearing, about ‘key skills’, the Skills plus view
that metacognition and self-theories were important was a novel one. Marzano’s
evidence that they matter greatly in human learning adds face validity to the USEM
description of elements of employability.
So too with a long-overdue re-working of Bloom’s Taxonomy. As Anderson
and Sosniak (1994) observed, when used as intended, the Taxonomy was a handy
heuristic, especially if its claim to be a taxonomy was not taken too seriously.
However, it was widely used by those who had never read the original and who
were insensitive to the trenchant philosophical critiques of its claims and
ramifications. The new edition (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) is a very different,
more robust creation.6 Its essence is illustrated in Figure 3.1. Attention is drawn
to the significance of metacognitive knowledge (the M of USEM), to procedural
knowledge (S) and to factual and conceptual knowledges (U). Again, the work
was not designed to describe employability but to be a taxonomy (in rather a
relaxed sense) for learning, teaching and assessment. However, the similarities
between this account of learning and the Skills plus description of employability
lend weight to the claim that employability ought to be understood as more than
a few key skills and some knowledge.
There are also similarities between USEM and the model of adaptable learning
suggested by Boekaerts and Niemivirta (2000: 422). They hold that in any situation
(and learning situations vary considerably), ‘declarative [U] and procedural
knowledge [S], cognitive strategies that have been successful in that domain, and
metacognitive knowledge [M] relevant to the learning situation’ come into play

The cognitive dimension

1 2 3 4 5 6
The knowledge dimension Remember Understand Apply Analyze Evaluate Create
Propositional knowledge:
‘Knowing that’
Procedural knowledge:
‘Knowing how’
Metacognitive knowledge

Figure 3.1 The taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessment (after Anderson and
Krathwohl, 2001: 28)
Note:
The factual and conceptual knowledge categories in Anderson and Krathwohl’s taxonomy have
been collapsed, since they can be subsumed under the broader heading of propositional
knowledge, or ‘knowing that’.
 A new view of employability 41

with ‘the students’ self-system, including their goal hierarchy … values, and
motivational beliefs’. (The capital letters U, S and M are our addition.) We read
Boekaerts and Niemivirta’s account of ‘motivational beliefs’ to resemble ‘self-
theories’ [E]. This is consistent with Locke’s account (1997) of motivation to
work which emphasizes efficacy beliefs.
It might be objected that these studies have a great deal to say about learning
and, by extension, teaching and assessment, but they are not analyses of the concept
of employability. One response is that as accounts of learning they describe
fundamental workplace processes: employers expect graduates to learn, fast and
continuously. It is therefore worth taking note of the US National Research
Council’s view that metacognition is important, partly because it can improve
understanding and transfer to new settings and events (Donovan et al., 2000: 15).
Such studies are therefore descriptions of something that is a fundamental aspect
of employability, the capacity for learning.
A second response is that learning is a form of work, and when the learning in
question is the complex and varied learning envisaged by the USEM account,
then the similarities between learning and work are pronounced,7 although recent
graduates do identify differences. Our argument is that similar processes are likely
to drive success in higher education and, with some reservations, in the workplace.
For example, Lent et al. (1994: 112) report ‘a direct relation between self-efficacy,
and academic/vocational performances indices’.
We finish this section with the notion of practical intelligence, introduced in
Chapter 1 as a theory of performance in the workplace and in life generally
(Sternberg, 1997; Hedlund and Sternberg, 2000; Sternberg and Grigorenko, 2000a;
Sternberg et al., 2000). They see practical intelligence as an effective way of
dealing with authentic problems. It is not stable, as academic IQ is supposed to
be, but grows with life experience. It has a domain-specific tinge.

… practical intelligence … may be distinct from the kinds of academic

intelligence associated with school success [and] expertise developed in one
environment (for example, school) may have limited application in other
environments.
(Hedlund and Sternberg, 2000: 155)

Transfer is not presumed. A ‘skill of transfer’ (Bridges, 1993) is needed and

there is no presumption that any transfer will be easy, let alone automatic.
The parallels with USEM are:

• Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, is central to practical intelligence.

Although this resembles USEM’s understanding element, there is a difference
in that USEM simply specifies that evidence of understanding is important to
the employability of new graduates whereas practical intelligence (PI)
emphasizes the role of appropriate, domain-specific knowledge. In terms of
employability, practical intelligence highlights the knowledge that is needed
42 Employability

in employment, whereas USEM suggests that evidence of being able to

understand complex material is often sufficient for getting a job. Of course,
where jobs require specialist expertise, as in the professions, then the difference
of emphasis between USEM and PI is reduced.
• Skilful practices. Both USEM and PI value procedural knowledge. Again, PI
is more context-specific, stressing that procedural knowledge needs to be
appropriate to the tasks in hand.
• Efficacy beliefs. PI has no problem with this area but current work places
more emphasis on procedural knowledge, recognizing that working
successfully involves appropriate self-theories and beliefs.
• Metacognition. PI attends to knowledge that is largely tacit, acknowledging
that versatility and flexibility are associated with good strategies for
identifying, transferring and deliberately developing it.

So too there are parallels between USEM and de Corte’s summary account of
what is involved in developing expertise in a domain:

[It] involves the mastery of four categories of aptitudes, namely:

• A well organized and flexibly accessible domain-specific knowledge base;
• Heuristic strategies for problem analysis and transformation;
• Metacognitive knowledge and self-regulating skills;
• Positive beliefs, attitudes and emotions related to mathematics [or to
whatever other domain is in question].
(De Corte, 2000: 253)

Our claim, then, is that USEM has more scientific substantiation than old notions
that employability = skills.

Advantages and disadvantages of USEM

Advantages
Six advantages are claimed for the USEM account:

1 It is economical, comprising just four headings.

2 Following the principle of subsidiarity, it is permissive, allowing departments
and universities to put under those four headings the understandings, skilful
practices, etc. that they judge best.
3 It is a plausible representation of employer views that also connects with
research into learning and, by extension, into performance as well.
4 It raises the eyes from a skills-and-drill approach to employability.
5 It is consistent with academic values, in the sense that the things to which
USEM points approvingly are also things that many teachers in higher
education also value.
6 It is general enough to be applicable outside England.
 A new view of employability 43

Nine objections
Nine objections and our responses are summarized in Table 3.3.

A tenth objection
The USEM description of employability is open to an objection more serious
than any contained in Table 3.3, namely that it disturbs the curriculum and
established practices.
USEM is broadly neutral in terms of subject understanding if it is understood
as an endorsement of the good learning and teaching practices. The emphasis on
‘understanding’ rather than ‘knowledge’ might be read, though, as a threat.
‘Understanding’ implies the capacity to transfer learning to ill-defined problems
‘in the wild’: it implies transfer and authenticity. The difficulty is that one way of
helping students to perform to levels that might generally be beyond them – to get
a 2:1 or magna cum laude – is to set them tame tasks, providing scaffolding and
support. From the outside, performances then look meritorious but there are
questions to ask about whether they show understanding or just competence on
tame tasks demanding near transfer. USEM could imply more demanding
approaches to the high-stakes assessment of achievement, which would have
implications for teaching, curriculum and percentage of students getting good
GPAs or degree classifications.8
The implications for what have been called skills are also rather ambiguous.
Where there is evidence that existing provision for the development of subject-
specific and generic ‘skills’ is effective and that the set of ‘skills’ is sufficient,
then there may be little need to do anything more than check that care is taken to
help students to recognize what they are learning and to develop ways of
transferring the practices learnt in one context to others. However, we cannot call
to mind any psychological text that commends one-off skills development units
and recall many that say ‘skills’ are best developed by being applied to a range of
worthwhile material. Skilful practices are best developed across a whole
programme in order to provide practice, reinforcement and opportunities to apply
these practices to different content and through a range of increasingly-authentic
tasks. This is a challenge of significance to departments that have dealt with skills
through dedicated skill-building modules, typically at level 1 (or in the freshman
and sophomore years in the USA).
Efficacy beliefs and self-theories are rarely addressed in higher education or
touched upon by counsellors and other pastoral staff. However, Rogers (2002)
and Cannon (2002) explain the importance of taking seriously students’ self-
confidence, sense of self-worth and of promoting malleable thinking over fixed.
The implication is that these are aspects of undergraduate learning that are not
usually considered – a sample of Portuguese students (Vieira, 2002) reported that
teachers have too little care for their self-esteem. Again, any actions would need
to be at least programme-wide, although substantial reviews by Pascarella and
 44

Table 3.3 Objections to the USEM account of employability

Objection Response
1 It is too vague – it is left to teams and departments Partly true. Of course, departments would often resist more prescriptive
Employability

to establish the achievements that employers value formulations. Yet they are likely to welcome guidance and we note that, in the UK,
and which they will incorporate into their work. ESECT and the LTSN Generic Centre are working with LTSN subject centres to
elaborate USEM for departments and teams.
2 The challenge to skills is not welcome. It has been Insofar as the language of skills has prompted enthusiastic amateurs to make
a struggle to get the language of skills into higher assumptions, quite at odds with extensive psychological evidence, that it is possible
education. To excoriate it now risks bringing the to ‘have’ a skill, that skill levels can be specified in general terms, without
educational development movement into disrepute, reference to context and content, and that skills are transferable, then it has been
especially as the distinction between ‘skilful – to put it mildly – unhelpful to employability. No apology is made for challenging
practices’ and ‘skills’ may be too fine for some to it.
perceive.
3 It is not based on sustained research, being just one Partly true. It is open to challenge from other readings. However, it is a reading of
reading of the data. the data that has proved useful, which suggests it has some face validity. Some
correspondence with theories of learning has been demonstrated.
4 The E (efficacy beliefs) is poorly named. The Possibly true, although work on schoolchildren’s learning emphasizes that ‘learned
alternatives, ‘self-theories’ and ‘self-systems’ are helplessness’, which is a loss of efficacy beliefs, is fundamentally corrosive
more helpful. (Peterson et al., 1993; Seligman, 1998).
5 ‘Metacognition’ is jargon. Agreed, but the concept is important and is gaining ground in higher education.
6 It is not certain that higher education can influence There is some evidence that HE can make a difference here (Pascarella and
self-systems. If it can, then there is a marked lack of Terenzini, 1991; Astin, 1997; Perry, 1997; Dweck, 1999). And although less is
knowledge about how to foster appropriate self- known about how to foster E and M than we might like, there are useful pointers.
theories and metacognitive strength.
Objection Response
7 What is known about the development of SEM Agreed. The question is whether the challenge is in the interests of students, then
(skilful practices, efficacy beliefs and metacognition) of employers. If it is, it becomes a question of costs – how much will teachers in
suggests that there is a need to think in terms of higher education have to do (for example, in articulating modules) in order to
whole programmes, not of individual modules, units adopt a programme-wide approach to the sorts of achievements they want
or courses. This is a challenge to practices, values students to be able to claim on graduation?
and systems, notably in the USA and in highly-
modularized universities in the UK.
8 In England, USEM cuts across the priorities Perhaps it supplements, rather than ‘cuts across’. For example, the Department of
identified by the Quality Assurance Agency’s Educational Research at Lancaster University, UK, added a section on beliefs (E
(QAA’s) subject benchmarking statements which and M) to Part 10 of its programme specification.
are, for example, silent on self-systems. It
compounds complexity.
9 Much of this, especially EM, resists assessment. It resists grading but not assessment. See Chapter 8 on assessing ‘fuzzy’ outcomes,
Since we believe that only that which is assessed such as E and M.
gets taken seriously by students, there is the
likelihood that EM, and probably some skilful
practices as well, will not be taken seriously by
anyone. USEM is a tokenist’s charter.
A new view of employability
45
46 Employability

Terenzini (1991) and Astin (1997) imply that the whole higher education environ-
ment may be implicated.
Many programmes, especially professional programmes, promote the virtues
of reflection, which is certainly a process that can contribute to the development
of metacognitive knowledge. The development of programme portfolios
(Cambridge, 2001) and of personal development planning in England (QAA,
2001a) can also sustain reflection and the development of self-knowledge. Notice
the programme-wide emphasis. There is certainly promise here if students can be
induced to participate, but it is most likely to be realized when programmes are
infused by research-informed strategies for helping students to know what and
how they know.
The tenth objection is not that USEM might disturb existing practices in higher
education modules. It is more serious. The objection is that USEM seems to depend
on all courses being brought within the iron grasp of programme specifications,
boards and directors. Worse, the message seems to be that unless university teachers
put themselves into this thrall, little can be done to enhance student employability.
There is certainly truth in the objection that USEM directs attention to
programmes, of which modules are but parts. We stand by the claim that the best
chances of enhancing student employability come from orchestrated, programme-
wide actions, believing that research points strongly in that direction. However,
in Chapter 12 we shall use the concept of ‘tuning’ the curriculum to argue that it
is possible to have programme-wide coherence and, through the application of
subsidiarity, to respect diversity. In Chapter 7 we also show that there are many
individual initiatives of value and argue that a lively co-curriculum9 is an important
adjunct to a good curriculum – but not a substitute for it.

The dynamics of employability

Our approach to employability is a dynamic one. Table 3.4 depicts the contribution
to employability that can be made by experiences prior to higher education and in
the different phases within higher education. It shows transitions and notes some
of the work that has to be done to reduce the disruption that tends to accompany
them. It also indicates that employability does not rest when the first graduate job
is achieved. This is implied by the term ‘portfolio careers’, which was quite a
common way in the 1990s of saying that in the labour market people were as
employable as could be discerned from their portfolio of (updated) skills. In the
face of invasive professional obsolescence, employability needed to be continually
renewed to be sustainable. Actions that may groom students to get a fair job on
graduation are not really contributing to employability unless they include the
development of expertise (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993) and the enhancement
of practical intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2000). Such strategies might enhance
an institution’s employment rates but unless they are dovetailed with the systemic
good learning that makes for sustainability, then they contribute little to
employability.
Table 3.4 A dynamic view of employability

Moments in the transition to graduate employments Implications for employability

1 Awareness of the employability process It is common to find naïve beliefs about the value of a degree in the labour
market and lack of awareness about employer expectations. Schools and
colleges can challenge this through personal development planning and
careers advice that highlights the significance of USEM or some similar
broad account of employability.
2 Entry to higher education Good induction arrangements will last longer than a week or two – a
semester or year is better. Students need to learn the ‘rules of the game’
including the ‘employability game’; begin identifying achievement and
supporting evidence; experience teaching, learning and assessment.
3 The first year experience Methods that promote learning that is consistent with USEM or some
similar account; succeed as learners.
4 On course Acquiring ‘employability assets’ – developing well-grounded claims to the
elements described by USEM or a similar description. Representing
achievements in convincing forms; learning to present claims of achievement
5 Job getting in various ways to different employers with different requirements;
identifying appealing career opportunities and learning to deal effectively
with applications, interviews and assessment centres.
6 Entry to the workplace In the midst of disorientation, using metacognition and self-theories to cope.
7 Career development with workplace learning Identifying development needs and collecting evidence of the learning that is
occurring informally and non-formally. Career planning and management.
A new view of employability
47
48 Employability

Having identified employability as an important component of life-long

learning, we shall now concentrate upon the undergraduate years, noting that the
Perspectives series of papers on employability has papers on the pre-HE experience
(Ward and Pierce, 2003), the first year (Yorke, 2003a), the later undergraduate
years (Yorke and Knight, 2003) and transitions to the workplace (Harvey, 2003).
In Chapters 6–13 we describe some small and larger-scale ways in which the
curriculum can be geared to enhance employability. First, though, we consolidate
the claims for the USEM description (Chapter 4), complement it with an analysis
of how studying an Arts subject (English) can lead to various kinds of employment
(Chapter 5) and then in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 consider general implications for the
curriculum and assessment.

Notes
1 How convincing the claims prove to be is related to the state of the labour market in
which individual graduates pitch themselves. Claims convincing in one industry or
region may not work in others, while claims made by ‘blue-eyed’ social groups seem
to be more likely to convince than similar claims made by less advantaged ones.
2 Early project papers referred to ‘skills’ because the term had wide currency. For reasons
explained in Box 2.2, we have slowly moved our public work over to the phrase
‘skilful practices’.
3 In the early days of the project ‘strategic thinking’ was preferred to ‘metacognition’,
largely for fear that ‘metacognition’ would be seen as jargon. We now think that
‘metacognition’ is becoming accepted and appreciate the advantages of a term which
has attracted a great deal of psychological research.
4 His analysis omits some forms of research that are not amenable to meta-analysis
(Light and Pillemer, 1982).
5 Her thinking centres on a distinction between fixed self-theories (I am intelligent,
outgoing, caring) and malleable, or incremental, theories (I can behave intelligently,
outgoingly, caringly by thinking well and working at it). The ‘dynamic, incremental
view of human reality … allows more room for change … [and] may reduce the
likelihood of helpless responding and promote mastery-oriented coping in the face of
aversive events’ (Dweck, Chiu and Hong, 1995: 283).
6 In the 2001 ‘taxonomy’ there can be overlap between the six cognitive processes:
‘analyze’ is not always easier than ‘evaluate’ and there must be doubts about the
assumption that ‘conceptual knowledge’ always precedes ‘procedural knowledge’.
There is a competing view that levels of difficulty reside in tasks: ‘tasks have a
pull to certain levels’ (Fischer, 2002). Turiel (2002: 290) adds that people appear to
be inconsistent in their judgements, which poses assessment problems. In fact, ‘these
might not be inconsistencies but variations in the applications of different judgements
to different contexts’. These findings, which fit with other research into ‘situated
cognition’, have significant implications for attempts to design progression into degree
programmes and for the certification of competence.
7 Employers and new graduate hires both talk about the need to work to deadlines,
under pressure, to a budget and with a keen eye to client satisfaction.
8 Worried by ‘grade inflation’, Harvard has decided to limit the proportion of A grades
it awards, a rare example of a university voluntarily reducing the percentage of good
and outstanding degrees it will award. However, grade inflation is multi-causal and
not amenable to simplistic remedies (Yorke, 2002a).
 A new view of employability 49

9 ‘Co-curriculum’ is a North American term which conveniently refers to all those

arrangements made outside the ‘regular’ curriculum for the educational enrichment
of the undergraduate years. While referring to things that are optional, it avoids the
unfortunate connotations of the English term ‘extra-curricular’. We say more about it
in Chapter 7.
Chapter 4
50 Employability

A research study of
employability

Views from the workplace

As described in Chapter 3, USEM provides a way of thinking about employability
that is at a sufficient level of abstraction to be widely applicable as a heuristic.
This chapter looks at what recent recruits into employment and their more
experienced colleagues have to say about employability.
As part of the Skills plus project, semi-structured interviews were held with 97
recently appointed graduate employees and 117 colleagues from the same
organizations who had been in employment for rather longer. Some of the latter
were fulfilling a supervisory role in respect of the new recruits, others were simply
more experienced co-workers. Unlike much research into ‘the views of employers’,
the interviews avoided, as far as possible, those with roles such as ‘human resources
manager’ for three reasons: first, existing research has been sensitive – perhaps
too sensitive – to the views of such people; second, the consequence tends to be a
bias towards larger organizations and away from small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs); and third – and most importantly from our point of view –
‘employability’ as understood close to where the graduate recruit’s work is actually
being carried out may be rather different than that as understood at the top of an
organization. In this chapter we use the term ‘senior’ (coded S) as a shorthand to
denote those of our 214 interviewees who had been in employment for some time
(irrespective of status in the organization) and ‘junior’ (coded J) to denote those
relatively recently recruited into employment.
The interviewers were people with experience of the educational service, some
having retired from higher education. The interviews were recorded in the majority
of instances, and the recordings were transcribed. Where this was not possible,
notes were made of the interviews. All interviewees had been informed of the
purpose of their interview and had signed an agreement for the interview data to
be used on an anonymized basis.

The informants
Three-quarters of the junior informants were 26 or younger at the time of interview.
There was an even split as regards gender, 46 being male and 49 female.1 Forty-
nine had obtained an arts-related degree, and 34 a science-related degree, with 65
 A research study of employability 51

obtaining upper second class honours or better. At the time of the interviews, 76
had been in their post for less than 18 months. Forty of the junior employees were
in public sector posts, and 53 in the private sector. Where the size of the organization
was identified, 63 of the junior employees were in organizations of more than 100
people, and only 17 in smaller organizations.
Of the more senior employees, 78 had been in full-time employment for ten or
more years. There were proportionately fewer men than women in this group (50
as against 66). The senior informants divided evenly between public (56) and
private (57) organizations which, where their size was identified, were pre-
dominantly large (71, compared with 22 identified as small). The senior employees’
relationships with the junior employees varied: 18 were co-workers; 3 mentors;
49 supervisors or line managers; and 25 senior managers.
There was a bias in the interviews towards the practical because informants
were graduates in employment and those working alongside them. The research
approach reported here is likely to have brought to the fore comments on practical
intelligence and may have tended to overshadow an appreciation of academic
intelligence in action.
We organize this summary of these interviews around the USEM account, with
which informants’ views were broadly consistent. We acknowledge that such a
complex data set might be analyzed in different ways but choose USEM as our
point of reference on account of the advantages reviewed in Chapter 3. There are
methodological difficulties in all such analyses (Knight and Saunders, 1999) and
we present ours as one careful and plausible reading of a substantial archive.

The broad picture2

Junior employees
Asked what had helped them to gain employment in their graduate jobs, the junior
employees’ responses pointed to four general reasons:

• Degree experience
• Personal qualities
• Communication skills
• More pragmatic aspects.

In some instances, the academic nature of the degree programme was important
(as would be expected). In addition to subject-specific expertise, mention was
made of more general employment-related capabilities enhanced through degree-
level study. However, set against this was the suggestion by a few informants that
their degree programme had not helped them to develop the pragmatic under-
standing and skills3 that they found themselves needing in employment – here,
time-management, prioritizing of work, and working with others were noticeable.
Some informants also mentioned an absence of practical, ‘real-world’ experience;
52 Employability

a lack of attention to communication and general interpersonal skills; and a lack

of training in information technology.
Personal qualities were significant in the 97 junior employees’ minds. They
produced, between them, 108 attributes which could be located in the general
area of personal qualities. Allaway, in analyzing the data for the Skills plus project,
notes tendencies for the type of attribute to vary with the type of organization in
which these employees were working. There was a tendency for those in the
industrial sector to produce attributes such as ‘active’, ‘cope with pressure’,
‘extrovert’, ‘leader’, ‘proactive’, ‘reliable’, and ‘self-driven’, whereas those from
the health and social services sector were more likely to suggest attributes such as
‘approachable’, ‘concern for people’, ‘empathetic’, ‘helpful’, ‘self-aware’, and
‘sensitive’. This raises the issue of the psychological ‘fit’ between the graduate
and the organization’s value system – an issue that awaits further elucidation.
Ability in various aspects of communication, such as listening, presentation
and negotiation, were believed to have been significant in the acquisition of the
junior employees’ current jobs.
The vast majority (81 of 93 valid responses) of junior employees considered
work experience (often relatively low-level and casual) to have contributed
considerably to their employability. It demonstrated the desire to work, exposure
to – and awareness of – more than just an academic world and, in their terms, the
development of relevant skills. In a fair number of instances the work placement
had been of direct relevance to their current job (notably for posts in industry and
in health or social services). For a few, the work experience had been followed by
recruitment to the same organization.
A junior informant from a small organization (138 J) pointed to the importance
of being multi-skilled, since it was unable to operate on the basis of fairly rigid
role-definitions.

Senior employees
The 117 senior employees (whose status, it will be recalled, varied within their
organization) pointed to five main groups of characteristics when describing what
their organization sought in applicants:

• Quality of, and performance in, education

• Knowledge and skills
• Personal characteristics
• Communication skills
• Work experience.

Forty-seven informants made explicit reference to the value of work experience,

but this may under-represent the true picture since some of the other characteristics
mentioned may have been developed through work experience without being
explicitly acknowledged.
 A research study of employability 53

Educational experience had two components – the quality of the higher

educational experience (where the perceived quality of the institution was, in some
instances, taken as a criterion), and the performance achieved by applicants on
their programmes of study (though, as is noted later, the occasional informant
was less concerned about the degree performance than about the potential of the
applicant to fulfil the requirements of the job).
The ‘knowledge and skills’ group of characteristics subsumed not only specialist
and ‘generic’ knowledge, but also ‘soft skills’ such as those related to working
with others (which spill over into communication skills). The desirability of
communication skills aligned quite closely with what the junior employees said,
with self-presentation, oral and written communication and other interactive skills
prominent. One, implicitly critical of the capacity of graduates to express
themselves, stated:

I expect [higher education] to teach them the difference between good and
bad grammar.
(183 S)

though the comment might in part be addressed to the compulsory stage of

education.
More than 550 references were made to personal characteristics, hinting at
their heavy weighting in the judgement of employability. These could be loosely
categorized under headings such as intelligence; thoughtfulness; motivation;
responsibility; self-efficacy; and sociability.
When higher education was criticized, these informants used terms that were
similar to the criticisms made by the junior employees. Personal qualities and
practical, work-related knowledge and skills dominated the criticism, with commu-
nication and general interpersonal skills also featuring quite strongly. Against
this, it was recognized that some of these characteristics would be developed in
the home, in groups outside the educational field, and through leisure activities of
various kinds.
One comment from a senior employee relates to the economic implications for
graduates of their increasing number:

I think sometimes the universities give a slightly unrealistic view of what to

expect when you go out and get your first job … they will … say to you
‘When you’ve got this qualification you will … get a £20,000-a-year job’ and
in the real world it doesn’t always happen like that, in fact it’s quite rare. So
the biggest thing … a university could do would be perhaps lower the
expectations slightly. We don’t have many apprenticeship schemes in this
country any more but effectively that is what you’re doing …
(162 S)
54 Employability

Understanding

Subject understanding
There is a fair amount of evidence from the senior employees that, where the
degree subject has a direct relevance to the field of employment, the graduate’s
disciplinary understanding is taken as read (though in some cases there was pressure
on the applicant to demonstrate their disciplinary capabilities by asking them
how their disciplinary understandings could be turned to useful account). Where
the employer was less concerned about the actual subject(s) studied, and was
more interested in a general capability, the emphasis in the interviews veered
towards more general attributes and performances. In other words, more than
‘just a degree’ was wanted: for example, one senior employee said:

… if all the person had was their degree then they wouldn’t have got shortlisted.
(185 S)

However, one senior employee (120 S) was concerned that ‘good workers’
might get weeded out during the selection process whilst academic high fliers
progressed (here we might see ‘knowing that’ given precedence over ‘knowing
how’). Yet, for another senior employee, the classification of the degree was not
the most important thing:

I’m looking for a balance between accomplishment at a technical level, in

terms of a reasonable degree. I’m not after a first, or even a 2:1 when it comes
to that. Basically, someone who’s gone through the course and understands
what they’ve done, but also somebody with a personality … to me the
personality side is always 51 per cent … because unless you can get on with
the various departments … your job can be made ten times harder, or if you
can get on with them it’s made ten times easier.
(180 S)

Academic knowledge may miss the multiple perspectives that the world of
employment desires. One junior employee criticized her programme for focusing
on the consumer at the expense of considering the supply side:

Everything’s got to be manufactured to a price, for a reason. Although we did

study economics and marketing we were kind of brainwashed too much,
throughout the course, on consumerism and the end user, not the implications
for the manufacturer.
(179 J)

She was unhappy with the extent to which her programme had prepared her for
the complexity of the computer systems that had confronted her when she arrived
in the retail industry:
 A research study of employability 55

… a lot of the retails have got new specification systems, which are like big
computer databases and I’d never seen one before, and I think that’s really
bad, that you get to your first job and you’ve never even experienced something
typical of the retail industry. A lot of it is theory, and probably lacking a few
essential skills for today’s retailing.
(179 J)

Another (161 J) had taken it into his own hands to develop the skills in
information technology that he needed for the career that he had envisaged.

General understanding
A lot of interviews emphasized the relevance of general understandings – often
the kind of tacit knowledge that a person picks up when they are immersed in a
situation, without it necessarily having to be spelt out. The acquisition of work-
related understandings has, of course, been a longstanding justification for
sandwich (or co-operative) education, in which the student spends time in some
form of work placement as part of their studies. In recent times (and probably
stimulated by the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative of the late 1980s)4 the
justification has been extended in the UK to programmes other than those
designated as sandwich programmes. One junior informant pointed to work
experience as a way of determining whether a particular kind of employment
would suit her:

… it’s OK doing the theory but you might not like it when you actually get
the job.
(152 J)

Another offered a much more positive testimonial to the value of work

experience:

[The work experience] just kind of lifted me off really into what I’m doing
now and helped me with new skills.
(161 J)

The value of general work experience to a potential employee was stressed in

a number of interviews, one senior employee for example noting that

… we would expect everybody to have had some sort of work experience,

even if it’s holiday working, part-time working … just any working environ-
ment where they’ve had to work with people, understand some of the politics
that goes on and maybe see if they understand any of the financial aspects as
well.
(117 S)
56 Employability

Not unrelatedly, senior employees pointed to some applicants’ poor appreciation

of how the world of employment worked, one noting that

There are things that [people coming out of an academic environment] just
don’t seem to have a clue about.
(182 S)

This was given a more explicit focus by another who referred to graduates’
scant awareness of hierarchy and bureaucracy.
(186 S)

Knowing ‘how the world works’ requires practical experience as well as

academic learning. As one senior employee put it succinctly:

Common sense real life isn’t as in the textbooks.

(196 S)

Another (210 S), commenting on a junior employee, noted that she had not yet
acquired the world-wisdom through life-experiences ‘to be able to make … on
the hoof judgements’.
However, it was clear that some junior employees had appreciated the value of
prior engagement in the world of work:

[part-time work] makes you more, I would say, streetwise, more reliant on
yourself. [He worked in a bar and as a Student Union door steward.] [You]
need to be very confident in that sort of situation because you do get situations
that can arise that are rather nasty … you need to be level-headed as well,
’cos if something does occur and you’re responsible for that you have to react
very quickly, or there’ll be first aid …
(171 J)

The year out was one of the biggest aspects of why I can hit the ground
running with this company. People who have not done a year out … are not
used to all the day-to-day issues that I had to deal with in surveying.
(181 J)

… the actual placement that I undertook gave me a chance to have an insight

into statutory work, so that filled in a massive void that I felt was missing on
the course … they just talk of law in general, they do a lot on the Children’s
Act, but it’s much different to the things written in practice and actually
applying the stuff.
(122 J)

The differences between academic and practical understandings were caught

 A research study of employability 57

in a number of interviews. A former mature student pointed to the advantages that

she had regarding her understanding of how things ‘worked’ in employment:

… when [younger students] come out of university it’s a different kettle of

fish altogether. I was prepared [as a mature student] for what it’s like to work
in the proper workforce whilst students aren’t…. I just think that where the
university let us down was … the placements should have been longer [than
3 weeks].
(128 J)

Another junior employee had come to wonder whether the balance of her
academic programme in nursing had been optimal:

… maybe there was too much … theory behind the management and different
philosophies of management, rather than practical advice about how to manage
certain situations and how to manage a ward, and what you would do if this
happens, or that happens.
(213 J)

Of course, what she may have missed is the deferred impact of theoretical
understandings when she is faced with other kinds of management challenge as
her role in the organization evolves.
The need to bring formal academic understandings into play with practical
understandings is a theme of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s analysis (1993) of the
development of expertise. There are examples in the interview transcripts:

… you can read things and you can be taught things but it’s very different to
actually being in a room where you’ve got a family who are in the middle of
a heated conflict and trying to work out how you actually manage that situation
and deflate some of the anger there. So you can read but you actually have to
get involved and practise those different scenarios [sometimes by observing,
sometimes by viewing a video and commenting on it]. Shadowing can be
difficult because of the confidentiality, etc.
(135 S)

… you might read all the theories, say about attachment theory, you might be
very clear what attachment theory is and how it should work, but it’s very
different when you’re translating it into this family or family A, or family B or
family C. They might respond in a totally different way and it’s crucial that you
don’t over-interpret that response from a purely theoretical perspective, that
you’ve got to put it in context as a whole this family’s functioning ’cos they
don’t just function, you know you can’t just pigeon-hole families, you can’t
just look and say ‘this is what’s happened to this child so this is how this child
is going to respond’ because A and B doesn’t equal C, there are a whole host of
58 Employability

other issues so you need to be very open-minded, flexible and interpret as a

whole, really, and not just individual aspects of the same situation.
(123 S)

Local knowledge is similarly important:

… what they need to do is [to interpret] the things you’ve learnt at university
into local practice, about what we do here in [Town A] ’cos how we do it here
… is different to how we do it in [City B] which is different to how they do it
in [City C and Town D and Town E] and everywhere else, so people need to
learn local policies and procedures and about how we then interpret what we
do.
(123 S)

… even though [the authority’s procedures stand up very well nationally] the
inadequacy of the systems is just unbelievable – nothing is logical, nothing
logically follows, nothing triggers off another system automatically, you have
to know about all the systems and that is very hard.
(120 S)

Organizational understanding
The need to contextualize one’s employment within an understanding of the
organization was mentioned by a senior and a junior employee from very different
work environments. In a factory, for example,

it’s as important to know what’s happening out there as it is doing your job.
( 178 S)

and in the field of law enforcement

The ability to understand the workings of a police force is always important

even if you’ve got a clerical job in finance or something like that ’cos it is
very unique – it is one of the emergency services and ultimately the work that
support staff do could influence whether somebody dies or lives after a police
officer responds to an incident.
(161 J)

However, the breadth of desirable understandings extends beyond the boundary

of the organization to include

wider issues, sociology issues, whatever the latest White Paper is …

(214 S)
 A research study of employability 59

Enterprise
Some senior employees in private organizations thought that new recruits ought
to possess more commercial acumen than they appeared to have. This reinforces
the argument for work experience and ties in with the broader point, made earlier,
that graduates needed to have developed their understanding of the world of
employment – provided that the work experience is sufficiently focused to enable
students to gain this kind of understanding.
The issue of enterprise was picked up, albeit negatively, by one senior employee
who stated that graduates analyzed but tended not to come forward with ideas.
Although they may have researched a topic whilst studying,

they didn’t then come forward and say ‘As a result of my research I think it’d
be absolutely terrific if you make green sponge puddings’, for example.
(200 S)

There is more than a hint of creative problem-solving in the preceding example.

Creativity was more explicitly valued by a junior employee who saw the value of
being able

to think outside the boundaries of normal [job] activity and be able to come
up with solutions …
(161 J)

There was, particularly amongst senior employees from SMEs, an expectation

that graduates should exercise their initiative, and not wait to be told what to do.
The strongest expression of this came from one senior employee who was also at
pains to point out that trying to achieve success at the expense of others (‘over
bodies’) would not be acceptable and would be counter-productive:

If there’s something that needs attacking, that needs doing, you grab it. You’re
never given a job, you know: it’s up to you, you make your own, but not
through [playing] politics. That won’t work here.
(196 S)

The junior employee in this SME appears to have ‘got the message’:

… when I was … offered the chance to maybe do a little work somewhere

else [in the SME], I made the most of it and did as well as I could, and I
showed an interest. I mean I am interested and I grabbed …
(195 J)

A senior employee of an SME was very definite that the business needed people
who were proactive and not reactive. The demands of the business were such that
60 Employability

there was no room for taking things easy, or spinning tasks out unnecessarily. The
informant put it bluntly:

I want somebody who compacts their work to make more time available.
(200 S)

Skills
We remarked earlier in this chapter that the languages of skills were commonly
used. Our problem is that they were used too readily, with the result that it is not
possible to say much that is useful about ‘skills’. However, most of the comments
relating to skills were references to generic achievements, not to site- and sector-
specific ones. One aspect of ‘skills’ which did attract comment that resonates
with perceptions from elsewhere was the graduate’s ability to organize what they
had to do within the time available to them. There was also a distinct group of
comments about the significance of interpersonal skills.

Organizing
Organizing and prioritizing one’s work was widely noted as being important –
something that one might infer from the transcripts that had perhaps not been
sufficiently recognized by the junior employees when they were students. Yet the
changing nature of higher education in the UK and Australia (and wherever students
are having to combine study with part-time work and – in some cases – caring for
dependants) makes prioritization a necessity. Prioritization could be seen in terms
of self-organization or time-management, which a preliminary survey of
undergraduates has indicated is an aspect of weakness (Leon, 2002).
The organization of paperwork is critical to success in a number of work
environments, especially where others have to be able to find and use the relevant
information:

… if you look at our team we all operate so differently and some of us are
organized and some of us aren’t, but … organizing your time, organizing
your files, is very – actually to be honest that’s very underrated, because the
times when I’ve gone to people’s files to try to find information and they’re
just in no order, it’s infuriating.
(121 S)

Interpersonal skills
The ability to work with a range of people was widely mentioned in the interviews.
Not only was being a ‘team player’ seen as important, but so too were being
culturally aware and able to relate fairly easily to those with whom one came into
contact. One recently employed graduate acknowledged the value that he had
 A research study of employability 61

extracted from working with refuse collectors. He had also travelled to other
countries and had learned their languages, and therefore had an appreciation of
other cultures that appeared to be unrivalled amongst the sample of junior employee
informants.
Treating people with respect, and ‘speaking their language’ were important, as
was not pretending to expertise that one did not possess:

… being able to handle people is a skill, being able to talk to the public in a
language they understand, you’re dealing with a typical northern town where
people can smell a rat and they know when [you’re bullshitting].
(131 S)

Some were faced with the need to deploy the skills of advocacy and persuasion
(177 J). Empathy, too, was important, and some of this could only come as a
consequence of experience in the job:

… the ability to leave your office and go and face people in the community,
not knowing how those people will be in terms of their social situation, their
mental health and also how they’re going to perceive you and deal with that
social-work jargon … that requires a degree of skill that I don’t think a graduate
would necessarily come with … [it] only comes with practical experience …
you don’t need a social-work qualification … to be able to think about how
people function under stress, under difficult situations.
(136 S)

However, as a junior employee (137 J) in the same area pointed out, one had to
be aware of the limits to which one could go in empathizing with clients.
Some new recruits had appreciated the need for the kind of sensitivity that
Goleman (1996) terms ‘emotional intelligence’ when dealing with people. There
is, in some jobs, a particular requirement for tact and diplomacy:

you had to be sensitive sometimes if you had a larger lady [in the gym] and
she wanted to lose weight … saying what she wanted to hear but you’d tell it
to different people in different ways, you’d know one person would want
motivating in one way and another person would want motivating in another
way …
(148 J)

Diplomacy was not always apparent, even between professionals. One junior
employee, exposed to a situation in which divergences in professional judgement
had emerged, had been concerned about the manner in which the disagreement
had been conducted and she seemed to have had a sensitivity perhaps lacking in
her colleagues:
62 Employability

I just felt that it was very inappropriate to slag off another professional in
front of clients.
(137 J)

Efficacy
In this section the concept of self-efficacy is treated broadly, encompassing various
aspects of a personal commitment to success and a belief that, even if the person
does not succeed every time, they can make a difference to many situations in
which they find themselves.

Motivation
A number of recent employees said that they had strong self-motivation. For one,
it was explicitly acknowledged in finding, as an undergraduate, a work placement.
For another, self-motivation was maintained by inventing short-term targets,
exemplified in part-time work in a bar:

I’ve probably set myself little challenges in my head to … serve three people
before the next person’s served one, and just little things like that … keeping
myself interested.
(175 J)

Determination and commitment

Determination (or will) was often mentioned as a desirable attribute, which carries
strong connotations of commitment. This was caught by two recent recruits and
one more senior colleague:

I’ll get my teeth into things and won’t let go until I’m satisfied that I’ve
exhausted it or [found] whatever I’m looking for.
(140 J)

… if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well, and I take pride in what I do,
and I see it through to the end, quite determined, instead of saying ‘oh I
haven’t got the time’, pass it on to someone else, you know. I stay late if
something needs doing, although I’m not a workaholic or anything… [laughs].
(179 J)

However, only the third of these informants referred to the possibility that
determination might be ‘developable’:

I guess that’s all to do with the personality, the strong will, the confidence,
which I think may not be there in the university training. Whether it should
 A research study of employability 63

be or not, I don’t know. I think that strong will or maturity is something that
has to be taught. I mean some people are strong willed anyway, but I think
you can improve people who aren’t strong willed, and that’s what’s happened
with [new appointee].
(178 S)

Confidence
Self-confidence is obviously a desirable attribute. A person who believes that
they can achieve something is more likely to be successful than someone who
lacks self-belief. One senior employee referred to a ‘can do’ spirit. Another referred
to an optimistic approach. One recent recruit said:

I’m one of the best and that was the motivation. I can make it, as long as I put
the work in.
(140 J)

Confidence is close to self-belief, and was often identified as a desirable

characteristic. Important as it was, it needed to be tempered by a realization that
some decisions had to be made on the basis of incomplete information:

somebody who has confidence, who has a personality, who can stand up
and not necessarily be the expert – you’re far from being the expert in
terms of knowledge – but have the confidence to stand up there and make a
decision …
(173 S)

Dealing with people could be potentially tricky, particularly if one were the
bearer of unwelcome news. As one senior employee of a statutory agency remarked,
for the agency’s employees, confidence was

one of the key things because they do have to be going out and speaking to
people who in most cases are not going to be best pleased with some of the
information they’re receiving.
(185 S)

Assertiveness
One junior employee had been very assertive, as a student, in seeking help with
the preparation of her curriculum vitae and had had to push the institution’s careers
service hard to get what she wanted:

Interviewer: Did you have to go to them and was it optional?

Graduate: Yes I had to go to them; yes, they didn’t come to me.
64 Employability

Interviewer: So you were motivated, then?

Graduate: Yes, I pestered them.
(112 J)

Assertiveness was applauded by one senior employee:

… they very quickly seize on [new ideas] and they want to be part of any
working parties or initiatives, and they very quickly sort of, suss out exactly
what is expected of them, and they’re very organized in their approach and
being able to, then, implement something. Er – not to be fazed, say, in a large
working party or something … able to argue your point and not be intimidated
at all by other people …
(212 S)

Autonomy
A few junior employee informants made reference to their development of
autonomy.5 One referred to moral courage and the need to lead by example:

moral courage … lead by example. Very easy to go with the pack; never easy
to stand up and say ‘No that’s wrong, we shouldn’t do that’ [to subordinates
and superiors].
(174 J)

Another pointed to the need to stand one’s ground:

the ability not to be swayed by other professionals – I don’t mean to be arrogant

by that.
(137 J)

As an undergraduate, this informant had demonstrated her autonomy, arguing

successfully for the right to undertake a particular project despite the initial
objections of the academic staff involved.
Other informants (214 S; 122 J; 160 J) noted the importance of being aware of,
and acting within, ethical standards of behaviour in respect of their work.

Coping with stress

Employment, as life in general, throws up stressful situations. Being able to cope
with stress of various kinds was noted as important by both senior and junior
employees. A new employee might, for example, have to come to terms with the
recognition that what they had learned in higher education might not align perfectly
with what was needed in the employment situation – research into transitions,
summarized in Chapter 1, predicts that there will often be a period of apparent
 A research study of employability 65

‘de-skilling’ as academic understandings are challenged by practical exigencies.

For example, report-writing in the workplace often has to be brief and to the
point, in contrast to the expectations of higher education for as complete an analysis
as possible within a comparatively generous word-limit.
New recruits, especially in SMEs, were expected to come to terms quickly
with the demands made of them. One senior employee acknowledged the shock
that this had engendered in a new appointee:

I think you expect almost to come in and, all right, we’ll mollycoddle you for
one year or two years [laughs] but that doesn’t happen here. … And I think
that, really for [new appointee] especially … it really was a bit of a shock for
her.
(178 S)

Calmness under pressure was valued, as was not being fazed by not knowing
the answer when asked a question. Some involved in ‘people organizations’,
ranging from social work to the armed services, had to be able to cope with the
emotional impact of their work.

Metacognition
Some senior employees observed that there was a need for a reflective approach
to be adopted regarding work. They expected it to have been developed in the
degree programme:

If someone … said they’d got a degree … I would expect them to have …

been doing certain things that would make them aware of … the way they
think …
(214 S)

The expectation was that new recruits would be sufficiently self-aware and
self-confident to know when they needed to seek advice from colleagues and
when they would be expected to handle things themselves. One senior employee
said:

… we are looking about them having some insight as to when you might
need to talk to your manager, when you might need to talk to your colleagues
or when you can be expected to resolve those issues yourself …
(119 S)

Some junior employees had acknowledged that what they had already done
was of value in this respect, and they had been proactive in their self-development.
66 Employability

One, for instance, had undertaken an intermediate-level course on counselling

which helped in communicating with and ‘getting alongside’ people.
Another had been motivated to undertake a personal SWOT (strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, and had appreciated its value in her
chosen caring profession.:

It is an exercise that I have done for myself, at home, analyzing my strengths

and weaknesses and opportunities, just because I felt I needed to do it, not
because it was part of my training.
(179 J)

Learning to learn
There was a general, and unsurprising, acceptance that employees would need to
continue their learning, whether through formalized continuing professional
development or otherwise. As one senior employee noted, there was a need for
people to be prepared to develop their talent and skills; another said that there was
no place for ‘know-alls’. The requirement for the ability to ‘learn how to learn’
was captured by one who said:

… the skills and knowledge base is so wide that if you haven’t got the skills
or the knowledge you need to know how to find them and you need to be
fairly independent …
(120 S)

Some new employees appreciated the importance of keeping up to date:

you’ve got to keep on top of the game, you’ve got to know exactly what’s
going on especially in the fashion world … you have to be up to date with
everything, all the new technology as well …
(146 J)

I thought if I wanted to stay in this then I have to force myself to learn fast
and I did that and it’s worked.
(140 J)

The assertiveness implicit in learning to learn was recognized by one junior

employee:

I’m not frightened of asking questions, me. I’m not a [person] who’ll sit
there and think ‘God, I can’t do this’ and stick my head down and just ignore
it. I’ll ask questions and that’s the way I learn and find out things …
(128 J)
 A research study of employability 67

Pr o b l e m s
Researchers, including ourselves, have explored the meanings of employability
as a construct. Given that the development of employability has become a direct
policy priority in England and is an implied priority in many other countries, such
research brings with it a tacit syllabus for the promotion of ‘employability’ and
directs the attention of higher education towards a new set of concerns, such as
students learning to present themselves in an appropriate way. This is double-
edged. On the desirable side is the educational virtue of helping students to
appreciate just what they have to offer to employers – something that some (and
perhaps particularly those in non-vocational disciplines) lack. One senior employee
expressed some frustration with the inability of some graduates to recognize that
they had, in fact, already developed considerable skill in time-management:

Mature students juggling home life and further study … I think ‘Come on,
you can see that they’ve got good organizational skills, they must do!’ I mean
they’ve certainly got a bit more about them …
(214 S)

Pilot work with ten unemployed graduates (Knight and Knight, 2002),
undertaken as part of the Skills plus project, hinted that at least some had not
made as strong a case for employment as their achievements might have led one
to expect, with the implication that the possession of a degree was being perceived
as sufficient by itself, in contrast to the views expressed earlier in this chapter.
The remedy might include some form of training in presentation, one senior
employee observing that

… coaching in interview skills is an absolute necessity these days …

(134 S)

Some students had developed imaginative approaches to self-presentation in

order to ‘get themselves noticed’ amongst the piles of applications likely to land
on an employer’s desk. One, for instance, had written a curriculum vitae in terms
of a press-release in preference to adopting the typical presentational format.
The less desirable side of self-presentation is the risk that universities, colleges
and undergraduates will concentrate on the development of a performative veneer
which might mask things that would render an appointment problematic. One
senior employee in the caring professions put it thus:

I think that some people who come through the mill have learnt political
correctness and the words are quite hollow but they get lots of ticks when
they come to interviews because they can say the right things but in reality
it’s sometimes – in my experience – it’s not very honest.
(120 S)
68 Employability

There is a hope that the preparation of a portfolio of achievements, supported

by evidence, could be of use to both parties to an appointment process. The student
could have at their fingertips the evidence to support a claim for consideration,
and the employer could ask the applicant to draw on that evidence to elaborate
points made before – or even during – an interview. There is, however, the danger
that this too will become an exercise in veneering.

Re t r o s p e c t a n d p r o s p e c t
We have criticized many of the common ways of talking about employability and
proposed an alternative, the USEM account. This chapter has suggested that it is
consistent with research evidence collected in the Skills plus project. Chapter 3
argued that USEM is consistent with other research evidence as well.
The next chapter explores the themes we have been addressing in Part I by
examining what employability can mean in the context of degree programmes in
English.

Notes
1 There were, for each item of data, a relatively small, but variable, number of non-
responses, so totals seldom add up to 97. Responses coded as ‘other’ have been omitted
here.
2 This section relies heavily on analyses conducted by David Allaway of Lancaster
University.
3 Our reservations about ‘skills’ notwithstanding, informants talked skills languages,
often using ‘skills’ to cover anything that is desirable in the workplace.
4 This initiative began under the auspices of what became the Employment Department
of the UK Government.
5 Perry (1970/1998) offers a view of student development that moves, in broad terms,
from acquiescence to authority to functioning on an autonomous basis. Autonomy,
for Perry, implies the preparedness to act according to self-held principles, even in
hostile circumstances.
Chapter 5 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 69

The study of English and the

careers of its graduates
Philip Martin and Jane Gawthrope

Overview
This chapter illustrates concerns that have been addressed in Chapters 1–4. It
describes the key issues and features of the English degree’s relation to the world
of employment. It does this by examining the nature and value of the discipline
itself in relation to the employability debate, by considering the evidence gathered
from research and statistical surveys, by presenting the personalized accounts of
selected graduates, and by a discussion of the English curriculum and its pedagogy
in relation to skills profiling.

English and ‘employability ’

The statistical dimensions of the study of English in

UK higher education
The Quality Assurance Agency’s Benchmarking Statement for English1 defines
the subject as:

a versatile academic discipline characterised by the rigorous and critical study

of literature and language. It is concerned with the production, reception and
interpretation of written texts, both literary and non-literary; and with the
nature, history and potential of the English language.

Over 130 institutions out of a total of 171 offer degree-level programmes in

English, so the subject is very widely taught. In January 2003 the website of the
Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)2 listed 3,364 undergraduate
English courses. To put this into perspective, there were 3,550 engineering and
4,079 history courses. According to figures from the Higher Education Statistics
Agency 10,555 students were recruited to undergraduate and postgraduate English
programmes in the year 2000.
The subject is therefore broadly comparable with others in terms of student
recruitment in the same year:
70 Employability

• Maths, statistics and operational research: 10,611 students.

• Geography, earth and environmental sciences: 11,095 students.
• Hospitality, leisure and tourism: 9,716 students.

A brief history of the discipline

As a discipline, English is historically conditioned by controversy and interro-
gation, yet the current debate about its relation to the world of employment is
different. Where previous questions have been concerned to locate the purpose,
value and practice of the degree, its relevance – in these categories – has been
circled by intellectual boundaries. Now English is being asked to demonstrate its
value in relation to pragmatic measurements. How useful is an English degree in
the world of employment? What practical benefits does it bring? And most brutally,
perhaps, how do the salaries of English graduates compare with graduates from
other disciplines? What is a degree in English worth in financial terms?3

Issues
One response to these questions would be to admit that English, in comparison to
the vocational subjects, is not well-prepared to answer them.4 The degree is not
on its own in this respect, in terms of either its knowledge or its skills. How, for
example, would a pure scientist explain the relevance of a recondite area of
knowledge such as string theory to an employer looking for a skill-set relevant to
the selling of advertising space? No better, I suspect, than we would in an explana-
tion of how Wordsworth’s relationship to picturesque aesthetics might fare in the
same context. Another response – and a better one entirely – would be to reverse
the poles in a re-organization of the question’s implicit hierarchies. How can an
employer make the most of an English graduate’s knowledge and abilities?5 And
how can English graduates be best prepared for making the most of their attributes
in these respects? A further re-organization might re-centre the question again:
how does an English degree help a student in the series of choices they will make
about – and within – the world of employment?
It is important, we believe, to get these questions the right way round from the
outset. The purpose of a non-vocational degree (and possibly others too) is not
purely nor primarily to equip its graduates for employment. If that were the case,
then we may as well abandon academic disciplines by and large, and construct
degrees out of skills courses evacuated of content, which would be cheaper and
quicker than using academic subjects as awkward vehicles for the imparting of
training needs. Equally, academic subjects cannot ignore the demands of the
economy, nor can they deny their students’ need to establish themselves as good
employment prospects. A non-vocational degree such as English is primarily
focused on developing knowledge about particular cultural forms and histories:
its purpose is to involve the student in the revision of existing knowledge through
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 71

the value it attributes to informed and educated individual opinion. In this regard
its primary purpose is not direct training for employment, but the development of
a rich fund of cultural and human knowledge, which in turn is subject to critical
enquiry of many different kinds. However the degree is structured or conceived
(and there is a deal of difference between many English degrees), the high value
given to the individual view is generally endorsed. And at the heart of the degree,
in almost all cases, will be the refinement and sophistication of argument, creativity,
deduction and debate, exemplified in the overwhelming prevalence in the degree
of the discursive essay, and the seminar – or small group – discussion. However,
it is important to be clear about the nature of this emphasis. English values
individualism but it does not blithely credit opinion for its own sake. The individual
view has to be backed up by knowledge, by sophisticated creativity which – for
example – is capable of re-organizing existing knowledge in new and unexpected
combinations, of seeing the relative merits of opposing or contesting arguments,
or by an understanding of the deep complexity of language itself in many different
forms, historical or contemporary. To this end, the degree is taught and assessed
in such a way as to give high priority and visibility to the individual understanding.
Profiling the attributes and abilities that English departments intend to foster
is demanding, and difficult for a host of reasons, but not impossible. Undoubtedly,
this notion of individualism should be given some priority: English graduates are
good at employing independent analysis but, at the same time, they are taught
through processes which give the highest regard to dialogue – with peers, with
tutors, with established bodies of thought. They are therefore accomplished in
considering the views and opinions of others, and of different schools of thought,
and in positioning themselves in relation to all of these. Their reading experiences,
dependent for their success on imaginative and creative engagement, as well as
analysis, make them imaginative, creative and analytical. And because both literary
forms and linguistic analysis make them highly conscious of the complexities of
language, they are used to dealing with demanding material, suspicious of over-
simplification, and appreciative of eloquence. They have great reading stamina,
and because of their historical and cross-cultural reading, they have a developed
sense of history, and of other cultures. Their ability to communicate effectively
on paper and in speech is likely to be well developed. They will often have been
set research tasks, and so will be good at finding things out and, more importantly,
will know the kinds of questions to ask. They will, in all likelihood, have a
continuing appetite for learning and reading, and they will be curious of the social
world around them, since so much of their study in literature and language will
have focused on acts of social communication. This would be a starting point for
profiling the English graduate’s abilities.
Yet there are also a whole range of factors to take stock of here. First, it is
important to acknowledge the limitations of terms like ‘the world of employment’
and, indeed, the skill-sets that are usually drawn down to summarize employers’
needs. Employment opportunities are far more differentiated than such lists imply;
72 Employability

graduates’ implementation of these attributes are likely to be differentiated to an

equivalent, or greater, degree; finally, graduates do not glean all their attributes
from the programme of study, and indeed there is evidence that their employability
prospects are more strongly linked to other influences (Brown and Scase, 1994).
At the same time, there is a certain strength in the generic vagueness of both
terminologies (employment and skills), for the ground is so differentiated that it
is impossible to map in such detail. It could be argued that the strength of the
skills identified for graduates is that their very generalism implicitly acknowledges
further differentiation (for it is extremely likely that most disciplines will draw
down the same lists in the identification of their graduates’ strengths).6 These
caveats might appear to be a set of impossible denials (there is no such thing as
the world of employment, no such thing as graduate attributes, let alone an English
graduates’ attributes) but what we mean by them is that none of these categories
or quantities are archetypally definitive; rather, they are generally indicative. It is
important to recognize this to avoid the instrumentalist trap of regarding skill-sets
religiously, or indeed, as non-negotiable outcomes; an approach which is also
liable to deceive students through false expectations. Neither students, nor the co-
ordinates of employment, nor the economy itself, are so amenable: these are
complex, rich, and volatile quantities, and we need to be aware of them as such.7
The dilemma therefore divides like this: do we stick with our generic notion of
graduateness, aware of its provisionality and the space it therefore acknowledges
for further differentiation, or do we begin work on a more refined, more accurate,
and more individually responsive means of accounting for graduates’ abilities,
such as that initiated above? Do we stick with the certainty of a general law, or go
in pursuit – possibly in vain – of precision? Bearing all this in mind, and noting
that we are now in the relatively early stages of either process, our response to this
has been to gather further evidence, to find out more about the current situation of
English graduates in employment.

Generalized subject choice and career patterns

In the autumn of 2001 the English Subject Centre noted an increasing level of
interest in employability issues amongst its community in UK HE. This was against
a background of the government’s desire to achieve a 50 per cent participation
rate for young people in HE, a growing public awareness of the level of debt
incurred whilst studying for a degree, and the subject’s perceived competition
with more vocationally oriented subjects. Departments were feeling under pressure,
perhaps for the first time, to indicate the strengths and aptitudes developed in the
study of English literature, and to demonstrate to potential recruits how these
might lead to ‘successful’ careers after graduation. There was, however, little
evidence to inform the subject community’s view of how its graduates related to
the world of employment, and so the English Subject Centre commissioned the
Centre for Higher Education Research and Information at the Open University
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 73

(CHERI), a unit with established expertise in the field of graduate employment,

to survey the field of the English degree and graduate careers. Most of the informa-
tion on generalized career patterns given here draws on this work by Brennan and
Williams (2003). The Subject Centre was anxious to avoid relying solely on first
destination statistics collected only six months after graduation. CHERI had access
to a data set taking a longer profile extending to three or four years after graduation
and therefore giving a fuller picture of career patterns.

Motivations to study English

Why is it that over 10,000 students per year choose to study English, and what
influence do career considerations have on this decision? Data collected by Brennan
and Williams (2003) from sixth formers and their teachers show a mix of attitudes
towards English and graduate careers. It scores low on direct career relevance,
with decisions to continue studying the subject for pure enjoyment often being
hedged with take-up of another, more applied subject, in a combined programme.
On the other hand, others regard the acquisition of a good class of degree regardless
of the subject as of primary importance; some see English as a ‘blue-chip’ subject
that conveys evidence of potential to employers, much as classics used to do.
When teachers were asked how English might be made more attractive at degree
level there was no support for trying to make it more job-related. Rather there was
a considerable body of opinion suggesting that English could market itself better,
emphasizing its value in employment terms and expounding the range of
occupations for which it might serve. It is therefore an oversimplification to say
that even amongst sixth formers, English is labelled as a non-vocational subject:
the Brennan and Williams study found some recognition of the deeper compe-
tencies bestowed by academic study.
This is an important lesson for English departments under pressure to demon-
strate in crude ways the employment relevance of their courses. Generally speaking
students are not motivated to study English because of any direct career relevance,
but because they enjoy the subject and see it as a ‘high status’ one. The career
relevance comes not from the subject studied per se, but from the way in which it
is seen to prove the students’ wider intellectual abilities, which might broadly
equate to the ‘Understanding’ and ‘Metacognition’ of the USEM model.

Generalized career patterns

In this section, we look at the information that can be gleaned from statistical data
about the career profiles of English graduates, and how this compares to other
subject groups. The data examined are those generated by the national First
Destination Statistics (FDS)8 which are collected six months after graduation,
and data collected in a survey conducted by CHERI three to four years after
graduation (Brennan et al., 2001).
74 Employability

When making career choices, the number of possibilities open to English

graduates, like other non-vocational graduates, is immense. Most ‘top’ employers
in the UK make most of their jobs open to graduates irrespective of the subject of
their degrees. For English graduates then, their subject of study can therefore be
regarded as less important than other factors such as intellect, attitudes, social fit
and prestige of their university.

Level of employment
The FDS data are, of course, limited in that former students are surveyed only six
months after graduation, when the transition to stable employment typically takes
two to three years. The 2000/1 data indicate that 58 per cent of English graduates
were in employment six months after completing their degrees, a figure which is
similar to that of other non-vocational graduates. Twenty-eight per cent were still
studying and only just over 7 per cent were actually without work and were seeking
it. Of those employed, 75 per cent were working in a full-time paid position and
41 per cent were in a graduate level occupation. In broad brush terms, this paints
a picture of graduates not yet embarked on a settled career path, taking further
qualifications in order to equip themselves for one or working at what they might
regard as temporary jobs. A mere six months after graduation this is as one might
expect (Purcell and Elias, 2002).
What is the picture if we look three to four years after graduation using the
CHERI data? Again, unemployment does not appear to be a significant problem,
with only 9 per cent experiencing this in the first three and a half years after
graduation. This is close to the average for all graduates. Although in the first two
years the proportion working is low among English graduates compared to others,
this is largely due to the high proportion engaged in further study, and after three
and a half years these differences have largely disappeared. By the beginning of
the fourth year the labour market activity of English graduates is similar to that of
any other group of graduates, with 84 per cent of them in graduate level jobs. This
is slightly worse than average for all graduates, but not worse than Humanities
and Languages graduates in general. We can therefore conclude that although the
English degree does not equip students for a specific career, it is giving them the
capabilities to find and keep jobs at an appropriate level.

Employment sectors
Both the FDS data and the CHERI data show that there is a relatively high
proportion of English graduates in the public sector (45 per cent) and non-profit
sector (12 per cent). For all graduates the equivalent percentages are 35 per cent
and 6 per cent. This concentration in the public and non-profit sectors, where
salary levels are lower than the private sector, probably explains the low average
salary of English graduates. At the time the CHERI data was collected (1998–9)
there was a gap of £1,500 between the average income of an English graduate and
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 75

that of all Humanities and Language graduates, and a gap of £4,500 compared to
all other graduates.

Job satisfaction
According to the CHERI data, English graduates’ satisfaction with their employ-
ment situation is the same as the average among other Humanities and Language
graduates, with 46 per cent reporting fairly high levels of satisfaction. Compared
to all graduates, however, where 58 per cent had a positive view of their situation,
the level of job satisfaction is lower.
English graduates have a less positive view of their jobs when asked to take
into account their earlier expectations. Asked whether their work situation met
the expectation they had on entering higher education, only 19 per cent of English
graduates gave a firm ‘yes’. This compares with 30 per cent for Humanities and
Language graduates, and 37 per cent for all graduates.
This may point to several issues in the area of the interaction of higher education
and the world of work. Most obviously it points to a widespread disappointment
amongst graduates, with the quality of working life a mismatch between expecta-
tions and experience. Those entering HE directly from school or college may
indeed have an idealized image of career development, or an assumption that the
degree is a ticket to a lifetime of demanding and rewarding work. However, we
must also consider that many expectations are not unreasonable, and the mismatch
arises from the pressures and restrictions of jobs which give little room for personal
fulfilment.
Whatever the explanation, the situation suggests that most Humanities and
Language Departments might benefit their students by providing more
opportunities to enhance their understanding of the workplace both in terms of
the range of careers available and the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of graduate
employment. They need to be prepared for a transitional period of several years
after leaving higher education and entering stable graduate employment. And
finally, they need to be reminded that because there is no automatic employer
demand for non-vocational graduates in particular subjects, English graduates
need to be adept at demonstrating a whole range of personal and cultural attributes
in addition to their possession of a degree. The challenge for those departments
recruiting students from non-traditional backgrounds is that, as the CHERI report
puts it, ‘for students from non-vocational subjects, questions of what you have
studied may be less important than questions of where you studied and your social
background’ (Brennan and Williams, 2003: 7).

The workplace relevance of English

How does English as an academic discipline present itself to potential recruits in
terms of its contribution to career development? We have already noted that the
primary motivation to study the subject comes from enjoyment of language and
76 Employability

literature rather than as a qualification for a particular career. Nevertheless, the

large financial investment made by students and their parents in higher education
means that the question of what comes afterwards exerts at least a background
influence in subject choice. So how do departmental websites present career
opportunities to potential students?
A survey of a random selection of 33 English Department websites in the
summer of 2002 (see Brennan and Williams, 2003: 22) showed that all but three
offered information on the abilities, competences and skills developed in students
and/or gave examples of the types of career graduates enter. ‘Journalism’,
‘Teaching’ and ‘Media’ were the three careers most likely to be mentioned, closely
followed by ‘Publishing’ and ‘Postgraduate study’ (Brennan and Williams, 2003:
23). But if one looks at the range of occupations which English graduates actually
go into, the conclusion would be that departmental websites are failing to reflect
this breadth. The First Destination Statistics 2000/1 show that for those in employ-
ment six months after graduation, the largest category is ‘Business, consultancy
and research’ (18 per cent), followed by the ‘Wholesale and retail trade’ (16 per
cent) and ‘Manufacturing’ (11 per cent) (Brennan and Williams, 2003: 36). If not
actually misleading, many departmental websites are therefore underselling the
education they offer as preparation for a wide range of different careers. The
focus on journalism and media on the websites arises, presumably, from an
inaccurate stereotype of the English graduate, or from an assumption that these
careers are attractive to potential students. The risk, however, is of deterring those
students who do not envisage themselves as working in journalism or the media.
In terms of the types of abilities, competencies and skills English departments
said on their websites they would develop, the most frequently mentioned were:
(a) written/oral communication skills and (b) critical analysis and evaluation. Both
of these figure in the English Benchmark Statement, although they are also
mentioned by a number of other subject Benchmark Statements. The CHERI data
from a survey of graduates three to four years after graduation (Brennan et al.,
2001) asked them how they saw their major strengths compared with other
graduates at the time of their graduation. This therefore gives us some insight into
how well the competencies being claimed on the websites and in the Benchmark
Statement are being delivered in recent graduates. Compared with other graduates,
English graduates rated themselves particularly highly in terms of:

• Written communication skills

• Oral communication skills
• Documenting ideas and information
• Creativity
• Tolerance, appreciating different points of view
• Critical thinking.

One can therefore see a high degree of concordance between the skills claimed
in the websites and Benchmark Statement and those mentioned by the English
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 77

graduates. (English Departments and the Benchmark Statement might re-consider

how study of the subject contributes to creativity, since although these sources do
not give prominence to it, English graduates express creativity as being a strength.)
Indeed written and oral communication skills and critical thinking are the skills
which employers believed the English degree was best at developing in graduates.9
However, there are some areas where English graduates feel they are weak
compared to other graduates. Brennan and Williams conclude that:

If we compare the skills English graduates feel they lack to those the English
benchmark statement reports they should possess, there is a mismatch in terms
of developing team work, time management/organization and IT skills.
Moreover, these same skills were all mentioned to a greater or lesser extent
in the search of websites. And indeed, in the study conducted by the Council
for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), employers felt that English degrees
were worst at developing time management and building relationships …
Although the evidence … is limited, it suggests that English departments
may not be developing the full range of attributes and capabilities outlined in
the benchmark statement.
(Brennan and Williams, 2003: 27)

This returns us, therefore, to the dilemma we outlined above: should we stick
with the broadly indicative categories of ‘graduateness’ or should we be devising
more customized profiles for English graduates, which in turn, can be made even
more responsive to individual needs? Certainly there is little will, among
academics, to do the latter, and while some of this can be put down to a familiar
reluctance to convert intellectual value into utilitarian capital, this is not the only
root of the lack of enthusiasm to go further. Evidence currently suggests that
graduate generic skills are situated in a confused and misleading discourse primed
by policy, but not underpinned by clear ideas of learning (Bennett et al., 2000:
175–7). Academics are wary of the skills agenda, but there are also clear signs
from students that they come to their degrees with skills-weariness, and an
established scepticism about tick-box charts, content-evacuated courses, and bullet-
point lists. Further, there is little evidence from employers that they want more
elaborate benchmarks or competence charts. They are hardly having difficulties
recruiting graduates per se, although it is clear that they find some of them short
on what they regard as basic skills (literacy, numeracy, IT, team-working). Making
more extravagant claims for the intrinsic presence of transferable skills will not
help anyone. It is useful, at this point, to turn to our case studies offering retro-
spective views on the English degree, since they offer highly particular – but
nevertheless interesting – ways of analyzing the long-term value of the English
degree.
These case studies are not offered here as typical monuments of the English
degree; their status is rather that of oral histories, personal accounts that are not
engendered by overstated claims, or the opposite. In each case, it is clear that our
78 Employability

graduates were less aware of the attributes inculcated or nurtured by the degree at
the time of its duration. Retrospectively, they all achieve a more precise sense of
how the degree has helped in particular ways. For one (Jane Arthur) the key
elements are analysis and creativity: ‘the ability to look for new angles, to select
from a wide range of possible exempla’. For another (Val Butcher) the most
significant is something she believes to be all too often left out: the corollary to
confident communication, she notes, is ‘the ability to influence others’, and here
she identifies something not exclusive to English, but a quality which sits right at
the centre of those discursive activities which we used to characterize the degree
at the start of this chapter. All English students grow to recognize the place of
rhetoric (technically, the power of persuasion) in literary and other texts, indeed,
that is what so much of their essay writing and seminar discussion adds up to. Our
third graduate (Peter Strachan) is in similar territory when he cites his experience
of ‘making a written case for a grant to Oxfam’s senior management’ – a particularly
vital persuasive skill, perhaps, and alongside this he stresses the importance of
the ‘development of thinking within a theoretical framework’ and ‘reading
critically’. These, he notes, are attributes that have stood him in good stead. He
has received a training in thinking of a kind, by the very stringency which literary
theory demands. Each of our graduates also provides a neat coda for their brief
life-sketch. Val Butcher celebrates her experience in English, but wishes she had
known what it was doing for her at the time; a ringing reminder perhaps that we
owe it to our graduates to make them more conscious of their abilities. Jane Arthur
writes positively about the challenge and satisfaction of the degree for its own
sake – ‘studying English … was the most intellectually demanding part of my
life’. Peter Strachan acknowledges the space the degree gave him to think, and the
extent to which it was the means of considering the wider cultural and political
contexts that underlie all literary texts. He also notes it gave him an enduring love
of reading, and then, most potently, quotes his teacher’s adage that ‘there’s not
much you can do with an English degree but a whole lot that society can do with
an English graduate’ – a truism that nevertheless takes us back to the importance
of raising the consciousness of graduates and employers about the validity of the
degree beyond its programme.
However, ‘employability’ will not be achieved by a sticking-plaster list crudely
applied to an academic programme, and neither will academics be keen to promote
the cause of ‘employability’ if it only takes the form of denying intellectual values,
or indeed, of de-professionalizing their work. Most English students come to degree
level study because they enjoy the subject in its own right, and because they sense
that value to which their teachers will readily subscribe – the value of English in
developing the intellect, in permitting individuals to extend their creative, critical
and imaginative abilities to the full. It is essential to keep faith with this while
simultaneously recognizing the importance of enabling graduates to maximize
choice and potential in their careers. That means not making spurious or inflated
claims for our graduates’ abilities just as surely as it means making sure that we
do not undervalue what they do well.
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 79

Jane Arthur: a graduate in English

Jane Arthur read English at Leeds University between 1979 and 1982. After taking
an MA in Librarianship at Sheffield University, she pursued a career as a university
librarian and is currently Assistant Director of Learning and Information Services
at the University of Hertfordshire.

I read English at Leeds, 1979–82, which was a traditional programme,

including Old English, Middle English, Shakespeare, the Novel, and nothing
beyond the 1920s in the compulsory courses. However, we had some electives,
and I took Science Fiction and History of Language.
In those days, over 20 years ago, transferable skills or vocational skills
were not part of an English course, so, of my own volition, I taught myself
typewriting and took a computer studies ‘O’ level evening class.
I did not go to university with a career path in mind, but had the experience
of a Saturday job whilst at school – working in the local public library. This
at least gave me an idea of the sort of work which I felt confident I could do
and enjoy. Nevertheless, whilst at Leeds, I went through the rounds of careers
fairs and applications for many posts, which convinced me that I was making
an informed choice and not just drifting into a job. I obtained a one-year
graduate traineeship at Leeds University Library.
I gained an MA in Librarianship at Sheffield University, where I again
tried to develop IT skills by choosing a course in Prolog – in the early days of
Expert Systems.
My first post was at Cranfield University (Cranfield Institute of Tech-
nology as was) – a postgraduate technological university. I arrived as a newly
qualified librarian with no experience, a degree in English and lots of
enthusiasm. I ended up staying there in various posts for nearly six years.
Work there included searching information databases for postgraduate students
and staff, in the days when it was called online searching (there were no
CD-ROM or web-based databases) and access was charged at so much per
minute, so that ineffective searching could run up a hefty bill; and being the
editor of an abstracting service (hard copy and online database) called Robotics
Technology Abstracts, which was sold internationally, until it was no longer
competitive and closed down.
Subsequently, I worked at Dundee Institute of Technology (University of
Abertay) for three years as the Deputy Librarian. Then I moved to the
University of Hertfordshire, where I have been for nearly ten years, the last
three of which have been three days a week, balanced with motherhood. At
UH, I have managed campus libraries and learning resources centres
(converged library, computer centre and media services); I have been the
project manager for a new learning resources centre building; and I have
managed library system purchases. Along the way, I fitted in a part-time MBA
through the OU.
80 Employability

So, how far has my English degree helped or hindered me? Tricky one. An
English degree has never been a prerequisite for any job or course which I
have done. In my career, I have had a couple of significant ‘breaks’: one was
getting the postgraduate traineeship at Leeds, and the other was getting the
job at Cranfield. For early career posts, most candidates have broadly similar
qualifications and experience, so I believe the secret was to have some unusual
and therefore memorable hobby or experience. An English degree did not
really help here. Later on, jobs were based on previous experience, and track
record.
However, English taught me analysis, writing and the ability to handle
and select from large amounts of data. The texts I studied had largely been
written about ad nauseam by scholars, so I learnt the technique of selecting
some minor episode or image as symbolic of a wider theme. The ability to
look for new angles, to select from a wide range of possible exempla and to
demonstrate an understanding of both the wood and the trees, are things that
have stood me in good stead when dealing with, for example, the huge amount
of detail of a building project; the need to communicate complex issues
straightforwardly with users/customers; and the need to write for a time-
constrained audience. I don’t claim that I always achieve these, but I know
what I am aiming for.
Studying English for three years was the most intellectually demanding
part of my life. Other studies and work have been satisfying in other ways,
e.g. a skill mastered, a project completed, a bid won against competition, the
joys of parenting. But I would not have missed the intellectual challenge of
studying English.

Va l B u t c h e r : a g r a d u a t e i n E n g l i s h
Val Butcher read English at the University of Sussex and then took a Diploma in
Vocational Guidance. She has been involved in careers guidance and careers
education in schools, colleges and universities since the mid-1960s.
She is now Senior Adviser for Employability with the Generic Centre of the
LTSN (Learning and Teaching Support Network), and a consultant on Higher
Education in matters relating to employability in the academic curriculum.
She was formerly Director of Enterprise and then Principal Adviser for Higher
Education and Employment at the University of Leeds, and Assistant Director in
the Leeds University Careers Service. She is also a Fellow of NICEC (the National
Institute of Careers Education and Counselling), a Senior Visiting Fellow at the
Centre for Employability, University of Central Lancashire, and a member of the
Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Enhancing Student Employ-
ability Co-ordination Team.
She is a member of the Careers Writers Association, producing articles and
learning materials for students and has researched and published extensively on
the links between education and the world of work.
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 81

‘Skills? I don’t have any skills … I read English!’ I recall informing a graduate
recruiter triumphantly. Skills, I felt, were a lower order of learning, suited to
those who had taken apprenticeships – whatever they were.
I soon found out. Having told my University Appointments Officer that I
wanted to ‘work with people and not be stuck behind a desk’ I found myself
the youngest student on a course of training to be a Youth Employment Officer.
I had explored library work, teaching and graduate secretarial work, all of
which seemed to ‘use’ my degree, although I couldn’t say how. Then I had
the good sense to consult the professionals, and embarked on a career which
I have loved for the past forty years.
What did my English degree do for me?
For many years, I would have said ‘nothing’ because I simply was not able
to distinguish between the content and the process of my learning. I was just
very sure that I was never going to read Thackeray again.
It was, I think, when I became involved in training other practitioners and
had to identify and articulate what a competent practitioner in my field needed
to be able to do that I realized that I was drawing on attributes, attitudes and
competences which had been framed during my degree studies.
‘Planning/execution of essay/project work’ identified in the English
benchmarking statement as a key feature of the subject is something I have
deployed, fairly obviously, in the writing of bids for funding, progress reports
and dissemination materials that I have had to write in my years of managing
large development projects on careers education and employability in schools,
further and higher education.
The ability to ‘understand/develop intricate concepts’, also mentioned in
the benchmarking statement, has undoubtedly been drawn upon in my research
work, which has resulted in publications on a range of careers and learning-
related topics.
More creatively – and ‘creativity’ is one of the attributes cited by English
graduates themselves as a quality in which they believe they compare well
with other Arts and Humanities graduates – I have produced a wide range of
information and learning materials for staff, from writing a video script and
workbook on ‘Effective Use of Careers Material’ to ‘Making the Most of
Work Experience’, a Tutor/Careers Adviser Material on preparing students
for work experience. For students themselves, I have written more than I can
possibly mention, including four editions of Taking a Year Off.
One of the English departmental websites referred to by Brennan and
Williams (2003) mentions ‘Lucid and confident presentation of argument in
writing/speech’ and I am astonished that the corollary to this, the ability to
influence others, is not mentioned, since this has been a key requirement of
my work, and, I am sure, that of many other English graduates.
That the study of literature equips a graduate with tolerance and an appre-
ciation of different points of view (another view English graduates hold of
themselves) should not, perhaps, be surprising, but I also believe that it can
82 Employability

equip the individual with an emotional intelligence; the ability to sense what
other people’s agendas might be and to communicate and relate appropriately.
Does all this, forty years after my degree, give the whole picture? Not
really. I also feel that I am a competent team builder and networker– where
did that come from?
The clue, I think, lies in the holistic nature of the higher education
experience.
‘Interests? No, I have no interests. Hobbies are puerile,’ I informed the
same bemused graduate recruiter. What did I do in my spare time? I went to
parties; organized parties. I loved parties.
After a predictable rejection (not predictable to me at the time), I stopped
being so frank in selection interviews, but had I known it, I had identified a
personal resource which has equipped me to work effectively as a change
agent in education for many years.
I’m glad I read English, but I wish I had known at the time what it was
giving me.

Pe t e r S t r a c h a n : a g r a d u a t e i n E n g l i s h
Peter Strachan graduated from University College, Cardiff in 1977 with first class
honours in English Literature. After a year off he started a D.Phil. at Jesus College,
Oxford, working on it full-time until 1981 and finally completing it in 1987. After
leaving Oxford he became a Voluntary Service Overseas volunteer in a teacher
training college in Egypt and after two years took over the management of the
VSO programme in that country. He subsequently worked for Help the Aged
(Overseas) in London and then managed the Oxfam programme in western Sudan
from 1987 to 1990. Upon his return to the UK he took an M.A. in Social Policy at
Brunel University and worked first as a benefits adviser for Age Concern in
Waltham Forest, London and then as a Development Officer with the National
Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB). In 1998 he joined Coventry
City Council as Policy and Planning Manager in the Corporate Policy Team and
has since become the City Council’s Area Co-ordinator for two of the most deprived
wards in the city. In 2001 he completed a Diploma in Management through the
Open University Business School and now swears that he will never take another
exam for as long as he lives.

The first thing that I’d have to accept is that I’ve never really tried to make
use of my English degree in my career. By the time my research money was
running out at Oxford, the only thing I was really clear about was that I no
longer wanted to be an academic. I did the public sector bit of the ‘milk
round’ and found very mixed attitudes to my academic background. Generally
they liked the First – evidence of either a reasonably sharp mind or, at least,
a certain degree of sheer doggedness – but I have no recollection of anyone
 The study of English and the careers of its graduates 83

saying that it gave me the ideal knowledge base for managing a coalmine.
The doctorate, not even completed, was the cause of much suspicion and I
had to work hard to convince a succession of potential employers that I could
take a decision without first spending six months in a library.
Clearly I was successful in convincing the NHS of this as they offered me
a place on their fast stream management training scheme, but by that time I’d
decided instead to accept a rather less lucrative offer from VSO. Again, it
wasn’t my degree that interested them, but rather the volunteer adult literacy
teaching I’d done during my year off in Cardiff and my campaigning activities
with the War on Want and World Development Movement groups in Oxford.
The bit of my thesis that did interest them was actually the bit that had least
to do with English, as such. My topic involved a lot of theory and this in turn
had involved getting up close and personal with a lot of theoretical linguistics.
The fact that this meant that I knew the difference between a past perfect verb
and an embedding transformation was probably taken into account.
So what did I (and society) get out of my six years studying Eng. Lit. –
and, of course, spending several thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money? I’m
profoundly grateful to have taken my first degree at Cardiff. At the time,
Cardiff was developing a reputation for pioneering approaches to English
Literature that were still regarded as a little outlandish in many universities,
where Bradley and Leavis still ruled the roost. Cardiff emphasized skills over
knowledge and encouraged its students to develop their thinking within a
sound theoretical framework. Depth of reading was prized over breadth,
literary history was considered to be of relatively low priority and value judge-
ments were positively discouraged. Instead I was schooled in reading critically,
in becoming highly aware of language and its effects, and in developing
arguments that were based on evidence rather than assertion. I was also
encouraged to think critically about the various theoretical standpoints on
offer and to explore the ways in which this theory could be applied to help
cast light on practical criticism (I use the term in both its general and technical
senses). These are skills that have continued to inform my work over the
years.
The habits of using theoretical tools to analyze practical problems and of
developing clear and well supported written arguments are ones that have
proved essential in many contexts. These range from making a written case
for a grant to Oxfam’s senior management five thousand miles away from
my base in west Sudan to formulating and evaluating policy options for elected
Councillors in Coventry. As a manager, I never cease to be depressed at the
poor quality of written English displayed by even fairly senior colleagues. If
a graduate in English leaves college with nothing more than the ability to
write prose that can be published in a newsletter with little amendment, then
that is a skill upon which many senior managers would now place a con-
siderable premium.
84 Employability

In terms of personal development, my first degree also gave me the space

and a framework for thinking about life, the universe and everything. Again,
the Cardiff emphasis on the value of theory was important here – a more
traditional university at that time would not have made the links with politics,
linguistics, society and ideologies about which students in Cardiff were
encouraged to think.
And it did give me three years in which to develop what has remained an
enduring personal love. My most recent collection of holiday reading included
Coriolanus and my Filofax has pages of favourite extracts from poets from
George Herbert to Seamus Heaney to which I frequently return to help restore
a sense of perspective at the end of a frustrating day.
My old headteacher at Middlesbrough High School, himself an English
graduate, used to say that there’s not much you can do with an English degree
but a whole lot that society can do with an English graduate. I suppose I’ve
been spending the last quarter century confirming the truth of that observation.

Notes
1 Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/english.pdf.
2 www.ucas.ac.uk.
3 One of the most recent studies conducted into this (Walker and Zhu, 2003), which
was based upon Labour Force Survey data, suggests that Arts graduates earn less on
average than those who enter employment with two A levels.
4 Very little is known about the real destinations of English graduates (for available
data see Brennan and Williams, 2003). However, there are many indications that the
constitution of the graduate population of the subject will have considerable influence
on calculations about its earnings. For instance, for many years English has had far
more women than men undergraduates (in a ratio of around 70 per cent/30 per cent);
mature returners – almost all of whom tend to be women – commonly made up around
30–35 per cent of English students in post-1992 universities and the colleges until
very recently. Large numbers of English graduates go into teaching. When reviewing
earnings data, it is important to bear such factors in mind. With clear evidence of
women still suffering unequal financial rewards in the workplace, large numbers in
underpaid professions, and many English students graduating between the ages of 35
and 55, it is unlikely that they will compare well with graduates of (say) Economics.
5 See the comments made in the Peter Strachan case study, p. 84.
6 The HEQC Pilot Graduate Attributes Profile is a model of ‘graduateness’ which can
be applied to any subject. It is reproduced in The Graduate Standards Programme
Final Report, Annex C: 86 (Higher Education Quality Council, 1997).
7 For an important conceptual discussion of skills in higher education which argues
powerfully for this complexity, see Barnett (1994: 55–68). For a good pragmatic
discussion of the factors in play, see Bennett et al. (2000), particularly pp. 120–43.
8 Available at: http://www.hesa.ac.uk/holisdocs/pubinfo/fds.htm.
9 Employers were asked in a study carried out by the Council for Industry and Higher
Education (2002) how they perceived skills development through undergraduate study
and how far these perceptions reflected subject benchmark statements.
Part II Part II: towards the enhancement of practice 85

Towards the enhancement of

practice

In Part I we offered a description of employability in general and argued that it

can be enhanced by good mainstream curricula and vigorous co-curricula. Given
the closeness of our account of what employers value to common thinking about
the processes and outcomes of good higher education practices, the argument was
that institutions concerned to enhance student employability would also be
enhancing student learning and vice versa. What, though, might higher education
institutions do to secure these twin benefits?
Part II begins by considering what would be needed to develop understanding,
skilful practices, efficacy beliefs and metacognition in the first cycle of higher
education. A discussion of ways in which employability may be enhanced in various
workplace-related ways then follows in Chapter 7. Given that the curriculum that
students really experience is shaped by the ways in which their learning is assessed,
we take time in Chapter 8 to explain how the fuzzy and complex achievements
that are central to higher education and to employability may be reached by
differentiated assessment arrangements. We notice that there is international
consternation about the assessment of learning and argue that a concern to promote
employability exacerbates matters. Although it might be convenient to exclude
assessment issues from the discussion, if employability were kept in the unassessed
attics of the curriculum, neither would it be taken very seriously, nor would the
processes and outcomes associated both with it and good pedagogic practices get
the attention they need to flourish. So, before we describe curriculum developments
favourable to employability, we need to consider assessment issues.
In Chapters 9–11 we survey curriculum development work done within the
Skills plus project in four universities in the north-west of England between 2000
and 2002. The three accounts and the overview in Chapter 12 describe an approach
to curriculum enhancement that we have found transportable, robust and effective.
Chapter 13 goes beyond the specifics of programme development and explores
the implications for universities and colleges. In asking what they need, as institu-
tions, to do in order to help students make the best possible claims to employability,
we are also asking, of course, what they need to do to promote good learning.
Even if the term ‘employability’ is not widely used beyond the shores of the
UK, there are – without doubt – questions about what higher education should be
doing in order to stimulate the sorts of achievements that employers around the
86 Part II: towards the enhancement of practice

world regularly say they value and to which higher education itself has long staked
a claim.
In Part I we argued that a concern for employability is a concern for much
more than narrowly-focused skills. In this Part we show that actions to enhance
employability, however parochial the uninformed might imagine them to be, are,
in fact, actions to stimulate that which makes higher education higher: complex
learning and the (co-) curricular processes that favour it.
Chapter 6 How we can develop employability 87

How we can develop

employability

Fr o m t h e o r y t o w a r d s p r a c t i c e
We argued in Chapter 3 that the USEM account had considerable face validity
because it can be lined up with an amount of empirical research evidence. We also
claimed that it provides a way of thinking about employability that is consistent
with academic values. Even if the general thrust of the argument is accepted,
there is a need to elaborate some of the detail. In the early sections of this chapter
we briefly survey some of the theoretical perspectives that underpin the USEM
account, emphasizing efficacy beliefs since our experience is that the ‘E’ of USEM
is generally less well understood than the other components. Though we have
separated the USEM components for analytical and presentational reasons, we
readily acknowledge that these are interrelated – for example, metacognitive ability
feeds into skilful practices. In the later sections of this chapter we comment on
some aspects of curriculum design where the intention is to promote complex
learning and employability.

Understanding
Some prefer to use the word ‘knowledge’ generically for what is learned about
one or more subject disciplines. Our preference is for ‘understanding’ because of
the more limited connotations of ‘knowledge’ that have been influential in
educational circles following the publication of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives in 1956. ‘Understanding’, too, has broader and narrower meanings,
and we have adopted the broader meaning, in relation to the subject discipline(s)
involved, which we take to encompass all but the metacognitive in Anderson and
Krathwohl’s (2001) revision of Bloom’s original work (summarized in Figure
3.1).
We expect undergraduate students to remember relevant facts, to understand
concepts, to apply their understandings to relatively routine problems that do not
call for innovative thinking, and to analyze situations and to bring critical evaluative
skill to bear on – for example – the literature. We may or may not expect them to
exhibit creative behaviour, i.e. to come up with something new, or some new
configuration of material that is already known (an analysis by Yorke (2002b) of
88 Towards the enhancement of practice

the first 22 subject benchmarks published by the Quality Assurance Agency

suggested that creative behaviour might figure in only about half of the subject
areas covered). We also expect students on science-based programmes to develop
the ‘know how’ to operate safely – say – X-ray diffraction or infra-red spectroscopy
apparatus in a manner that will produce trustworthy results. Similarly, we expect
students on arts-oriented programmes to develop an understanding of how – say –
the critical analysis of texts should be pursued.

Skilful practices
To some extent, the procedural knowledge we expect students to develop comprises
‘skilful practices’. These include practices needed for the deployment of
disciplinary expertise and those more generic practices that enable disciplinary
expertise to be applied effectively in the employment arena – these are often labelled
‘soft skills’, under which can be found self-management, the capacity to work
productively with others, awareness of the internal politics of organizations, the
ability to deal with divergent points of view, and the ability to determine what is
possible in a given situation (even if it is not what the person would ideally like).
Whether discipline-specific or more generic, skilful practices are context-
sensitive. Whilst there is, of course, a virtue in having an academic understanding
of how organizations ‘work’ and of what might be expected of a person occupying
a particular role, there is also a need for that understanding to be converted into
the ‘knowing how’ of success in particular practice, as some of the informants
quoted in Chapter 4 made plain.
Sandwich (or co-operative) programmes have always stressed the value of work
placement experience. Hartley and Smith (2000) offer a typical justification,
pointing to the value of such programmes in respect of the following:

• Helping students to see the connection (and, we might add, the disconnections)
between theory and practice.
• Assisting in the development of specific skills for which the equipment may
not be available in the higher education institution.
• Developing the capacity to work effectively in teams (in the work environment
teams tend to be more heterogeneous than those in the higher education
environment, which potentially adds educational value).
• The development of characteristics such as responsibility, initiative, ethical
behaviour and respect for others (not that these are undeveloped by higher
education, but that the different context widens the student’s repertoire).

Efficacy beliefs
We use the term ‘efficacy beliefs’ in a broad sense, and encompass a number of
theorists’ contributions within it (Table 6.1).
 How we can develop employability 89

Table 6.1 Some theoretical contributions to the ‘E’ of USEM

Theorist(s) Contribution
Dweck (1999) ‘Fixed’ and ‘malleable’ self-theories
Dweck (1999) Learning and performance goals
Dweck (1999) followed Performance goals subdivided into ‘approach’ and
by Pintrich (2000) ‘avoidance’ versions
Sternberg (1997) Practical intelligence
Rotter (1966) Locus of control
Bandura (1997) Self-efficacy
Seligman (1998) Learned optimism
Salovey and Mayer (1990); Emotional intelligence
Goleman (1996)

Dweck (1999) makes the point that the kind of self-theory held by a person is
likely to impact on the way in which they approach the task of learning:

… we have seen that holding a fixed theory of intelligence appears to turn

students towards concern about performing and looking smart. Holding a
malleable theory appears to turn students towards concerns about learning
new things and getting smarter.
(Dweck, 1999: 23)

A fixed self-theory is a belief that an attribute such as intelligence is immutable

– one is bright or one is not – whereas a malleable self-theory admits the possibility
that the attribute can be developed. This quotation also draws attention to the
distinction that Dweck also makes between performance and learning goals.
Performance goals are concerned with ‘doing things correctly’ and the sustaining
of appearances; learning goals are – as the label implies – related to the desirability
of learning new things, and carry fewer implications for ‘getting the right answer’.
Adopters of performance goals, according to Dweck, are quite likely to find their
self-esteem threatened by failure, whereas adopters of learning goals are more
likely to be spurred further to succeed.
Pintrich (2000) subsequently showed that performance goals could be
subdivided into two types, ‘approach’ and ‘avoidance’. ‘Approach’ performance
goals were based on a person’s desire to exhibit mastery, whereas ‘avoidance’
performance goals were based on a desire not to be shown up as inadequate.
Pintrich was able to show empirically that there were circumstances under which
there was no significant difference between performances of students adopting
learning and ‘approach’ performance goals, whereas the adoption of ‘avoidance’
performance goals led to inferior performance.
Dweck’s and Pintrich’s work points towards a connection with the ideas of
‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning. Performance goals tend to be connected with surface
approaches whereas learning goals tend to be connected with deep approaches.
90 Towards the enhancement of practice

There is another connection that may also be sustainable – with theories of student
development (Perry, 1970/1998; Kohlberg, 1964; King and Kitchener, 1994) in
which there is a general developmental trajectory that runs between acquiescence
to authority and personal autonomy (Knight and Yorke, 2003b). We can speculate
that the adopter of performance goals is more likely to take an acquiescent stance
in employment than the adopter of learning goals.
Sternberg (1997) suggested that, in addition to the kind of intelligence that is
captured in intelligence tests, there is also a ‘practical intelligence’ which enables
people to perform effectively when faced with the complex, often ‘messy’,
problems thrown up by life. Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000a), reviewing the
evidence regarding the development of practical intelligence, conclude that the
typical trajectory continues upwards throughout a person’s life (save possibly
towards the end, for pathological reasons). In other words, practical intelligence
is ‘developable’ and, educationally, there is a lot to play for – for employability
and life in general. We have summarized similar conclusions about the development
of expertise. In contrast, IQ typically reaches a peak in early adulthood, and declines
slowly thereafter.
Goleman, in 1996, popularized the notion of emotional intelligence whose
origins lie in work done at the beginning of that decade (Salovey and Mayer,
1990). Goleman, drawing on this work, suggests that emotional intelligence
subsumes: knowing one’s emotions; managing emotions; motivating oneself;
recognizing emotions in others; and handling relationships (p. 43). Mayer et al.
(2000) are concerned at the plurality of meanings that the construct has come to
embrace, and indicate their preference for emotional intelligence as a mental
(indeed, metacognitive) ability which has four branches: emotional perception;
emotional integration; emotional understanding; and emotional management. If
success in social situations is – in part – predicated on emotional intelligence,
then emotional intelligence is a tributary of Sternberg’s practical intelligence.
Rotter (1966) developed the notion of locus of control, and devised a test to
measure the extent to which people saw themselves as being able to control events
(i.e. they had an internal locus of control), or as being controlled by others (external
locus). Although Rotter’s approach has been criticized on various grounds, the
idea of locus of control has had sufficient face validity to retain some currency.
We note here that there is a possible link with the acquiescence–autonomy
dimension of student development that we mentioned earlier. We would expect
‘externals’ to be more acquiescent than ‘internals’.
There is also a link with Bandura’s (1997) concept of self-efficacy – broadly, a
person’s belief that they can make a difference to situations. Bandura uses self-
efficacy in both context-dependent and context-independent ways; however, the
distinction – though important – can be left to one side for present purposes. The
point we want to make here is that there is no guarantee that the self-efficacious
person will make a difference to a particular situation. The construct is probabilistic:
other things being equal, a high level of self-efficacy is more likely than a low
level to have an impact on a situation. Seligman’s (1998) concept of ‘learned
 How we can develop employability 91

optimism’ implicitly points to the potential for education to make a difference to

the way a person faces up to the challenges of employment, and of life in general.1
Seligman’s researches have led him to conclude that an optimistic cast of mind
can be developed, and his book suggests some ways in which this might be done.

The ‘developability ’ of efficacy beliefs

The various theorists’ work discussed briefly above suggests, with varying amounts
of explicitness, that the ‘efficacy beliefs’ – the ‘E’ – aspect of USEM is susceptible
of development. However, that development depends critically upon the teacher’s
awareness of the conceptions, their commitment to facilitating student develop-
ment, and their pedagogical expertise.
As part of the Skills plus project we asked some 2,200 first and final year
students across a variety of subjects to agree or disagree with the item: An individual
can’t change their intelligence by much. Roughly two in seven were inclined to
agree, suggesting the possibility of a fixed self-theory as far as intelligence was
concerned. The opportunity was also taken to use the item with 72 academic staff
attending workshops, with an almost identical result (though a couple, quite
reasonably, remarked that ‘it all depends what you mean by “intelligence” ’). If
these proportions were sustained across higher education, they would imply that
around five of every ten teacher/student pairings were those in which both parties
had a malleable view of intelligence, and that in one pairing in ten both parties
would hold a fixed view. The other two possibilities (teacher fixed, student
malleable; and teacher malleable, student fixed) would each appear on two
occasions in ten.
From a pedagogic point of view, the malleable/malleable pairing is the most
propitious since both parties believe in the development of intelligence (we do
not know what kind of intelligence was meant by the respondents, but speculate
that this might be ‘practical’). The least propitious is where both parties have a
fixed belief, since this could lead to fairly barren learning encounters in which
both parties act according to their presumptions. The learning achievements of
the student from the two ‘crossover’ pairings of malleable/fixed will probably
depend on the ‘malleable’ person. If the teacher has a malleable disposition then
they may, through the exercise of pedagogic skill, be able to help the ‘fixed’ student
to become more malleable. If it is the student who is the malleable one, then they
may need to call on a considerable amount of self-belief if the teacher offers no
expectation regarding their practical capacity to develop.
It is important for teachers to become aware, if they are not so already, of the
educational significance of the fixed/malleable distinction and of the
‘developability’ of practical intelligence. This has a particular force when a student
cohort might be felt to be lacking in academic ability because of modest entry
qualifications even when these might have been gained in difficult educational
and/or social circumstances. If students’ sense of self-efficacy is not strong, and
they perceive the cognitive and cultural leaps expected by their higher education
92 Towards the enhancement of practice

programmes are wide, then they are at particular risk of not bridging the gaps, of
becoming demoralized, and of discontinuing their studies.2 For those students
entering higher education from disadvantaged backgrounds, the risk-level is higher.
Bandura (1997) implies the need for tasks to be pitched at an appropriate level
and graded in difficulty, and he is explicit regarding the need for feedback:

The less individuals believe in themselves, the more they need explicit, prox-
imal, and frequent feedback of progress that provides repeated affirmations
of their growing capabilities.
(Bandura 1997: 217)

Where students have come to overrate their capabilities, they are also at risk of
performing badly in higher education and becoming demoralized (and especially
so if they are oriented towards performance goals). Naylor and Smith (2002)
analyzed performances of students graduating from UK universities in 1993 and
found that, compared with pupils with equivalent qualifications from state schools,
pupils from fee-paying schools obtained on average a lower class of degree. This
finding (which might surprise some) could stem from the teachers in independent
schools making strenuous efforts to get their pupils to do well in the A-level
examinations (after all, their schools’ reputation stems in part from pupils’ entry
to higher education) but not necessarily preparing them as well for the very different
learning experience in higher education. Boud (1995) might refer to a compara-
tively lower ‘consequential validity’ of the fee-paying pupils’ learning.

Assessment and efficacy beliefs

There have been recent moves in the UK to replace traditional assessments at the
end of the first semester by feedback intended to improve learning; many students
need longer than a semester to come to terms with what is expected of them
academically and early failure is discouraging, particularly if the student’s self-
theory favours performance goals. Quite apart from the general conditions under
which feedback is likely to improve learning, summarized in Chapter 8, there are
two points to be made about feedback and efficacy beliefs.

1 The focus of the feedback should be on the strengths and weaknesses of the
presented work (and not on the student).
2 The feedback should indicate how the student could develop their work for
future tasks (and not – unless the student has to retake the assessment – on
how best to re-do the task that is past).

Thought needs to be given to the manner in which feedback is given, as well as

the content and timing of feedback. Poor grades, unless accompanied by supportive
and constructive comment, can lead insecure students to believe they lack sufficient
 How we can develop employability 93

ability to succeed – perhaps because they have adopted performance, rather than
learning, goals.

Metacognition
Flavell’s (1979) concept of metacognition can be seen from three different yet
interrelated perspectives: strategic thinking; applicability to the task in hand; and
personal self-awareness. The first deals with learning, thinking and problem-
solving, and can be seen as having a general, cross-disciplinary relevance. The
second deals not only with the pragmatic know-how relevant to the task, but also
the capacity to stand back and reflect prior to, during, and after the implementation
of a course of action. The third refers to the knowledge that a person has about
their own strengths and weaknesses. All of these have a clear relevance for
employability.
Whilst some metacognition develops without special attention as a consequence
of study in one or more subject disciplines (and more quickly if metacognitive
capability is fairly well developed already), there is a case to be made for making
the development of metacognition an explicit part of the curriculum. The evidence
we presented in Chapter 4 indicates how important for employability is the ability
to work well with others, and an understanding of how one can, as an individual,
use self-awareness to maximal effect.3 A knowledge of one’s strengths and
weaknesses can be turned to advantage when one is working with others. Sternberg
and Grigorenko (2000b) see the practical application of self-awareness as
exemplifying successful intelligence in action, and Belbin’s (1981) exploration
of team roles points quite firmly towards the value of complementarity in group
problem-solving. There ought to be scope in a curriculum for incorporating
reflective analysis into group activities, and for encouraging reflection by individual
students on their achievements. Work placements provide particular opportunities
for personal reflection (Lazarus, 1992). Whilst a lot might happen in the normal
course of events, an explicit requirement laid on students to be reflective about
their learning from such activity is likely to give evolution a measure of assistance
– provided that the staff support for this is available.
Students in higher education are expected to have developed the metacognitive
capacity for self-regulation by the end of their programmes. Self-regulation
depends on the capacity to recognize and respond appropriately to the demands
of the situations confronting them. If students merely respond to statements of
standards and criteria without ‘making them their own’, then the development of
a self-regulatory capability may be hindered. Boud puts it succinctly:

Too often staff-driven assessment encourages students to be dependent on

the teacher or the examiners to make decisions about what they know and
they do not effectively learn to be able to do this for themselves.
(Boud, 1995: 39)
94 Towards the enhancement of practice

The corollary is of an implicit pressure to ‘come up with the right answer’ (i.e.
to achieve a performance goal) and not to stretch out – perhaps riskily – in the
interests of learning. Put another way, this is tantamount to encouraging ‘learned
dependence’ (Peterson et al., 1993) – which is surely not what higher education
intends.
Wolf (1995) showed in respect of academic staff’s understanding of criteria
that it is necessary to refine understanding of assessment precepts by considering
actual examples. On the same principle, it makes sense to engage students with
the assessment process, since this can encourage both cognition and metacognition.
Dochy et al. (1999: 345) concluded, following a review of the literature, that the
positive effects of engaging students in the assessment process included, inter
alia:

• Increased student confidence in the ability to perform.

• Increased awareness of the quality of the student’s own work.
• Greater independence in learning.
• Improvement in the products of learning.
• Increased reflection on the student’s own behaviour and/or performance.

Gibbs (1999: 43ff) provides an example from Engineering that is consistent

with the conclusions of Dochy et al. We note that these conclusions indicate that
peer assessment can assist the development of self-regulatory behaviour and also
indicate its contribution to the broader ‘E’ and ‘M’ components of USEM.
The work of Dochy et al. points to the broader importance of formative
assessment in student development. We note that a desire to strengthen formative
assessment has considerable implications for curricula since, in any context where
resources are constrained, it implies some redistribution of staff effort. On the
whole, traditional approaches to curricula do not accord formative assessment the
weight it deserves and, as a consequence, do not optimally serve student learning.
In some subjects and universities, staff may invest heavily in high-stakes summative
assessment to try to achieve what might be better done through low-stakes formative
approaches (see Chapter 8, and the extended argument in Knight and Yorke, 2003b).
Like peer and self assessment, personal development planning (PDP) has the
potential to stimulate reflection to an extent probably not hitherto reached in most
curricula. The construction of a portfolio of achievements and associated reflection
could also serve students well as they put together applications for jobs. However,
there are difficulties in devising robust and workable PDP systems and a real
problem of getting ‘buy-in’. Academic staff tend to be uneasy about ‘backstage’
innovations, things that distract their attention from teaching students and doing
research. Students are also pressed for time and likely to avoid innovations that
have no obvious pay-offs. The fear is that PDP may seem too remote from the
daily business of lectures, seminars, laboratories, studios and assessment. We
believe that the likelihood that PDP would gain acceptance would be at its highest
(but it would still be no certainty) if it were presented as a contribution to the
building of students’ curricula vitae.
 How we can develop employability 95

Te a c h i n g f o r s u c c e s s f u l i n t e l l i g e n c e
Teaching for ‘successful intelligence’, as Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000b)
describe it, aligns quite closely with what we see as the operationalization of the
USEM account of employability. Sternberg and Grigorenko are interested in
encouraging people to exhibit what Stephenson (1998) terms ‘capability’:

Capable people have confidence in their ability to

1 take effective and appropriate action,
2 explain what they are seeking to achieve,
3 live and work effectively with others, and
4 continue to learn from their experiences, both as individuals and in
association with others, in a diverse and changing society.
...
Capability is a necessary part of specialist expertise, not separate from it.
Capable people not only know about their specialisms, they also have the
confidence to apply their knowledge and skills within varied and changing
situations and to continue to develop their specialist knowledge and skills ...
(Stephenson, 1998: 2, minor presentational changes made)

Strongly implicit in the notions of ‘successful intelligence’ and ‘capability’ is

that they are holistic rather than atomistic. In USEM terms, understanding, skilful
practices, efficacy beliefs and metacognition come together in employability. Hence
although there is value in focusing pedagogically on one USEM component at a
time for some learning activities, the full power of the account will only be seen
in learning activities in which the student is expected to draw simultaneously on
most, if not all, components. Work placements and project work are two kinds of
activity in which richly complex learning may (though will not necessarily) occur.
Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000b) have prepared a handbook for the teaching
of ‘successful intelligence’, which offers broad ideas for activities intended to
develop aspects of complex learning: these need to be fleshed out with appropriate
disciplinary content.4 There are sections on teaching for analytical, creative, and
practical thinking whose main virtue is likely to be the prompting of ideas for
pedagogy in the higher education arena. Other relatively accessible (and enjoyable)
stimuli to thinking about student development can be found in the popularized
(and not pedagogically-oriented) accounts of Goleman (1996) and Seligman
(1998).
Many of the ideas put forward by Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000b) will already
be well known to teachers, though they may not always have been connected to
employability. The following list picks up some of Sternberg and Grigorenko’s
suggestions, students could be encouraged, for example:

• To question their assumptions (after all, any researcher worth their salt does
this).
• To explore possibilities for redefining the problem facing them (this could
mean ‘turning the problem on its head’).
96 Towards the enhancement of practice

• To be aware of the relationship between creativity and intrinsic motivation.

• To organize information.
• To think and plan before acting.
• To check periodically that they have not drifted off course (perhaps because
of going down an attractive by-way and losing focus on the main task).
• To engage in constructive critique of their own work, and that of others.
• To be prepared to take risks (after all, as Rogers, 2002: 113, observes, learning
‘is an essentially risky business’).
• To see setbacks as learning opportunities (following the maxim that ‘the person
who never made a mistake never made anything’).
• To tolerate the ambiguity and indeterminacy that inhere in many problem-
situations in employment and life generally, and to recognize that, in many
practical circumstances, a perfect answer is unattainable.

However, we have to observe that tightly-defined learning outcomes and

curricular structures may militate against learning from situations that reflect the
fluidity and ‘unboundedness’ that are inherent in some of the challenges that can
be found in workplaces.

D e s i g n i n g c u r r i c u l u m f o r c o m p l ex l e a r n i n g
The implications of USEM for curriculum design are dramatic but not, as we
shall shortly show, unfeasible. They are dramatic because the USEM description
of employability brings to the fore something that has often been recognized by
those organizing co-curricular activities, namely that opportunities and engage-
ments do not reliably translate into learning achievements. If learning in general
can be unpredictable, as is said by critics of attempts to pre-specify it in terms of
behavioural objectives and the like (e.g. Stenhouse, 1975), then this is all the
more so for complex learning.
Complex and complicated learning are not the same. It can be complicated to
memorize procedures, formulae, sequences and plots, especially if we have to use
several sources in the process. To do this is not necessarily complex because we
can define the outcome in fairly convergent, fixed or determinate ways. Nor is
formal operational thinking, the highest epistemological level identified by Piaget,
complex, because, at least in most of his examples, it is about the application of
mathematical and scientific reasoning to solve determinate, convergent problems.
It may be tough – for most of us it is tough – but there are answers which are
generally recognized to be the right answers and there are known procedures for
getting them. The learning we want to come from higher education is, in the
main, not determinate and therefore beyond the reach of precise, reliable and
valid measurement. Complex learning is ‘fuzzy’ learning and, as we have remarked
earlier, a slow business (Claxton, 1998).
We need to think about how many elements of employability are to be promoted
by programme arrangements that provide a sequence of learning environments to
 How we can develop employability 97

stimulate students to develop well-founded, evidence-based claims to

employability. Good learning environments can improve the odds of groups of
students becoming more employable but they do not guarantee that any individual
will become articulate, emotionally intelligent or self-motivating. There needs to
be a certain realism about what higher education can do to affect what has been
engrooved, embrained and embodied in the years before people become
undergraduates. Consequently, it is important to stress that any claims that higher
education can increase the employability of graduates need to be made in
probabilistic terms – in other words, about the likelihood of making a difference
at the group level.
The inappropriateness of the apparent certainties of some outcomes-led
approaches to education challenges traditional instructional design processes and
calls for a different approach to the design of learning environments that is
conducive to the sorts of complex learning that concern us here (Ganesan et al.,
2002). Rather than imagining that it is possible to pre-specify complex learning
outcomes and then line up the correct teaching and learning and assessment
experiences to advance them, it is more a case of trying to put in place a series of
opportunities or affordances conducive to their emergence, in some forms amongst
a worthwhile number of cohorts of students. This begs questions about the sorts
of circumstances under which such complex learning is favoured, to which we
now turn.

Learning
Learning does not come from instruction alone. Take, for the sake of argument,
Bereiter and Scardamalia’s account (1993) of four types of knowledge that experts
have: formal, informal, impressionistic and self-regulatory knowledge. They also
point out that much of these knowledges is tacit and acquired by informal means,
such as the daily practices of work, study, leisure and other social exchanges.
Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. Becher (1999) reports that
professionals may learn six times as much non-formally as they do formally.
Coleman and Keep (2001: 16) argue that much learning is ‘embedded in the day-
to-day’, which is to say that we learn through doing tasks in activity systems and
with others in our workgroups or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998).
Some tasks, ways of working and social groupings encourage new thinking
and doing; they are rich in opportunities for different forms of learning. This is
most likely when people are disposed to tackle problems to increase their expertise,
when their goals are learning goals rather than task performance goals (Bereiter
and Scardamalia, 1993; Dweck, 1999). On this analysis, direct instruction can be
one of many stimuli for learning, but learning can also be encouraged by giving
people new tools with which to work, creating new expectations or ‘rules’, and
making it easier for them to share problems, brainstorm answers and talk, face-
to-face or electronically. In this view the physical architecture of the place in
which work takes place, the electronic architecture, the learning tasks and messages
98 Towards the enhancement of practice

about the ‘name of the game’ may all affect what they learn. Some of that learning
is intentional and the product of instruction but where it is formal, or ‘negotiable
knowledge’ as Bereiter and Scardamalia call it (1993: 61), it risks being crystallized,
inert or disconnected. Of course, formal knowledge does not have to be like that,
and it may emerge from the construction of meanings in the flux of using good
tools, rules and the contributions of other people when tackling tasks.
There is a lot of research evidence about good learning. For instance, de Corte
(2000) concludes that

Research has led to the identification of a series of characteristics of effective

learning processes … learning is a constructive, cumulative, self-regulated,
goal-oriented, situated, collaborative and individually different process of
knowledge building and meaning construction.
(de Corte, 2000: 254)

The elements contributing to this learning are less obvious. In our paper
‘Employability and good learning in higher education’ (Knight and Yorke, 2003a)
we described learning in higher education as an outcome of the interplay between
four elements. These are:

1 Student approaches to learning in general, including the beliefs that lie behind
them. We know that students who think they are trying to reproduce faithfully
information as a part of a ‘right-or-wrong’ game have less time for sense-
making than those who want to transform information by making a sense of
it that is fit for a time and purpose (Prosser and Trigwell, 1999, provide a
good summary of this research). Good learning, whether directed at
employability or not, depends on the quality of students’ general approaches
and beliefs. There is a lot of evidence that approaches can be changed for the
better by well-designed learning environments, programmes and practices.
2 Student approaches to studying in a domain – to studying something. They
are more specific than students’ general learning dispositions. Students may
take:
• ‘deep’ or sense-making approaches;
• apathetic, ‘just-getting-by’ approaches;
• surface approaches, where the aim is compliance rather than
understanding;
• strategic approaches (which involve using whichever of the other three
approaches makes best sense in the circumstances).
The approaches to study that students use tend to reflect general approaches
to learning and the sorts of tasks, lectures or tests we design. There is therefore
a case for programme-wide audits of the tasks students do, not least to see
that there is some sense in which the tasks are fit for the purpose of promoting
valued learning outcomes that have a fit with employability. Examples of
such audits are found in Chapters 9–11.
 How we can develop employability 99

However, we need to know more about good task design and the design of
good teaching→learning→assessment sequences – there is no HE equivalent
of the seminal work on school classroom tasks done by Doyle (1983), Bennett
and colleagues (1984) and Stigler and Hiebert (1999).
3 A good general learning environment. This should contain plenty of
opportunities for students to mix, work together on problems, network
electronically and construct meanings from a good range of resources. In
poorer environments there may be, for example, a mismatch between physical
resources and valued learning outcomes, or academic staff may sponsor
cultures that are at variance with those needed to foster complex learning and
employability. Even in such unfavourable circumstances, connections can be
made between, say, libraries full of heavy textbooks and what students will
tend to learn. As befits what is surely a professional and creative activity,
learning design will need to be understood as a probabilistic and fuzzy activity
and not the sharper and surer practice of rational curriculum planning (Ganesan
et al., 2002).
4 Instruction, task sequences and assessment processes. They should be aligned
so that the curriculum-in-use is recognizably akin to the espoused curriculum.
When they are not, the operational curriculum fits the ‘garbage can’ model,
being just an accumulation of conflicting beliefs, practices and priorities.
And if students find it hard to discern a programme learning culture, curriculum
coherence or plenty of opportunities for developing valued social practices,
it is not surprising if they default to the coping strategies that have worked
elsewhere. These strategies will often emphasize the collection and reproduc-
tion of information and algorithms, and not sense-making. Individual teachers
and their modules may sparkle in ‘garbage can’ or ‘free-for-all’ curricula but
ultimately contribute relatively little to the complex learning that employability
and good learning both need. In the UK the Quality Assurance Agency has
pushed institutions to write specifications for their programmes, which has
generally prompted departments to think about the match between pedagogic
practices and programme aims. In Skills plus work with departments we have
found that curriculum auditing is a good way to get discussion about this
coherence. The process, elaborated in the next four chapters, is simple. Each
course tutor records the teaching, learning and assessment methods in use.
They are tallied on programme grids, which quickly show imbalances. This
pattern stimulates discussion about whether programme-wide pedagogic
practices are fit for the purpose of promoting programme goals, which have
been framed in response to the employability policy.

This fourfold analysis is a useful prompt to designers, not a template. For

example, there is not a direct chain of connections between learning environments
and student activities (Goodyear, 2002). One explanation of this points to the
operation of individual psychologies, which mediate ‘objective’ environments and,
in so doing, give each a distinctive tinge for each individual. We refer here to
psychological variations in, at least, self-theories, perceptions and motivations.
100 Towards the enhancement of practice

Design
In designing employability-oriented curricula (and, we would add, any curricula)
it is important to ensure that the students’ learning experiences are coherent and
progressive – a matter that has, until recently, been in the background while
institutions in the UK have implemented modular schemes. The requirement of
the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for institutions to provide programme speci-
fications has re-emphasized the traditional curricular virtues of coherence and
progression. It also implicitly focuses attention on the way in which the student
experience is developed. Early learning encounters generally need more ‘scaf-
folding’ (Wood et al., 1976; Bruner, 1985), which is progressively removed as the
students’ capabilities develop. As we noted when discussing efficacy beliefs
(above), the less attuned the entrant is to the expectations of higher education, the
more important it is to have good scaffolding in place, and for progression to be
taken seriously in curriculum and task design.
We take from de Corte’s work (2000), which was admittedly focused on school
mathematics learning, a series of guiding principles for the design of good learning
environments:

• Learning environments should induce and support constructive,

cumulative and goal-oriented acquisition processes … through a good
balance between discovery learning and personal exploration on the one
hand, and systematic instruction and guidance on the other.
• … As students’ competency in a domain increases, external regulation
of knowledge and skill acquisition should be gradually removed so that
they become more and more agents of their own learning.
• Learning environments should embed acquisition processes as much as
possible in authentic contexts that have personal meaning for students,
are rich in resources and learning materials, and offer ample opportunities
for collaboration.
• … taking into account individual differences among learners in cognitive
aptitudes as well as in affective and motivational characteristics.
• Because domain-specific and domain-general knowledge play a
complementary role in competent learning and thinking, learning
environments should integrate the acquisition of general (meta-)cognitive
skills within the subject matter domains.
(de Corte, 2000: 254)

Yet, that said, there is a real shortage of research into the design of such environ-
ments, especially should we think in terms of programme-level designs to afford
the best chances that individuals would respond most creatively to the four
elements. We offer three general pointers:

• Rational curriculum planning and overly mechanistic approaches will not be

able to handle this complexity. Although it may not be congenial to command-
 How we can develop employability 101

and-control managerialists, curriculum design becomes a matter of bringing

together as many sources of potentially productive messages, opportunities
and requirements as possible in the belief that they will have some impact at
the group level.
• It is vital that students appreciate the opportunities or affordances designed
for them and that we foster learning cultures that help them to know what
they are learning and why, and that help them to know how to develop the
claims to achievement that make them more employable. The Alverno College
experiment (Mentkowski et al., 2000) is a remarkable demonstration of what
is possible when students understand what a programme, its components and
affordances are intended to promote.
• Official thinking notwithstanding, we should not become fixed on the
development of individual teachers’ instructional skills, important though this
is: instead, we should worry a lot more about the development of ‘learning
departments’ that create student learning environments and programmes
favourable to the development of employability.

The next chapter describes steps that have been taken in one country, England,
to develop employability. Chapter 8 argues that further progress will depend on a
working solution being found to the problems of assessment.

Notes
1 The self-efficacious approach is captured in various popular formats, including Piper’s
(1946) children’s book The Little Engine That Could in which the engine puffs ‘I
think I can, I think I can …’ as it attempts for the first time to go over a hill. All ends
happily, of course, with the engine seeming to say ‘I thought I could, I thought I
could …’ as it descends the other side. Not every attempt by the self-efficacious is
blessed with success, of course.
2 We observe, in passing, that around two-thirds of withdrawals from programmes of
study in the UK take place during or at the end of the first year, which is the critical
period for adjustment to the demands of higher education.
3 Note that this is another way of referring to emotional intelligence, whose meta-
cognitive aspect was noted earlier in this chapter.
4 The materials are intended to be applicable to a range of educational levels and the
authors indicate the level(s) for which each suggested activity is suitable.
Chapter
102 Towards 7
the enhancement of practice

Engaging students with the

worlds of work

Addressing employability
Companies still complain about the employability of graduates … despite the
cash, government pressure and numerous initiatives, many believe that
universities are neglecting the employability factor.
(Utley, 2002: 10)

This chapter shows some of the ways in which higher education institutions have
shown that they take ‘the employability factor’ seriously. For example, St John
Fisher College in Rochester, New York, will pay graduates who do not find a
professional job up to $5,000 until they do.1 Similarly, engineering students at the
University of Miami can get up to $17,000 of graduate school tuition. Although
the emphasis in these schemes is on employability through relevant content, liberal
arts colleges are also taking an interest. A leader article in USA Today (26/9/97)
said that,

The money-back guarantees are most common at technical colleges that can’t
turn out graduates fast enough to satisfy high-tech employers. But the
popularity of the programs is encouraging liberal arts schools to rethink how
best to prepare students for after-college life.

We agree and suggest that a university or college has not really addressed
employability until it has a convincing account of the ways in which it enhances
not only the employability of those taking programmes with a direct vocational
relevance but also that of philosophers, historians and artists.

Scope and purpose

The account that follows is localized and generalizable. It is localized in that the
examples are drawn from England.2 It is generalizable in that similar initiatives
are to be found throughout the English-speaking world3 (see Gaff and Ratcliff,
1996; Boud and Solomon, 2001).
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 103

Many of the initiatives we describe are at the course level or centre upon the
co-curriculum, which we define as activities that are complementary to but not an
integral part of an academic programme. This is indicative of the problems that
systemic, programme-wide approaches cause for those working in high-choice
modular systems in which the notion of programme coherence is somewhat hazy
and the module or course is the primary unit of analysis. We return to this theme
in Chapters 12 and 13.
We end this chapter with some uncomfortable questions about graduates likely
to face disadvantage in the labour market. Are initiatives such as these sufficient,
or would it be fairer to aim to enhance employability through mainstream curricula,
or is neither approach good enough?

Wo r k - b a s e d a n d w o r k - r e l a t e d l e a r n i n g
The idea that student employability is enhanced by work-related and work-based
learning has considerable face validity. ‘Work-related learning’4 is a loose term
covering activities that are intended to contribute to a student’s fitness for employ-
ment.5 It includes classroom activities that are designed directly to

• teach propositional or formal knowledge that is of value in an occupation;

• develop something of importance in a particular occupation (triage or
classroom management);
• foster generic practices, such as team-working and interpersonal fluency.

A number of higher education institutions provide opportunities for students

to get credit for work-related learning – as in the Leeds University Philosophy
Department, where credit can be had for the mentoring of more junior students.
The School of Independent Studies at Lancaster University has long allowed
students to propose ways of securing course credit through work-related activities
and through some academically-appropriate activity based upon their work-based
activities.
Many things that can be learned on-campus can also be developed in a
workplace. Other valued achievements, such as triage or classroom management,
demand workplace practice and are likely to be assessed in the workplace. Work-
based learning is therefore treated as a special kind of work-related learning. A
lot of institutions formally accredit work-based learning as an integral part of
their (non-sandwich) curricula – offering a module’s worth of credit, for example.6
So, work-based learning is taken as a subset of work-related learning: ‘work-
related’ distinguishes an activity from ‘pure’ academic work, and ‘work-based’
signifies that learning should be happening in a workplace. Following our sum-
maries of the development of expertise (Chapter 1), practical intelligence (Chapter
1) and generic skills (Chapter 2), we remark that practitioner development will
usually come from on-campus and work-based experiences, combine formal and
non-formal learning and be promoted through the mainstream curriculum or
through the co-curriculum.
104 Towards the enhancement of practice

In 2000 the English funding council, HEFCE, invited institutions to bid for
funding to develop foundation degrees in part-time, full-time and distance learning
modes. These degrees were to be work-related, developed in partnership with
employers and including substantial amounts of work-based learning. The Future
of Higher Education (DfES, 2003) stressed the importance of the foundation
degrees in government plans for expanding the participation of young people in
HE and showed enthusiasm for the continued development of higher education
programmes delivered in further education colleges. Although these new pro-
grammes could be used to illustrate ways in which work-related and work-based
learning can be blended, we will not pay them particular attention but treat them
as special cases of initiatives to enhance employability.

E m p l o y a b i l i t y- e n h a n c i n g p r a c t i c e s

Wo r k - b a s e d l e a r n i n g
This can take the form of placements, which are part of the programme of study,
or of work done outside the programme but ‘cashed in’ through personal
development planning or enrichment activities, such as Insight plus. Harvey says
of placements that they are of two types.

Embedded placements may be:

Optional or compulsory;
Single block placements (thick sandwich) or multiple block placements (thin
sandwich);
Year long, semester long or for shorter periods.
External placements often take place during term-time and may be of variable
lengths but are usually single block placements. They are arranged privately
by individual students, or arranged through agencies or are part of the
recruitment procedures of some organisations.
(Harvey, 1999: 2, 3)

He is wary of the assumption that placements necessarily lead to learning,

arguing that

Unless these external placements are heavily promoted and facilitated within
an institution with an expectation, at programme level, that students become
involved, institutions should not claim any employability development as a
result …
(Harvey, 1999: 3)

Blackwell and colleagues (2001) described four substantial studies of work-

based learning and observed that the experience was not invariably a high quality
one, nor did students necessarily consider that they had learnt a lot from it. They
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 105

did suggest that graduates, looking back, were more appreciative and wondered
whether this might be because they, the graduates, had had the time to reflect –
they saw reflection as an essential concomitant of work-based learning. They also
observed that there are difficulties in assessing work-based learning (see Chapter
8) and argued that good quality work-based learning has six characteristics:

• Stakeholders – students, employers, academic staff and employees – all appre-

ciate the underlying intentions.
• The quality of work experience is greatly enhanced by prior induction and
briefing for all concerned; facilitation of ongoing reflection; debriefing,
reflection and identification of outcomes.
• Work experience is accredited so that it is taken seriously.
• Low-stakes or formative assessment is used to support the process of learning
from work experience.
• Students build up a work-experience portfolio.
• Students can say what they have learned, provide illustrations and, if need
be, commentary.

Harvey illustrates several of these points in the following example:

The University of Bournemouth provides an example of the monitoring and

reflection process. Students are required to keep a logbook or diary of their
placement (weekly entries) detailing activities, targets, skills used, difficulties
encountered and how they overcame them, as well as what they learned. This
has to be signed by their supervisor on a regular basis. Towards the end of the
placement students also complete a specific assignment of 2,500 words that
brings together their findings. Placement development advisors visit students
in situ on two occasions during the 40-week placement. The advisor speaks
both to the student and to the workplace supervisor and produces a report
identifying progress made from visit to visit, including learning and skills
development. Finally the company is asked to complete a one-page appraisal
form (matrix of skills). The pieces of work, the logbook, the personal
development advisor reports provide an overall picture of the placement.
(Harvey, 2003: 38)

Noble and Paulucy (2002) offer complementary advice. They also make an
important economic distinction between types of work-based learning. They
distinguish between that which ‘involves the translation of discipline-based
university programmes into forms which can be delivered through the workplace’
as in the case of an MBA in management practice, and that ‘where the focus and
context of the curriculum is primarily designed by the learner’ (p. 26). This
distinction between ‘batch processing’ and customized provision is important for
several reasons, two of which are:
106 Towards the enhancement of practice

• Customized provision ‘requires staff to develop what may be a new set of

skills, behaviours and competencies in relation to learner support. Facilitation,
networking, brokerage and negotiation are all essential parts of the skill
repertoire’ (p. 27).
• Customized provision is expensive and probably cannot be scaled-up so that
this form of work-based learning becomes part of all students’ curricula.

The conclusion that dedicated higher education staff are needed to facilitate
and support the development of work-based learning is predictable, as is the
corollary that this need is greatest with customized, individualized placements.
There are costs too for employers, as is evident from the Association of Graduate
Recruiters’ briefing paper (2002) for employers on providing good quality work
experience. Although the AGR is clear about the direct and indirect benefits to
employers, what stands out is that work experience cannot be satisfactory unless
it is purposeful and well organized.
There are questions, then, about the feasibility of widespread work-based
learning in a mass higher education curriculum and about its affordability,
especially in its bespoke forms. Problems with answering these questions have
led some programme teams to look instead at strategies reviewed earlier – relevant
content, projects, skill-building and entrepreneurship modules.
A number of local and national organizations and networks offer external
placements. The Shell Technology Enterprise Programme7 (STEP) is a long-
standing organization that provides some 1,200 placements a year in SMEs.
Evaluation evidence shows that STEP placements are appreciated by employers,
with 82 per cent of those involved in 1999–2000 saying that the placement would
have a long-term impact on the business and 55 per cent saying that they had
made a profit of £2,000+ on it (Work Experience Group, 2002: 12). STEP keeps
a high profile through such events as its ‘UK’s Most Enterprising Student’ award.
There are also regional and institution-specific initiatives. One is the KITTS
project,8 a development in the greater West Midlands area supported by nine higher
education institutions, which helps about 60 SMEs a year to take on graduates to
tackle a specific project for up to 13 weeks.
There is, though, general agreement that preparation is needed if a placement
is truly to be a learning experience:

Specific forms of student preparation advocated included practice in identi-

fication of learning outcomes and their articulation; practice in articulating
cognitive language and concepts to other people (to gain familiarity); and
practice in relating cognitive concepts to everyday and work settings to provide
relevant anchoring ideas.
(Little 2000: 126)

Despite this agreement, Little found that there was a lot of emphasis on helping
students to get placements and
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 107

… only a very few of my case studies made reference to discussions about

processes of learning, the learning cycle, processes of reflection on actions
and experiences, and the language used for articulating the development of
higher order cognitive skills and personal transferable skills.
(Op. cit.: 126)

When it comes to thinking about work-based learning for part-time students,

such as those in the National Health Service University or in the Open University,
this emphasis on learning, not on placement, becomes compelling because students
will usually already be in paid or voluntary work. The problems are not getting
placements but in seeing how learning can be supported through the experience
of work in a variety of settings. This is a challenge being faced by Foundation
Degree programmes in England, and raises issues concerning the relationship
between learning that takes place in the workplace and academic standards.
Watchwords are:

• Learning – what programme outcomes should students be addressing?

• Quality – how is the university to be assured that students receive good quality
support and guidance, especially when the student is the only person formally
learning from work in a community of workplace practice that may have no
experience of formal learning through work?
• Support – how can academic, practical, central and local arrangements enable
students to learn and represent their learning effectively?
• Assessment – what would count as adequate and efficient assessment arrange-
ments with students widely dispersed across a varied range of workplace
settings?

Clearly, if part-time students are to have the same opportunities to capitalize

upon their higher education to enhance their employability, then part-time and
corporate providers need to address these issues, formidable though they are.

Advice on the design and operation of work-based learning

In the code of practice for placement learning (QAA, 2001d), there is a section
which provides a set of precepts, with accompanying guidance, on arrangements
for placement learning that typically takes place outside the institution and that
has the support and co-operation of a placement provider. The code emphasizes
the need for clearly defined aims and intended learning outcomes that are
understood by all parties, and for an explicit specification of responsibilities of
the higher education institution, placement provider and student. There is a view,
though, that it would be helpful to produce a good practice guide for work-based
learning to supplement the code of practice. There is advice available from the
Association for Sandwich Education and Training and the National Centre for
Work Experience (Work Experience Group, 2002) and guidance from the
108 Towards the enhancement of practice

University of Cambridge Programme for Industry (2000), which is directed at

higher education staff and employers, especially SMEs.
There is a need to help employers appreciate what is involved in successful
work experience. The UK Association of Graduate Recruiters publishes Work
Experience – An Employers’ Guide to Success (2002), which makes the case for
employer participation in work experience and advises on establishing links with
universities, setting up and running work-based learning programmes, attracting
quality applicants, and supporting and assessing students during placements.
Smaller and ‘micro’ businesses find it difficult to engage in planning for, and
providing, work experience for students, since their staff resources are often too
stretched to permit the commitment of time that such work requires. Particularly
at the ‘micro’ end, there is a reluctance to become involved in the bureaucratic
paperwork that can accompany work experience. Micro businesses in the areas
of, for example, design and ‘the media’ find it easier to provide institutions with
project briefs to which students can respond in the institutional environment, or at
home. Some small organizations in these areas have taken up the concept of ‘tele-
working’, arguing that it can contribute to functional efficiency and that it replicates
some working practices. Where they engage with academic programmes, the
engagement may take the form of consultation at the programme design stage
and, later, when the students’ responses to the project briefs come up for assessment.
This form of work experience, however, highlights the ethical problem of benefiting
from student work at relatively minimal cost, especially should the students produce
work of a higher standard than that of the business’s own staff or of the staff of an
agency.
It is easier to concentrate on the learning that should come from placements,
volunteering and part-time work if students, mentors, employers and teachers
have a language to use that identifies likely learning outcomes and ways of mapping
them onto a university’s or college’s awards system. The framework can exist in a
prototype version, which is available to departments interested in work-based
learning and which identifies common outcomes, how they might be highlighted,
assessed and mapped into the awards structure. Some customization by departments
and programme teams is then needed to adapt the framework to their particular
learning intentions. Alternatively, Glasgow Caledonian University has developed
a framework for Work-Based Learning awards which is based on individually
negotiated learning contracts (Chisholm, 2002). On grounds of economy, the
programme-specific approach is to be preferred, although individual learning
contracts offer greater flexibility.

Ensuring that subject matter is relevant

A common response to claims that there are skills shortages or gaps has been to
set up programmes that directly address those gaps by, for example, increasing
the number of undergraduate places in nanotechnology or web engineering. There
is an obvious appeal to bringing the subject matter of higher education closer to
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 109

what employers want, although it is not easy for higher education to be sure what
will be needed in five or six years time, when the first graduates emerge from a
programme (which is one reason for the over-supply of graduates with ICT
strengths at the turn of the last century); it is not easy for HEIs to recruit high-
quality staff in these ‘leading edge’ areas; and sometimes they get it wrong by, for
example, all joining the scramble to produce MBA graduates.
Within established courses, subject relevance is often assured in normal
classroom practice, as when students learn procedures, theories and practices that
are directly related to workplaces. It is also quite common for teachers in some
applied and vocational areas to teach through case studies and other materials that
require academic understandings to be brought to bear on workplace issues. In
other subjects, such as history, teachers sometimes find opportunities to set tasks
that require students to think about workplace problems, as when they are asked
to plan a museum exhibition on Ourplace fifty years ago. There still seems to be
steadily growing interest in problem-based curricula, in which ‘academic’ content
is explored through consideration of practical problems that are often representative
of workplace practices.
The graduate apprenticeship scheme sponsored by the English government
created degree and diploma level programmes, targeted at specific economic
sectors. These apprenticeships should enrich the work-based learning elements of
programmes and link them more securely with the ‘academic’ elements. Students
would also be developing ‘key skills’, typically leading to the award of a National
Vocational Qualification, always given suitable evidence of achievement from
both the workplace and university study. A common feature of graduate apprentice-
ships is ‘a self-managed and reflective Personal Development Summary’ (EMTA,
2000: J-1), which resembles what is now called ‘personal development planning’
in England.
The national training organization for engineering manufacture, EMTA,
supported work in a number of universities, including the University of Luton,
where the Work Based Learning Unit organized

a stand-alone modular course providing training and development for

graduates to practise their skills in the workplace. It has been likened to a
form of ‘finishing school’ to prepare graduates for possible future work within
a SME.
(EMTA, 2000: 8)

Loughborough University reviewed the 45-week engineering work placement

to integrate it more fully with the overall academic package.

Pr o j e c t w o r k a n d o t h e r ‘ c o n t ex t u a l i z i n g ’ a c t i v i t i e s
Difficulties in providing workplace learning opportunities have stimulated an
interest in work-related activities, such as projects, lifelike case studies, authentic
110 Towards the enhancement of practice

assessment and other context-rich work. Queen’s University, Belfast, reports on a

project-based learning programme developed in the mid-1990s ‘to foster closer
links between employers and higher education through the development of joint
employer-academic tutor projects … [to] offer a range of realistic projects …
[that] may be taken as an alternative to conventional dissertations or projects
suggested by tutors’ (Brown, 1999: 4). There were not only projects in the ‘obvious’
areas of science and engineering, but also in history and social science. Although
one large employer estimated that each project had incurred around £250 in direct
costs and about 40 hours of company personnel time, ‘the benefits to the company
outweighed the investment costs’ (O’Neill, 1999: 75). That is not the whole story,
though, because there were significant costs to the university, including the
appointment of a dedicated project-based learning officer, a working group, a
network and staff development workshops.
As one-offs, projects tend to be expensive and there is an appeal in cheaper
ways of engaging learners with realistic problems. Some teachers at the University
of Leeds have developed case studies that engage students with lifelike problems
through which academic material can be mastered. This ‘context’ work (School
of Geography, 2003a) has some resemblance to problem-based learning, although
it is on a smaller scale and can be incorporated into many existing courses in a
way that problem-based learning cannot. The School relates this to ‘intrapreneur-
ship’, which it defines as ‘the art of working within an organization to effect
change, by developing new ideas, procedures or products, by innovating practice
and thereby enhancing business’ (School of Geography, 2003b: 1). Context
materials are intended to stimulate this ‘intrapreneurship’, which can easily be
associated with the development of good claims to employability.

Skills enhancement
Surveys show that informants are prepared to identify sets of skills that make for
employability. In auditing employability development activities in Wales, Harvey
(1999: 4) collected information about embedded employability-skills development
on modules/courses, defined as courses that include ‘the explicit and transparent
development’ of any of fifteen named ‘skills’, ‘which may be formally assessed’.
Little (2000) reported that analysis of work-based learning case studies found the
following skills were generally emphasized: personal and social skills,
communication skills, problem-solving skills, organizational skills and creativity.
The Keynote project aimed to ‘identify, disseminate and develop the key skills of
textiles, fashion and printing students, thereby enhancing their employability’ (D.
Allen, 2002: 2). Noting some disagreement over what these skills are, he also said
that 12 out of 14 institutions surveyed reckoned that key skills were fully embedded
within curricula. Although Harvey (2003) shows that there are a number of skills
development schemes running in higher education, this agreement on the
significance of skills of one sort or another is qualified by Allen’s note that ‘… in
the majority of the institutions, there was no explicit tracking of skills development’,
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 111

and in a department which had a good system in place ‘very few students availed
themselves of the opportunity to gain key skills accreditation’ (D. Allen, 2002: 2).
One explanation may be that there are costs involved in adding ‘extras’ to
mainstream curricula which students and institutions may be equally reluctant to
incur.

Other awards
Believing that skills are not enough, some higher education providers have
developed broader employability programmes. The Graduate Employability Award
(Hopkiss, 2001: 4) aims ‘to help you to evidence the transition from student to
effective graduate employee’. The award is validated by the OCR9 national
awarding body, which means that it has national recognition. It comprises five
units: the reflective practitioner; customer service; workplace safety; working
with others; improving one’s own learning and performance. After induction,
allocation to an assessor or mentor and completion of a learning agreement, students
concentrate on gathering evidence to satisfy the requirements of each of the five
units. Assessment is by portfolio and a ‘professional discussion’ with the assessor.
Other, more local, examples of awards being made outside degree structures
include the Work Experience Award developed as part of the JEWELS (Joint
Systems to Enhance Work Experience Levels of Service and Satisfaction) Project
run jointly by the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter, and the York Award which
is a certificated programme of transferable skills training and experiential learning,
offered by the University of York in partnership with a number of public, private
and voluntary sector organizations.10

Visits, work shadowing and mentoring

Staffordshire University introduced a mentoring scheme in 2000 which matched
18 students with disabilities with a mentor, ‘that is an individual with professional
experience who can open up a window of opportunity to an undergraduate with
special needs’ (G. Allen, 2002: 25). Both mentors and students said they gained
from the relationship. The IMPACT project,11 administered from the University
of Bradford on behalf of a consortium of institutions, is ‘targeted primarily at UK
minority ethnic students to enhance their employability skills and increase
employment opportunity’ (IMPACT publicity flyer). It provides one-to-one
discussions, employer events, mentoring, access to work-shadowing and work
experience, mock interviews and a variety of workshops to support the job
application process.

Enhancing an entrepreneurial disposition

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are recognized as sites of innovation
and wealth creation. One line of thinking is that for growth there needs to be a
112 Towards the enhancement of practice

greater supply of graduates with an entrepreneurial disposition. This makes the

promotion of entrepreneurship an interesting way of contributing to employability.
This is quite well established in some subject areas, especially – and predictably
– in Schools of Business, such as the Audencia Business school in Nantes and
ESC Grenoble, although it is more likely to be an MBA-level concern than an
undergraduate one. In England, though, where self-employment and small-scale
enterprise are quite common in some economic sectors, such as those served by
the Art and Design subject area, many Art and Design departments make some
entrepreneurial elements available in their programmes.
Harvey (2003) describes initiatives including:

• ‘Westminster Business Consultants’ is a junior enterprise organization that

provides a commercial service and is run, managed and staffed by Westminster
University students.
• The Business School at The University of Newcastle has developed a business
enterprise module as a way of embedding an array of attributes in the
curriculum.
• At Liverpool John Moores University, there is an optional one-day course for
arts students on self-employment that has been in operation since 1997 and
had 89 participants last year. It is now attracting attention from graduates in
other disciplines.

In some subject areas, a curriculum concern for entrepreneurship would be a

significant contribution to graduate employability, given what is known about
employment patterns (Blackwell and Harvey, 1999). In others it might broaden
students’ career planning. Brown and Puddick (2002) report on a Cambridge
University scheme, based on the assumption that

… if students could be exposed to the realities of entrepreneurial businesses

through working in them, their awareness of the necessary conditions for
success would be enhanced and their fear of the unknown would be reduced
… Such exposure might persuade more people that learning can be used to
create wealth rather than just to get a job.
(Brown and Puddick, 2002: 50)

The programme comprised induction packs, placements, projects, lectures and

workshops. At a money price of about £500 per graduate, the programme was
good value for money, although there were substantial hidden costs and it is not
easy to see how it could be substantially extended beyond the 50 students who
had participated in the first year. Donnelly (2003), describing an established
‘enterprise’ programme at Heriot-Watt University, which attracted more than 500
volunteer participants in 2002, is very clear about the substantial costs, logistical
problems and compromises. He concludes that
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 113

… there is clear evidence that enterprise can be learned by large numbers of

people and that they can produce ideas capable of commercialization, given
the help of the university. Whether universities themselves are capable of
addressing this challenge remains to be seen.
(Donnelly, 2003: 43)

As with work-based learning, a difficulty is getting commitment from SMEs.

Remarking on data showing that in 1998 less than 3 per cent of them claimed to
have collaborated with higher education, Brown and Puddick comment that

… even in the Cambridge area where the existence of the University was
assumed to be a major reason for their location, the companies had generally
never taken a student on work placement.
(Brown and Puddick, 2002: 52)

Ball (2001) said that art and design graduates need self-confidence, which
might come from independent learning, business awareness and a better
understanding of entrepreneurship. The University of Brighton has responded by
providing fashion and textiles design students with ‘a group assignment that raises
awareness of how and why businesses succeed or fail’ (Ball, 2001: 17), which is
supported by ‘five interactive workshops designed to raise students’ awareness of
issues for small businesses, why they are started, why businesses succeed or fail,
aspects of business management, such as finance, costing and pricing and the
skills required by owner-managers’ (ibid.). Copies of students’ reports were sent
to owner-managers, who appreciated their insights and involvement. Students too
appreciated this applied entrepreneurship course. Although Ball did not address
issues of sustainability and scale, this approach looks to be generalizable since it
is not customized (there were 50 students in the first presentation) and it appears
to stand in place of more traditional final year projects.
An alternative is to consider how entrepreneurship might be an option within
the mainstream curriculum, even available to such as philosophers and historians.
While it is unlikely that work placements could be offered, much could be done to
foster an entrepreneurial cast of mind. Gibb (2002) encourages the creation of
environments conducive to learning and entrepreneurship. The goal is to promote
entrepreneurial behaviour, ‘the ability to cope with uncertainty and complexity’
(p. 135) by designing learning environments that ‘enhance the capacity of
individuals to practise such behaviour in a way that will, hopefully, enrich their
lives and help their organizations to perform better’ (ibid.). When he later says
that ‘… much of this [entrepreneurial] way of life can be rehearsed by use of
appropriate pedagogy’ (p. 137), we see a connection between his view of the
development of entrepreneurship and ours on the promotion of employability.
114 Towards the enhancement of practice

Learning from part-time work

Although it has been traditional for North American students to work to pay their
way through college, it is a newer phenomenon in the UK. Most students in the
UK now have part-time work and it is being appreciated that there is an opportunity
here for strengthening student claims to employability. Noble comments that some
universities and colleges

See extra-curricular and off-campus activity through, for example, part-time

employment, student union activities … as a means of developing
employability. Students are sometimes given the opportunity to gain an
additional qualification as a part of this work …
(Noble, 1999: 125)

Insight plus,12 run by the Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC), helps
students to develop claims to achievement on the back of their part-time work. In
the 2001/2 academic year it was run at eleven UK universities and was planned to
grow fourfold in 2002/3. The programme comprises workshops, mentoring and
support materials. Three leading graduate recruitment companies support it and
will use it in their recruitment programme. Student Volunteers UK, a partner in
Insight plus, helps students to capitalize on their voluntary work and participation in
the funding council’s active community scheme. The University of Wolverhampton,
finding that traditional mechanisms for providing student work experience, notably
industrial placements and projects, were operating at full capacity, developed
structures to help students to convert part-time and casual work into course credit
through a level 2 module that exploited a transferable, computer-based self-
assessment tool (Sidhu, 2000). Watton et al. (2002) summarize the experience of
several such projects, finding that reflective learning logs or portfolios are the
main means by which ad hoc work experience is converted into academic credit
or other forms of recognition. Despite these initiatives, the Work Experience Group
considered that ‘where institutions assess learning derived from such ad hoc work
experience, the take-up by students is low’ (WEG, 2002: 7).
Students’ part-time work could be turned to stronger account if it were to provide
the ‘life experience’ enrichment of a programme of academic study which might
be termed ‘Work-related Studies’. This could form one component of, say, a joint
programme in Subject X and Work-related Studies which might be attractive to
some students, not least because it could help them to deal with the problem of the
debt that typically arises as a consequence of pursuing a qualification in higher
education. To be credible, the Work-related Studies component would need to be
solidly grounded in academic disciplines, and there is considerable potential for
the inclusion of material from individual and social psychology, organizational
sociology, human resource management, finance and accounting, and so on. If
the student then wished to extend their studies in Subject X alone up to degree-
level, then this could be undertaken on a post-experience basis.13
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 115

Learning from volunteering

In England there is a new stream of funding from HEFCE, known as the Active
Communities Fund (HEACF), which is intended to encourage students to engage
in voluntary work. Every HE institution has substantial funding, which could aid
the enhancement of employability: recent research amongst 200 of the UK’s top
businesses shows that three-quarters of employers prefer to recruit candidates
who have undertaken voluntary work experience and that over half think that
voluntary work can be more valuable than paid work (TimeBank, 2001). Another
form of external organized work experience is voluntary work through Community
Service Volunteers, Millennium Volunteers or Student Volunteering UK. There
are about 25,000 student volunteers across the UK working in community-based
projects in over 180 further education and higher education volunteering groups.
The case studies of ‘The Art of Crazy Paving’ research project (Speakman et al.,
2001) showed that volunteering promoted an organic learning process that honed
continuing personal development planning and self-reflection.14

Better careers guidance

Commenting on students’ career planning, the Work Experience Group (2002:
10) observes that, ‘Those who need most guidance are least likely to consult the
Careers Service’. Rowley and Purcell (2001) reviewed data on users’ perceptions
of careers service quality and concluded that

…. The scope of provision differed widely between institutions … There

appeared to be a need for a more pro-active service during a student’s course
of study, that would, for example, publicise the services on offer, and arrange
work placements … Students at post-1992 universities, those following
‘minority subjects’ or highly specialised courses, and students over 25 were
less likely to be satisfied with provision … in those groups of students that
appeared to be most in need of the service, significantly lower proportions
were likely to have used it … Although the majority of students had used the
careers service and rated the information and guidance useful, it appeared
that the majority of those did not visit until their final year, by which time it
was often too late for those inadequately prepared for the labour market …
(Rowley and Purcell, 2001: 419–20)

They advised careers services to give more attention to the development of

career management competencies in all students, and to refocus resources in order
to target those groups of students that have been consistently identified as failing
to receive an acceptable threshold quality of careers advice and guidance (Rowley
and Purcell, 2001). The Harris Report (DfEE, 2001) reviewed higher education
careers services and made a series of recommendations designed to raise standards
and improve performance and to integrate careers services into the organization
116 Towards the enhancement of practice

as a whole. A Joint Implementation Group has addressed the six Harris recom-
mendations and has published guidance on core services for students, graduates
and employers in a report entitled Modernising HE Careers Education (Universities
UK/SCOP, 2002). It is not clear whether funding will be available to help careers
services meet these ambitions, although work commissioned by the higher
education Careers Service Unit (CSU) explores ways of targeting resources so
that those students most in need of advice are encouraged to seek it.
One of the outcomes of the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative of the late
1980s and 1990s was the inclusion in curricula of contributions from institutional
careers services. This recognized the significance, for students’ development, of a
relatively early engagement in thinking about what they might need, over and
above their formal qualifications, to succeed in employment. There continues to
be interest in bringing careers services into closer relationships with subject
departments, notably by

… integrating the skills of career management into the curriculum. They cover
institution-wide and discipline-based approaches involving a range of activities
including open and distance learning, computer-based learning materials,
involvement of employers in curriculum delivery and the development of
career management modules … A major problem facing institutions is,
however, one of resources to support this kind of development.
(Noble, 1999: 123)

The Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC) runs the Insight conferences
for students which prepare them for the transition to work and also contribute
strongly to their ability to get a graduate job.

Pe r s o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t p l a n n i n g
In Chapter 8 we comment on the place of personal development planning (PDP)
in a differentiated approach to assessment, so we only remark here on its potential
to be integrative by encouraging students to reflect on their learning, needs and
developmental plans as a whole. It is seen as a student-owned process that will
often involve the creation and revision of a portfolio.
However, it is not something that higher education is finding it easy to address,
although a great deal of work has been co-ordinated by the Centre for Recording
Achievement (CRA), encouraged by the Generic Centre of the Learning and
Teaching Support Network, and undertaken through projects in universities and
colleges around the country.

Re s p o n d i n g t o d i s a d v a n t a g e
We have observed that certain groups of graduates do not fare as well in the labour
markets as their degree classifications might have led us to expect. There have
been some projects to enhance their employability. Amongst them are the following:
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 117

• The AGCAS MERITS (Minority Ethnic Recruitment, Information, Training

and Support) Project (see Booth, 2002), which worked with Black and Asian
students and graduates, who tend to be disadvantaged in the job market. The
programme involves careers services at half a dozen institutions. Brunel
university has extended the MERITS Project, piloted a proactive mentoring
approach and offers free Career Planning Resources – hard copy, ring-bound
versions of a ‘Tutor Pack’ and a ‘Mentoring Pack’.
• The IMPACT project, designed to support ethnic minority students in various
ways, was noted above.
• The Leicester Employment Skills within an Accessible Curriculum (ESAC)
project15 is creating and disseminating materials that will ensure that students
with disabilities and specific learning difficulties are provided with
opportunities to develop key employability skills through inclusive approaches
to academic curricula.
• Deaf and Creative is a web site aimed at young deaf people looking for the
next stage in their education or career.16 There is information about going to
university, getting a job, starting a business, doing further qualifications and
getting funding. It lists job vacancies.

Despite the obvious appeal of such initiatives, we know that authorities on

special educational needs provision in schools have often argued that the starting
point must be good educational practice for all. Their view is that addressing
many special needs depends, first and foremost, on good practices: any special
provision depends upon a bedrock of good general practice, hence the title of
Ainscow’s (1991) book, Effective Schools for All. There is some support for this
in research evidence that effective schools tend to be effective for all children
(Mortimore et al., 1988). That line of thought has influenced our approach to
employability, which has been concerned with designs that can help all students,
not just those willing or able to participate in the co-curriculum, or those who
happen to have chosen subjects in which there is a plentiful supply of jobs, such
as initial teacher education. Of course, it is still reasonable and possible to enhance
student employability in many ways: within the mainstream curriculum and
without; systemically and individually; inclusively and selectively. That general
agnosticism is still our basic position, although we have views about what it is
best to do in the different settings in which we have worked.
Yet there is a powerful case for identifying and targeting those who are likely
to be at risk in the labour market. Without coming down on one side or the other,
we draw attention to three issues attaching to decisions about targeting provision
at those likely to be the most disadvantaged in the graduate labour markets. We
comment on practical, educational and political-economic issues.
Regarding the practical issues, Brennan and Shah say

The case for targeting support to students in greatest need is recognised but
in practice it is very difficult to achieve. Only with regards to mature students
does there seem to be successful experience of targeted support for
118 Towards the enhancement of practice

employability. The problems are partly ethical – institutional staff are nervous
about treating students differently – and partly practical, how to identify those
most in need. The way forward seems to be through some process of self-
referral and student awareness raising. Better information for first year students
on employability is [one area to address] … [T]he very success of some
institutions in widening participation may create difficulties in enhancing
employability … the development of an institutional culture that reflects the
cultures of the majority student groups (ethnic minorities) … [makes it]
difficult to respect the diverse cultures of students and to extend their horizons
and awareness beyond those cultures.
(Brennan and Shah, 2002: 3)

The educational issue is whether special provision can make up for an indifferent
curriculum, which echoes earlier comments about the importance of basing special
educational needs provision on good general educational practice. Issues of political
economy follow: which is the best investment – curriculum enhancement for all
(which is likely to preserve patterns of disadvantage), or disadvantage-busting
projects?
Many of the initiatives described in this chapter are undoubtedly excellent, yet
they are constrained by the quality of the mainstream curricula that students
experience and they often reach those who choose to be reached by them. There is
a view that employability would be best served by fuller curriculum integration,
which is the line that Skills plus took. However, before describing the project’s
work in Chapters 9–12 and then returning to systemic issues in Chapter 13, we
need to consider the assessment implications of locating employability in the
mainstream curriculum, rather than relying on the co-curriculum for its
enhancement.

Notes
1 There are conditions. ‘Typically, students must maintain a B-minus average, mentor
with professionals and complete their internship’ (USA Today, 29/9/97).
2 Further information can be found in:
• The journal Industry and Higher Education, published six times a year, is
dominated (70 per cent of papers) by empirical reports which typically take case
study form (Valentin and Sanchez, 2002).
• Oakland’s (2002) Directory of Employability Resources also contains summaries
of curriculum developments, work experience and extra-curricular activities.
• Enhancing Employability, Recognising Diversity, published by Universities UK
and the Higher Education Careers Service Unit (Harvey et al., 2002) contains a
further sixteen case studies of UK practice, ranging from a programme helping
students from ethnic minority backgrounds (the IMPACT project) through the
development of progress files and associated personal development planning to
the development of a learning at work framework at Liverpool John Moores
University.
• Harvey’s Transitions to Work (2003) is a substantial account of projects and
initiatives that enhance higher education’s contribution to employability.
 Engaging students with the worlds of work 119

3 Conversations with colleagues from universities across the European Union suggest
that there are countries in which employability is conceived principally in terms of
raising student achievement (better grades), updating the curriculum (ensuring content
relevance) and, sometimes, developing skills (although there is some resistance to
the term and government interference in higher education). There is also a lot of
attention being paid to the Bologna Process, which is about harmonising the structure
of first and second cycle higher education in the EU and ensuring that transcripts
from one country are easily readable in others. Important though this is, the process
is, as yet, indifferent to the quality of what lies behind those transcripts – to level of
demand, process standards and learning intentions.
4 The Future of Higher Education (DfES, 2003) refers to ‘work-focused’ learning,
which we equate with work-related learning.
5 Explicitly excluded from this summary are work with former students, postgraduate
programmes, further professional development work, other adult continuing education
and life-long learning. They are important but peripheral to our concern with first
cycle higher education.
6 Brennan and Little (1996: 129–30) identified six approaches to the recognition of
achievement in work-based learning. Some more recent examples are given in Watton
and Collings (2002: 33).
7 http://www.step.org.uk/.
8 See http://www.wmg.warwick.ac.uk/SME_MTC.shtml.
9 The acronym is a welcome alternative to ‘Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of
Arts Examination Board’.
10 For details of the JEWELS Project, see Watton et al. (2002), www.jewels.org.uk/
finalreport.htm and associated papers. For details of the York Award, see
www2.york.ac.uk/admin/ya/.
11 See www.bradford.ac.uk/admin/impact.
12 See www.insightplus.co.uk.
13 An extended discussion of this suggestion can be found in Yorke (2003b).
14 This paragraph is based on Harvey, 2003.
15 See http://www.le.ac.uk/eu/ESAC/project.html.
16 See www.deafandcreative.ac.uk/.
Chapter
120 Towards 8
the enhancement of practice

Assessing for employability

The problem of warranting achievements

We have insisted that many of the achievements that employers value resist reliable
assessment. Even if we devise and can afford to use tolerably-reliable ways of
judging complex achievements, there are still difficulties in warranting achievement
– in affirming that someone is fit to practise, first class or competent. One way of
explaining this caution about warranting can be based on the claim that ‘skills’
are better understood as social practices and that their interpretation demands
situationally-sensitive judgement. This raises questions about the degree to which
it is wise to generalize from situationally-specific judgements – any generalization
from just a few judgements would be suspect. But warrants are exactly that,
generalizations from some instances of practice to future performances. They are
also plainly high-stakes, which means that they must also at least be tolerably
reliable. The problem for the assessment of those achievements that make for
strong claims to employability is that many of them defy measurement. The more
complex the achievement, the harder it is to assess it without over-simplification,
on the one hand, and afford sufficient, tolerably-reliable assessments to make
generalization reasonably trustworthy, on the other.

The importance of assessment for the

promotion of employability
The single, strongest influence on learning is surely the assessment procedures
… even the form of an examination question or essay topics set can affect
how students study … It is also important to remember that entrenched
attitudes which support traditional methods of teaching and assessment are
hard to change.
(Entwistle, 1996: 111–12)

Assessment, as Entwistle says, affects how students study; for example,

encouraging them to take ‘deep’ approaches to tasks, thereby discouraging them
from ‘surface’ approaches, or vice versa. Assessment identifies what is to be taken
seriously and what is not. And the assessment standards, which are often expressed
 Assessing for employability 121

as criteria or indicators, tell students what they need to do in order to succeed and,
in good courses, they are the basis of improvement-centred feedback to students.
There are many interesting assessment methods (Knight and Yorke, 2003b,
summarize fifty-one) and there is no shortage of books on how to use them (for
example, Brown and Knight, 1994; Banta et al., 1996; Hounsell et al., 1996;
Brown et al., 1997; Walvoord and Anderson, 1998; Heywood, 2000). However, in
order to decide which methods are best for a course (we are leaving programme
assessment aside for the moment) there is a need to have a fairly well-formed
sense of what the assessment tasks are intended to achieve in respect of learning
behaviours, the understanding of content and performance standards. Which
methods are best for an employability curriculum geared to the development of
student understanding; subject-specific and general skills; efficacy beliefs and
malleable self-theories; and strategic thinking or metacognition? We are going to
argue that the more complex learning goals cannot be captured by the high-stakes
assessment routines, such as examinations, that are in common use. Those routines
may be suited to the assessment of subject understandings (although some would
argue that they are really only good for assessing the retention of information) but
not helpful in judging the ‘E’ and ‘M’ of the USEM account — and they are
arguably not very good for the SEM. Since it is agreed that things valued enough
to be stated as course learning outcomes should be assessed, we have a problem.
How to assess complex learning if summative assessment is scarcely fit for the
purpose? We will offer some solutions, first at course level and then at programme
level (and we are convinced that with learning, teaching and assessment cultures,
the programme level is the one that really matters). First, we take a brief look at
some basic assessment concepts.

Summative and formative: high-stakes and

low -stakes assessment
Assessments are frequently used to sum up a person’s achievement. In these cases,
there is a summative purpose behind the tasks learners are set. Summative assess-
ment provides ‘feedout’, in the shape of a warrant to achievement or competence
(such as a degree certificate), and in the form of information that can be used as
performance indicators in appraising the work of teachers, departments, colleges
and national systems of education. Assessment for summative purposes is high-
stakes assessment.
One implication is that those being assessed are likely to do all they can to
conceal ignorance and suggest competence. That is in tension with another
implication, namely that when the purposes are summative then the assessment
should get it right – should be accurate, objective and reliable. In summative
assessment there is a conflict between the intention to find out what learners under-
stand and can do and the learners’ interest in hiding their shortcomings. There is
a further difficulty because reliable judgements of achievement are based on the
repeated use of carefully tested tasks, which are judged by more than one assessor
122 Towards the enhancement of practice

using low-inference assessment criteria. The problem is that what should be and
what can be afforded are not necessarily the same. There are also serious technical
difficulties, not reviewed here, with the idea that complex achievements can be
captured by reliable assessment procedures (Knight 2002c). But high-stakes
assessment has to be done because stakeholders expect grades and classifications.
The question then becomes how best to do something that is inherently problematic.
Some achievements, especially those connected with understanding and the
more straightforward skills, can be fairly reliably assessed in much the same way
they are currently assessed. Practice might be improved by:

• Refining the assessment tasks.

• Writing programme assessment plans to ensure that these learning outcomes
are repeatedly assessed throughout the programme.
• Developing assessment criteria which students have and understand and which
assessors use.
• Making resources available for double marking of all summatively-assessed
work, with the exception of work where there are clear right/wrong answers.

These actions will help to optimize the capacity to warrant or certify some
achievements. The important point is that there will be many achievements for
which an appropriate level of reliability cannot be reached (because the learning
outcomes are inherently fuzzy), or where the department cannot afford the expense
of getting reliable judgements that also preserve the integrity of the complex
achievement in question.
Assessments are also used to identify what learners need to do in order to
improve their work. This second approach to assessment, which is intended to
inform students about how to do better, is often called formative assessment. Any
task that creates feedback to students about their learning achievements can be
called formative assessment. Diagnostic assessment, which involves using
carefully-designed tasks to try and identify barriers to learning, can be seen as a
type of formative assessment that is little used in higher education. Notice that
formative assessment, with its emphasis on providing useful feedback, is more
helpful when learners are open about their limitations and do not try to conceal
ignorance or bury mistakes. Whereas summative assessment purposes discourage
learners from being open, formative assessment purposes thrive on disclosure.
Furthermore, with formative assessment the stakes are not so high – no-one’s
future rides on the accuracy of advice about continuing to improve one’s work –
which means that we need not worry so much about reliability. Reliability is
obviously good if you can get it or can afford to get it but it is not central to
formative assessment in the way that it must be central to summative assessment.
That is very useful because there are some things which we want students to learn
that cannot be reliably assessed, or cannot be reliably assessed with the resources
available.
 Assessing for employability 123

In a substantial meta-analysis of studies investigating the effectiveness of

formative assessment, Black and Wiliam (1998) concluded that formative
assessment was a powerful influence on learning. The effect size was around 0.7,
placing it on a par with the effect sizes that Marzano (1998) found for the self-
system and metacognition (loosely, the ‘E’ and ‘M’ of USEM, respectively). The
studies in these meta-analyses related largely to school pupils, and those relating
to post-compulsory education were not separated out. However, it is plausible to
infer that ‘what works’ for school pupils ought to apply, mutatis mutandis, to
higher education. The inference is strengthened when note is taken of the effective-
ness of formative assessment as it is used at Alverno College in the US (Mentkowski
et al., 2000).
Advice on giving feedback with due care for efficacy beliefs was offered in
Chapter 6. Here we consider the general conditions under which feedback is likely
to contribute to learning.

Conditions favourable to low-stakes assessment for

formative purposes
Some colleagues have been sceptical about the power of creating enough good
feedback, the evidence notwithstanding.
One line of criticism is that, as research clearly shows (Black and Wiliam,
1998; Torrance and Pryor, 1998), teachers may intend to create good feedback but
it often does not work: the learning potential remains unrealized. The conclusion
is that providing good feedback is no small undertaking. Six main conditions for
success, in brief, are as follows:

1 Sufficient tasks are provided

2 Students engage with these tasks
3 There are criteria or indicators of achievement
4 Learners and assessors know and understand the achievement indicators
5 Good feedback is provided on submitted work
6 Feedback is received and attended to.

Sufficient tasks are provided

This is obvious, but programme assessment reviews often show that some pro-
gramme learning outcomes get scarcely any attention – the ‘key skill’ of numeracy
is a case in point in many Arts and Social Science programmes. The failure to
cover learning outcomes can also be seen at the course or module level where it is
quite common to find that there are not enough tasks to create decent opportunities
for getting feedback on all course learning outcomes. In some cases that is because
there are too many learning outcomes. (We found a course of 30 contact hours
and a further 170 student learning hours which had 19 learning outcomes. Needless
to say, most were neither addressed nor assessed.) We tend to see this as a
124 Towards the enhancement of practice

programme design failing more than something to blame on the course team. In
other cases the problem is that teachers are so busy telling, that there is no time
for tasks that get students thinking and doing.

Students engage with these tasks

This can be understood as a point about motivation, which means designing tasks
that students recognize as important and worthwhile. It is also a point about the
teacher’s authority, indicating that teachers need to require students to participate
in all learning activities.

There are criteria or indicators of achievement

Many teachers have spent too much time trying to write unambiguous statements
of learning outcomes that can then be objectively used in the measurement of
achievement. We have already said that this is philosophically suspect, psycho-
logically misconceived and practically impossible. However, it is very useful to
have some indicators, even ‘fuzzy’ indicators, of the sorts of performance that
could be considered as evidence of appropriate achievement. Without indicators
it is hard for students and other assessors to have a sense of what could be counted
as evidence of achievement. Indicators do not replace skilled judgement; they
support it by providing a rudimentary language in the form of broad-brush reference
points for all to cite in arriving at and justifying assessment judgements. Without
them students have little idea of what acceptable performance looks like and
assessors rely on their individual experiences.

Learners and assessors know and understand the

achievement indicators
Where criteria exist they are usually published in programme and module
handbooks and posted on the web for good measure. This is not enough.
First, students have to realize that these indicators are the name of the game,
that they describe what is going to be valued and that it might be quite different
from what they expect to be valued. Knight was always disturbed to get final year
students wailing, ‘I hadn’t realized that I’d get a third [class honours degree] if I
didn’t cover those two criteria’.
Second, they need to understand what the indicators mean. Small group
discussion helps, especially if it precedes as well as follows attempts to apply the
criteria to make judgements on examples of student work. It also helps to get
students to look closely at marked work that has been anonymized. Ideally, they
would first see it without knowing the grade and comments, try to judge its quality
themselves and then reflect on the indicators once the grades and comments had
been disclosed to them.
 Assessing for employability 125

Tasks are appropriate to (matched to) learners

Matching means having a sense of pacing so that there is time for consolidation
as well as for new learning. It is not a science. The psychological literature is full
of reports of tasks that logically ought to have had certain levels of difficulty, yet
which turned out to be psychologically quite different from expectation. In general,
though, tasks are easier when learners are given more scaffolding or guidance;
when they are asked to work with a restricted amount of information; when
concepts, problems and solution strategies are both well-formed and well-known;
and when others contribute. Good feedback helps learners to understand what
they will have to do in order to succeed as they go on to tackle tasks that are less
well-defined and relate to larger amounts of less well-organized material.

Good feedback is provided on submitted work

Feedback should be:

• Purposeful. Purposes might include correction of errors, development of

understanding, promotion of generic skills, development of metacognition,
maintenance of motivation.
• Related to the achievement indicators. Some work calls for comments that
lie outside the criteria associated with a task but, when learners have been
working with indicators in mind and where teachers want to give advice about
future improvement, it is likely that the criteria will set the boundaries within
which most comments lie. Criteria-referenced comments can also help learners
to see the goodness of fit between judgements and their work. By the same
token, they can help teachers to be fair and consistent in giving feedback.
• Timely. Feedback needs to be fast so that students can respond to it with the
work fresh in their minds and in time to act on it before tackling another task
of a similar sort. Higher education practices are often dilatory compared to
the same day turnaround common in many primary schools and the one week
turnaround in secondary schools.
• Appropriate, in relation to students’ conceptions of learning, knowledge and
the discourse of the discipline. This point is intended to indicate that good
feedback can only be effective if learners and teachers share the same
underlying ideas about the rules of the game. Some good feedback fails
because the teacher has not spotted that students are playing the academic
game by different rules.
• Developmentally useful. This is the most important of these messages about
good quality feedback. Many teachers take pride in the amount of content-
related feedback they give and in the number of errors they correct. Yet the
whole idea of formative assessment is that learners get good suggestions for
improvement. Since they are seldom likely to do the same task again, the
implication is that feedback should be general, directed to similar but different
126 Towards the enhancement of practice

problems in the future, not specific. The most useful advice gives concrete
advice about getting better.
• Understood. This essentially repeats the last point. However well-intentioned
the teacher’s advice, if students do not understand it, then the potential of
formative assessment gets lost.

Fe e d b a c k i s r e c e i v e d a n d a t t e n d e d t o
There are plenty of stories of students checking the mark and then ignoring all the
carefully-crafted feedback that goes with it. This may be less likely with peer and
self assessment that produces comments but not marks. When grades are involved,
some tutors return the work and feedback but withhold the marks for a couple of
days. Students are probably most likely to attend to feedback when they work
within a programme-wide learning culture that has convinced them of the power
of low-stakes, formative assessment and of feedback in all its forms.
Even if these conditions are met, it is not true the students will not take seriously
something that is not graded. They may be compelled to do ungraded work for
formative purposes (it is a condition of being allowed to do graded work); they
may be induced to do it (as when formative work prepares for demanding, authentic,
high-stakes tasks); and they may be persuaded that they will benefit from it (when
they have become ‘knowing students’, who have enrolled in a learning culture
unlike the ones to which they will often have become accustomed). There is a
double point here: programme designers need consciously to devise ‘rules of the
game’ that value formative assessment and students need to know the rules and
why they are good rules.

The need for knowing students

Students come to a class with learning histories that have shaped their beliefs
about the rules of the academic game, particularly about what learning is and
what teachers do. Many innovative teachers have found that students resist
academic practices that do not conform to those expectations, partly because they
do not understand the thinking behind them and partly because some firmly believe
that they have paid to be instructed and then graded on what they remember. If
low-stakes assessment is made a central feature of a course it is necessary to
explain at least four things very clearly:

• Why there is such an emphasis on formative assessment. Students need to

appreciate that the idea is that all learning outcomes should be assessed, even
though it is not feasible to assess them all summatively. Formative assessment
is a way of paying serious attention to those that escape high-stakes assessment.
There is also compelling evidence that it can be very good for learning, which
is why some learning outcomes that are summatively assessed are also
formatively assessed. A course assessment plan shows how formative and
 Assessing for employability 127

summative assessment are dovetailed to give sustained attention to all course

learning outcomes. There is more about plans in the next section.
• Why students should expect to do peer and self assessment. Formative
assessment works well when teachers give thoughtful feedback on improving
performance, especially when feedback is related to assessment criteria that
are known, understood and used. (They might, for example, be printed on
assignment cover sheets that are distributed when assignments are set.) The
habits of judgement learned through assessing other students and then through
evaluating one’s own achievements contribute to student employability and
are a basis of life-long learning.
• That teachers cannot be the only judges of all achievements, nor is assessment
just about grades. Teachers design learning sequences that contain plenty of
opportunities to create and get comments related to course learning outcomes.
Then they encourage everyone to engage fully with the learning opportunities
in the course, sometimes lecturing but sometimes expecting students to work
independently; sometimes grading but sometimes expecting students to
appraise themselves or each other. This is not idleness and dereliction of
duty, as some students suppose, but necessary behaviour if learning is to happen
on the intended lines.
• That formative assessment will not work unless students and teachers take it
seriously. Obvious though the point is, students need to be told that low-
stakes assessment is not to be treated lightly. Indeed, in some online learning
environments, participation in discussions, which could be understood as
creating feedback, is compulsory for course credit. Teachers might want to
extend the principle to face-to-face work as well, perhaps requiring students
to provide evidence that they contributed criteria-related feedback to others
on x occasions during the course.

Implications for courses, modules or units

What might this concern for formative assessment and need for summative
assessment mean at the level of a single course or module?
A starting point is the obvious point that not all learning outcomes are judged
in the same ways. Some (such as giving references in good style, or using English
grammatically) only attract attention when background assumptions of competence
are violated. In other cases formative assessment is used, while others are subject
to direct high-stakes assessment for summative purposes.
It is helpful to distinguish between learning that is

• directly assessed, for high-stakes purposes, as when we use multiple choice

tests to make sure that students recall information;
• indirectly assessed with high-stakes in play, as when we say that good displays
of critical thinking betoken analytical and synthetic performances as well;
128 Towards the enhancement of practice

• directly assessed, with low-stakes intentions, as when students get feedback,

often from other students, on their contribution to group work;
• indirectly assessed for low-stakes purposes – production of a portfolio could
be taken as indirect evidence of other achievements that are subject to low-
stakes assessment, such as perseverance, willingness to learn and time
management;
• presumed to be satisfactory unless contrary evidence is compelling, as when
students do not follow referencing conventions.

The advantages of taking a differentiated approach to assessment are that it

makes better theoretical sense, that it is a route to stopping teachers from trying to
do the impossible,1 and that it allows fair assessment of complex, ‘fuzzy’ learning
outcomes.
There are decisions to be made about which outcomes are most suited to which
assessment mode. These are easiest to make when a module has been designed
with the following in mind:

• It does not have too many expected learning outcomes – a manageable number
lies in the range from five to eight.
• Most, if not all, of these learning intentions come from the programme
specification.
• A few – perhaps three – learning outcomes are identified as those that will
get sustained attention in the module.
• Assessment tasks provide direct evidence of attainment in terms of the two
or three learning outcomes that are module priorities.
• It is clear which learning outcomes are addressed by direct assessment with
high-stakes, summative purposes, either because the outcome lends itself to
high-reliability assessment or because sufficient investment has been made
to get tolerably-reliable assessments of a less amenable outcome. In those
cases, the assessment data can contribute to an eventual programme-level
judgement of achievement: the assessment can be used for warranting
purposes.
• It is clear which learning outcomes are addressed by formative means, when
the public stakes are lower. Assessment data, in the form of feedback for
improvement, may feed into students’ portfolios and any personal development
planning.
• Learning goals or outcomes that are indirectly assessed get direct attention in
other modules.
• Most programme learning outcomes will then get direct assessment attention
in more than one module, although some will be dealt with by the presumption
of competence (see above).

A strength of this approach is that students and teachers alike can concentrate
their learning and judgements on a few things at a time. Over-assessment, the
 Assessing for employability 129

bane of many modular programmes, is reduced because modules do not have too
much to do, i.e. they have five or so outcomes to address, and have fewer as a
module priority. It might almost be possible to say that the more outcomes to
which a module is committed and the more that it tries to assess directly, the
worse the module.
The distinctions and suggestions made so far imply having course (and, by
extension, programme) assessment plans. Points to consider include the following:

1 Many course learning goals are a selection from programme learning goals.
The link between course and programme learning goals should then be quite
explicit. There are difficulties if the programme specification is inadequate,
although university statements, such as Hong Kong’s City University descrip-
tion of the ideal graduate,2 provide useful pointers.
Some learning intentions will be course specific. It is helpful to limit the
number of learning goals a course has and to avoid writing inflated outcome
or goal descriptions.
2 Establish a course assessment plan or review the existing one for goodness of
fit with the aim of developing student employability. The plan should relate
major assessment activities to course learning goals, showing how each goal
is addressed through assessment and sketching the rubrics or criteria to be
used to judge achievement. Writing an assessment plan sometimes shows
that goals need to be modified or that rubrics and criteria could be improved.
Useful ideas can be had from the QAA’s benchmarking site3 or by contacting
your LTSN subject centre4 to see whether there are any subject-specific
indicators you can appropriate. It may also be helpful to consult the National
Qualifications Framework (QAA, 2001e).
3 When writing the assessment plan, keep it in mind that a range of learning
intentions demands a variety of learning and assessment methods. The books
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter describe many ways of assessing
achievement. Where employability is concerned, there are reasons to prefer
‘authentic’ assessment methods, i.e. methods that deal with complex and life-
like situations.
4 Draw on expertise in networks. LTSN subject centres, professional bodies
and subject associations in the UK and elsewhere are good sources of ideas
to borrow and customize.
5 Reconsider the balance between formative and summative assessment
purposes.
6 Do a reality check. Can all this really be done in this course? Why not
elsewhere?
7 Hold on to the idea that many assessment problems are either (i) not solvable
or (ii) most sensibly tackled at programme level, possibly with support at
institutional level.
130 Towards the enhancement of practice

It becomes clear that to take assessment seriously is to make a commitment to

look closely at the whole instruction→tasks→assessment sequence. Here it should
be understood that the workload involved in reappraising instruction→tasks→
assessment sequences can be considerable, although in good departments this
design work can be a collaborative venture, spread over an academic year and
supported by educational development professionals. In fact the need to design
assessments at programme level makes such collaborative work a necessity.

Implications for programmes

It is well understood that the complex learning achievements that employers and
academics value – understandings, skills, efficacy beliefs and metacognition –
tend to take time (what Claxton, 1998, calls ‘slow learning’). Plenty of reinforce-
ment and practice are needed. Programme-wide planning for learning, teaching
and assessment is necessary. Course-level actions are neither sufficient to produce
reliable judgements of complex achievements,5 nor when we expect student
development to take place across a whole programme. Clearly, many of the
suggestions made for course assessment apply to programme assessment planning
but there are also specific programme assessment principles. Those developed in
the Skills plus project are shown in Box 8.1.
It is important to check that the course assessment plans, taken as a set, do
show that those things valued by the programme are picked up by assessment
practices. This could be based on an audit and lead to a programme-level
spreadsheet similar to the one showing the distribution of learning and teaching
methods and to the one showing how the main curricular pathways taken by
students contribute to the development of the programme learning outcomes.
Some teams and departments use audits to provide programme-level ‘maps’
showing:

• The learning outcomes that were particularly addressed by each module and
how this came together as a coherent and progressive6 programme7.
• The teaching and learning methods used by each module in pursuit of the two
or three target learning outcomes. There is a check here that the methods are
appropriate to the learning intentions and that no methods are over- or under-
used.
• The assessment methods used by each module in pursuit of the two or three
target learning outcomes. It is assumed that these priority outcomes will be
directly assessed and the map shows whether the purposes are formative and
low-stakes or summative and high-stakes. There is a check here that the
methods are appropriate to the learning intentions and that there is sufficient
variety across the programme.

The Skills plus project described the work that followed the creation of these
maps as ‘tuning’ work. Maps show areas of over-attention (essays were over-used
 Assessing for employability 131

Box 8.1 The Skills plus programme assessment principles

Entitlements for students’ assessment encounters across a programme and
in any one year of it should be compatible with their teaching and learning
entitlements. That implies, for example, encountering a variety of assessment
methods and modes and getting good feedback from a variety of sources.
In addition:

• Summative assessment has the important function of providing trust-

worthy grades for significant learning achievements. However, by no
means all achievements can be affordably and reliably graded with
validity. This means that some achievements should not be summatively
assessed by academic staff.
• Most assessments will be ‘low-stakes’ assessments, which are intended
to improve understanding, or skills, or reflection, or the development
of self-theories that sustain achievement.
• Learning criteria should be available at programme and module levels.
In many cases these will be ‘fuzzy’ criteria that guide assessment conver-
sations in low-stakes assessment.
• There should be plenty of occasions to get feedback on performance,
which will tend to be conversational feedback.
• Peers (other students) will often provide feedback.
• As the programme progresses, students will learn how to become more
adept at self-assessment.
• Opportunities and support should be provided to help students create
learning portfolios that document their claims to educational and
employability achievements. For some achievements, this is the best
alternative to more traditional forms of summative assessment.

This entitlement should be explicit in a programme-wide teaching

summary.

in Knight’s History department), under-attention (a Social Science department

found that no one made numeracy a priority), and poorly-sequenced attention (as
when ‘communication’ is tackled in year one only, or electronic data handling
appears only in the final year). The programme leaders then negotiated with
colleagues to adjust the balance. Some historians introduced presentations; a
programme leader asked a group of colleagues who were already using a lot of
numerical data to declare it a priority and drop, as a priority, their concern to
promote critical thinking, since this was being tackled elsewhere; electronic data
handling was introduced in the first year and declared a priority in an existing
132 Towards the enhancement of practice

second year course; and writing in a variety of forms and for different audiences,
already a feature of one second year course, was declared a priority. And so on.
‘Tuning’ needs programme leaders who know their programmes well and who
can use the idea of priority learning outcomes to persuade some colleagues that
they can continue to develop critical thinking, which is a priority in some other
courses, but that everyone would be helped if they could make it a priority to do
so with numerical data, which would allow numeracy to be identified as one of
the two or three target learning outcomes for the course. This concept of priority/
target outcomes and ‘background’ outcomes is very useful because it recognizes
that good academic practice necessarily touches many desirable outcomes but, by
requiring that two or three priorities be identified, it gets a sharpness of focus that
helps teaching, assessment and student learning. Being largely a matter of wheeling
and dealing between two or three colleagues at a time, it also avoids the public
team-level wrangling that quickly turns into deadlock.

Implications for teacher workloads

There is a great danger that efforts to improve the range, scope and authenticity of
assessment can create enormous amounts of work for teachers who are already
busy enough juggling multiple calls on their time. For example, teachers and
learners gain from grade indicators or criteria that point to the sorts of things that
will be rewarded in a given task. Again, peer and self assessment have great
potential. Yet it can be a long, frustrating task to develop useful and concise grade
indicators and a lot of work is needed before students become easy with peer and
self assessment.
It is no less difficult to persuade colleagues to adopt practices that are based on
sound enough educational reasoning but which challenge other values. For
example, colleagues often say that assessment is becoming a time monster,
depriving them of space to do other important things. We are not the only ones to
have suggestions about ways of taming the monster. Twelve of them are:

1 Do not mark long, complicated, authentic assignments. Do make sure that

there are plenty of opportunities for students to get feedback on them but do
not mark them. For example, require the submission of a portfolio and then
assess student learning by means of an in-class assignment – a 500 word
critique/analysis/evaluation.
2 Look for opportunities to use formative self and peer assessment instead of
summative tutor assessment.
3 Set short tasks. They’re often harder. A 500 word essay demands no less
reading than a 5,000 word one and a lot more thought, as any academic who
has written a short article for a newspaper knows.
4 Set tasks requiring the production of posters, charts and concept maps. They
can be quick to mark.
 Assessing for employability 133

5 In good learning cultures, ones in which they know the ‘rules of the game’
and understand the criteria to be applied, students are less likely to make a
complete mess of assignments, meaning that there are fewer occasions when
massive feedback and coaching are necessary.
6 So too when students have worked collaboratively on projects and conversed
with one another about drafts.
7 In good learning cultures, students know the grading criteria which are printed
on assignment cover-and-feedback sheets. Again, this helps to reduce the
incidence of badly-wrong work.
8 Cover/feedback sheets can speed up feedback when students have to identify
the indicators that best describe their work (when they have to assess
themselves). Sometimes the teacher need write little more than, ‘I agree’.
Having an idea of the student’s judgement of an assignment can also make it
easier to give feedback because it precisely identifies any gap between the
teacher’s and the student’s judgements: feedback can be concise because it is
targeted. Of course, this does not absolve teachers from giving two or three
well-chosen pieces of advice for improving future work of a similar sort.
9 Limit what you say. Most people find up to three major suggestions enough
to deal with. Cover/feedback sheets can encourage concision by restricting
the space for comment.
10 Consider creating a bank of the feedback statements that you frequently use
and then draw on it when you give feedback.
11 If there are lots of errors, mark the first page or two and then return the work
for correction.
12 Rather than explaining what is wrong, direct students to sources so that they
can find out for themselves.

Teachers often resist these and similar suggestions on the grounds that some
involve compromising their beliefs about learning, teaching or what it means to
assess well. Evidence of their efficacy is powerless, as is the argument that, in the
face of overwork, some compromise on less important beliefs is necessary. It is
more important, we argue, to give way on some assessment practices than to
persist in using dry and contrived tasks that hardly engage with the ambitious
learning intentions of lively academic work and the development of good claims
to employability.

Communicating achievement
Figure 8.1 suggests that assessments lead to warrants or claims, which need to be
accompanied by some explanation of the circumstances under which the
performance occurred, which we call ‘process standards’.
134 Towards the enhancement of practice

Appropriate curriculum goals (as in the USEM account, for example)

Check that learning, teaching and assessment methods

are fit for these purposes

Make sure that the learning culture carries appropriate messages

about self-theories and metacognition (reflection)

Make sure that handbooks, programme specfications, etc. tell students what you
are trying to do, how and why. Check that students are, therefore, knowing
students

High-stakes (summative) Low-risk (formative)

assessment as the basis for assessment to create feedback
warrants to achievement for learning

Grades and warrants to Student claims to achievement

achievement, such as developed through PDP,
certificates, licences to practise, expressed in CVs and interviews,
other formal awards substantiated by portfolio
evidence

To make sense of these outputs, we need some contextual

information. Statements of process standards are one way of
doing this

Figure 8.1 A programme overview of assessment for employability

 Assessing for employability 135

Pr o c e s s s t a n d a r d s
‘Process standards’ is a term that invites us to appreciate that the same achievements
can come from quite different learning processes. A well-written report might be
the product of an individual’s unaided engagement with a task, or it might be
presented by an individual who has worked with others on a well-defined and
pre-structured task. The observer judges the products or claims based upon them,
without appreciating the different process standards behind them. Why, though,
should this matter? We return to ideas about transitions and translations, introduced
in Chapter 1. ‘Employable’ graduates are more skilled at both, which means that
they have the robustness of achievement that comes from tackling ‘far transfer’8
tasks and authentic problems, and from doing so with relatively little ‘scaffolding’.9
Unless employers have some idea of the process standards at work, they are short
of information they need to interpret warrants and claims. We suspect this may
help explain employers’ preference for graduates of some older universities over
graduates from lower-status institutions10 – we have heard of a presumption that
Oxbridge graduates, for example, are not spoon-fed, although graduates of some
other higher education institutions are.
The relationship between warrants, claims and process standards is sketched
in Figure 8.2. However, there is no tradition of describing process standards. While
it would not be hard for departments writing references or letters of recommenda-
tion for their graduates to append a description of their process standards, we see
little prospect in the medium-term of there being satisfactory ways of describing
process standards. The problem is not that it is difficult to write statements about
the process standards but that it is not possible to authenticate them. Unless
accrediting bodies or quality assurance agencies played a part in discouraging
inflated claims, the danger is that, like mission statements and other presentational
activities, they would be bland, exaggerated and useless.

High-stakes Feedout Transcripts of

Learning oportunities (summative) academic
designed into the achievement
programme to
support complex
learning goals (USEM) Transcripts of
process
standards

Low-stakes Feedback to Student claims

(formative) students and portfolios

Figure 8.2 Three faces of reporting achievement

136 Towards the enhancement of practice

Wa r r a n t s
Certificates, such as those attesting that a student has achieved an upper second
class degree, are extremely uninformative. Not only do they say nothing about the
achievements that have been recognized with this 2:1 degree, but a series of papers
from the Student Assessment and Classification Working Group (SACWG) has
shown how similar module mark profiles can lead to rather different degree
classifications (Yorke et al., 2000; Bridges et al., 2002; Yorke et al., 2002). In
some awards there is an element of norm-referencing.11 In others, where awards
are supposed to be criteria-related, there is evidence that they are used inconsistently
(for example, Hornby, 2003). Even if we might presume consistent and reliable
application of the criteria, the criteria are not routinely disclosed to employers;
sometimes not to students. And even if we did know the sorts of attainments a
first class degree represented, we would know nothing about the composition of
‘first class-ness’.
The 2002 SACWG conference heard a series of critiques of degree classification
practices in England which could be extended to most systems that take marks
from a variety of sources and combine them by some formula or another to get a
summary, most commonly expressed as a grade point average (GPA) or degree
class. While GPAs may look more informative, they simply replace a broad
categorization such as ‘upper second class’ with a number (GPA = 3.4). The same
objections apply. Some US business schools – Harvard and Wharton are identified
by Minder (2003) – forbid students from disclosing their grades because of fears
that recruiters place more weight upon them than they can bear and that it leads
students to concentrate on maximizing scores which can be at the expense of
learning.12
However, the problem as presented at the SACWG conference was not pointing
to the weaknesses of these approaches to reporting achievement but identifying
alternatives.
Award transcripts are supposed to be more informative. They usually name the
modules taken, identify their level and credit rating, and record the grade or mark
awarded. Of course, it is not obvious what a mark signifies. Writing of grading
practices in Canadian schools, Bercuson and colleagues (1997) complain that the
absence of national examinations and standards means that it is impossible to
know whether a good mark represents real achievement or low standards. So too
with higher education marks. Nor are transcripts normally written in terms of
learning outcomes, so that, apart from what can be inferred from the module title,
they can be uninformative about what has been learnt (Adelman, 1990).

Claims, portfolios and personal development planning

Figure 8.2 suggests that students’ claims of achievements (and hence to employ-
ability) be reported in two ways: through academic transcripts, which would be
part of a student’s progress file and which describe achievements that the institution
 Assessing for employability 137

is prepared to warrant or certify, and through portfolios derived from personal

development planning. Statements of process standards would, ideally, provide
contextual background for these two reporting routes.
It is intended that, amongst other things, personal development planning (PDP)
will be integrative by encouraging students to reflect on their learning, needs and
developmental plans as a whole. It is neither a pastoral process nor an academic
one, but a synoptic one. This is usually represented by a dossier or portfolio,
which comprises

• A store of evidence that can be used to support claims to achievement.

• An indexing system to identify which claims can be supported by which
essays, certificates, letters of appreciation, products, software, etc.
• Claims to achievement, which are often adapted to particular purposes, such
as making different job applications and applying to graduate school.

All or part of the portfolio may be in electronic form and many universities are
exploring online systems, such as RAPID, which is mentioned in Chapter 10. In
England, PDP, which is supposed to be available in 2005/6 to all undergraduates,
is usually seen as a process of:

• Reviewing achievements, which can be in-class, out-of-class or out-of-college

achievements, whether specific (achieving more ‘B’ grades than ever before)
or general (being more creative in academic work).
• Identifying learning needs, which can involve others, such as tutors or advisors,
in choosing courses and careers, or identifying areas of weakness – written
communication, for instance – upon which to concentrate in the next semester.
• Planning how to address these needs, which operates at several levels: how to
improve performance on assessed tasks, how to improve performance on
particular learning outcomes, choosing courses, career planning and job
seeking.
• Representing achievements, typically for employability purposes, usually
through a portfolio.

PDP is a set of processes that are valuable in their own right and a product –
the portfolio – that can help to secure employment, especially when the portfolio
is explicitly presented as a curriculum vitae-building process. It follows that a
PDP scheme must ensure that:

• There is guidance that addresses generic learning and study needs.

• There is guidance on how to address subject-specific learning needs.
• There is guidance on career planning and job seeking.
• There is support for and guidance on making and maintaining portfolios that
will sustain strong claims to employability.
138 Towards the enhancement of practice

• Students have a language, which might be based on the programme specifica-

tion, in which to represent their achievements; and they are familiar, particu-
larly through formative assessment, with the practice of making and supporting
claims to achievement.

Plainly, it is in everyone’s interests for departments to integrate guidance and

support provided by specialists in generic learning and study practices, careers
specialists and subject staff. PDP also takes staff and student time; it can look like
a bean-counting activity; it can resemble school records of achievement, which
are widely ignored; it is likely to be optional, and optional activities are taken up
by a minority; it will rarely be embedded in mainstream programme design, except
in programmes leading to professional registration. In short, unless PDP is
integrated, well-designed and cleverly organized, it risks being either a time-eating
monster or a mere curiosity, inspected by a few enthusiasts. Klenowski (2002:
Chapter 4) has a useful summary of such difficulties.
Yet, in terms of employability, portfolios and the supporting processes are
invaluable because how else are the complex achievements that higher education
values, but cannot (afford to) warrant, to be represented?

The demand side again

Even if we could have confidence in universities’ judgements of students’
achievements, recruiters will not necessarily pick the best. In subtle ways all sorts
of factors lead some graduates to experience disadvantage. In part this is due to
the methods used to select new graduate hires and in part to underlying assumptions.
Assessment centres, for instance, are widely used by big firms hiring graduates,
but Sternberg (1997) has argued that assessment centre judgements do not correlate
well with career success – those who did best in assessment centres are by no
means those whose careers flourish the most. Other firms prefer to appoint from
students doing work placements or other co-curriculum activities with them: ‘test-
driving your next employee’ as it is called in an article in Graduate Recruiter,
April 2003. While their reasoning is impeccable – they have seen what the student
can do in context, with real tasks – the difficulty is that students who get and who
can afford to get placements with these firms are not always a representative
sample of the cohort.13
There are also difficulties with the underlying assumption that the best person
for the job can be identified. Assessment and selection procedures cannot be so
precise. Instead of basing judgements upon absolute achievement, it would be
better to recognize that any one of a number of people could do the job well and
that those who have made strong progress during their degree studies might have
the greatest potential for further learning. Even if this is too radical, this reasoning
challenges the invalid practice of using school leaving grades as a criterion in
graduate recruitment.
 Assessing for employability 139

The challenge of assessing for employability

Only by adopting differentiated approaches to assessment – not all high-stakes,
not all direct – and by planning assessment across programmes can we sensibly
promote employability through assessment and really help students to represent
their achievements to employers. This is a more challenging statement than it
might seem at first sight. After all, how widespread is programme assessment
planning? And how can higher education institutions let go of the belief that the
learning outcomes that they take such care in specifying need to be assessed
summatively?

Three accounts of work undertaken during the

life of Skills plus
The following three chapters describe the work three departments undertook within
the Skills plus project in order to improve the contribution their existing
programmes made to student employability. None was able to do a ‘green field’
job and construct a curriculum from first principles and none had the time to get
as far as they would have liked with ‘tuning’ their programmes. We present these
accounts because they show what was done in circumstances that are probably
fairly representative of higher education in the UK.
We then set out in Chapter 12 some principles of procedure, based on the ideas
developed in Chapters 6–8 and the following accounts of experiences with Skills
plus. We believe that these principles are useful to others who want to enhance the
help that their programmes can give to students in making good claims to graduate
employability.

Notes
1 A lot of ‘key skills’ assessment is based on the mistaken proposition that it is possible
to assess them with high reliability in a single module and without significant invest-
ment of resources. Teachers may feel inadequate because they know that something
is amiss but do not realize that what they are trying to do is simply not possible.
2 See http://www.cityu.edu.hk/op/plan_part2.htm.
3 See http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/benchmarking.htm.
4 There is an index to subject centres at www.ltsn.ac.uk.
5 This is because reliable judgements should be based on evidence from different judges,
made at different times on the basis of different tasks and, perhaps, in different settings.
6 ‘Progressive’ refers to progression in student learning across a programme. What
arrangements are made to ensure that students at the end of the programme have
achievements that are qualitatively different from those that they had on entry? Just
graduating with more information would not speak well of a programme’s
arrangements for progression.
7 For many programmes, where there is high choice and many electives, this mapping
may be restricted to core courses or to the most popular sequences of courses. A large
general programme may have hundreds of associated modules, but most students
will follow one of several broad pathways. These can be identified by analyzing
student transcripts. Assessment maps can then be made for the most significant ones.
140 Towards the enhancement of practice

8 Tasks that ask us to apply understandings or practices to fairly familiar, well-defined

(or ‘tame’) problems are ‘near transfer’ tasks. ‘Far transfer’ tasks are better tests of
understanding and application.
9 ‘Scaffolding’ refers to the degree to which tasks are ‘tamed’ for the learner: for
example, to the degree to which they are near transfer tasks, the clarity of the task
specification, the degree of task structure provided, and the amount of help from
others designed into the activity.
10 There are other reasons for this, of course, including graduates’ higher academic
scores when they entered the more elite institutions, tradition and the greater prestige
of older institutions. It is also quite possible that graduates from older universities
have more ‘social capital’ and present themselves more easily as the sorts of people
employers want. Anthony Hesketh of Lancaster University has described this as ‘the
aestheticization of the self’: employability is a matter of presenting oneself attractively
in terms of employers’ preferences.
11 Norm-referenced awards are based on the candidate’s position in the class. The quality
of the class is an unknown factor, as is the quality of the candidate’s performance.
12 Dweck (1999) would perhaps see this in terms of a bias towards performance goals at
the expense of learning goals.
13 Although some university departments are careful about this. The Department of
Building and Construction at City University, Hong Kong, provides a lot of
employability-enhancing activities in the co-curriculum (as supplementary options).
They use their teaching excellence award money from the university to make sure
that all students get some co-curricular experience.
Chapter 9 The Skills plus project and nursing 141

The Skills plus project and

nursing
Geraldine Lyte

Introduction
This chapter presents some of the continuing educational developments in the
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting, University of Manchester,
arising from the School’s involvement in the Skills plus project. The project’s key
aim has been to build curriculum, learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) practices
that enhance students’ employability. It might be asked why a School of Nursing
should want to become involved in a project to fine-tune curricula, with the
purposes of enhancing students’ employability, when the professional component
of all nursing programmes is designed to prepare students specifically for
employment in the healthcare sector. The project was, in fact, timely for nursing
because it was initiated at a time when nursing education was considered to be
too theoretically driven to prepare its students adequately for the workplace (Glen
and Clark, 1999). Our curriculum planning teams felt that the adoption of the
USEM framework to support curriculum development would have both profes-
sional and academic benefits. For example, by focusing on the development of
subject (in our case nursing), research and key transferable skills, all of which the
USEM framework embraces, it could contribute to an individual’s employability
at the point of registration, as recommended by the English Department of Health
(DoH, 1999), the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and
Health Visiting (UKCC, 1999), the Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997) and the 2003
English White Paper (DfES, 2003). Our Nursing School wanted to use its involve-
ment in the project to evaluate existing LTA practices and undergraduate
achievements in preparation for the development of a new programme for 2002.
The case raises half a dozen issues of wider interest:

• It shows that the USEM account of employability is compatible with the

need to educate nurses to high academic and professional standards.
• The account can be applied beneficially to existing practices.
• Incremental change is a feasible strategy for enhancing the contribution that
curricula make to employability.
• USEM is a convenient formula for directing attention to the range of
achievements that a professional programme needs to consider.
142 Towards the enhancement of practice

• USEM assumes that LTA approaches will be orchestrated with the intention
of stimulating employability. This study shows that problem-based learning
is one route to alignment.
• As Figure 9.2 suggests, USEM can help to integrate the disparate concerns of
programmes with diverse aims and pathways to the award of a degree.

The programme concerned is a Bachelor of Nursing (Hons). The BN consists

of a foundation period for all students, who can then choose in the second part of
the programme to specialize in adult general nursing or mental heath nursing. It
was selected for the Skills plus activity because it is a well-established programme
for prospective nurses that was preparing to expand its provision to include a
child health pathway and increase its number of available places. The BN
traditionally recruited 40 high calibre students annually from across the country;
this rose to approximately 70 students in 2001 and is set to rise again to help meet
workforce requirements in the National Health Service (NHS).
Our School also offers a full-time Diploma in Professional Studies in Nursing
(DPSN), which recruits several hundred students per annum. During the initial
activity involved in the Skills plus project, the DPSN was already undergoing a
major re-validation to revise its provision and to offer its students the opportunity
to transfer to advanced diploma or degree pathways, depending on their academic
progression. Although it was felt unwise to involve that programme directly in
Skills plus audit and interviewing activity, the work on the BN has helped to
inform DPSN development, which has used the USEM framework for its new
curriculum, most clearly to support its newly proposed pathways.
Two Skills plus audits, focusing first on learning, teaching and assessment
practices and then on the outcomes they promoted, were completed within the
BN programme. Six newly qualified BN graduates and their employers were then
interviewed about employability issues. Finally, a survey was done with first and
final year students, using the USEM framework to explore the development of
key skills, nursing skills, research skills and students’ overall personal and
professional development. The findings were fed into the main Skills plus project
and into curriculum development in the School’s pre-registration undergraduate
programmes – the new BN and the DPSN programmes – as it was considered an
ideal approach to meet the academic and clinical requirements for undergraduate
nursing programmes. The distinctive attention to efficacy beliefs and metacognition
sat well with our professional emphasis on reflection and on personal qualities
and attributes.
This chapter now reviews what the undergraduate programme team concerned
has learnt about employability and curriculum development from its involvement
in the Skills plus project.
 The Skills plus project and nursing 143

Auditing and reviewing the 1997–2001 Bachelor

of Nursing (Hons) programme
Prior to re-validation in 2002, the BN programme offered a series of subject-
based units of learning within five core modules that were designed to help students
acquire a broad base of knowledge and skills for clinical practice. The first Skills
plus audit assessed the range of learning, teaching and assessment activities used
by lecturing staff, within all five core modules. This constituted a range of units
of learning to promote academic, clinical and research skills (Table 9.1).
Lecturers identified their LTA activities for each unit of learning (a sample of
one unit’s LTA activities is provided in Table 9.2) and the data were collated for
each academic year. The tables showed that students and their teachers used a
wide variety of activities to develop nursing, research and core skills. Research
skills development was strongly in evidence throughout each module and it was
judged important to build on this strength in the revised BN programme by
increasing the focus on the relationship of research and evidence-based healthcare.
Activities that encourage self directed learning, experiential learning, teamwork
and clinical skills development appeared to be scarce in parts of the programme.
Research in nursing education has advocated the use of such activities, principally
through the adoption of enquiry-based approaches such as problem-based learning.
The intention is that such activities will make students better prepared for
employment in today’s health service (Frost, 1996). The BN applied problem-
based learning in parts of its programme and planned to extend this application
for both the existing and future curricula.
The second audit enquired about the skills promoted by the five core modules
of the BN programme. The point of reference was the list of 39 aspects of
employability that are shown in Box 2.1. Ten of the BN teaching team, selected
because of their particular knowledge about and/or strategic involvement in the
programme, participated in the second audit. Each identified qualities and skills
from the list of 39 aspects that were stimulated within their core modules. The
findings suggested that many important aspects of employability for nursing
practice were addressed in the BN programme, in that most of the 39 were explicitly
developed. However, just as the LTA audit, although broadly reassuring, showed
some gaps, varying degrees of development were in evidence in this second audit:
for example, there were qualities and skills that students were expected to develop
without there being a specific curriculum emphasis upon them, including self-
confidence, problem-solving, awareness of international health issues and the
ability to work cross-culturally.
In sum, although many aspects of employability appear to be addressed by the
BN programme, a greater emphasis on the development of certain personal
qualities, core and process skills was identified as a priority for fine tuning in the
existing programme and then for development in the 2002 curriculum. The 2002
development has also had to take account of demands arising from changing
political and professional expectations of what constitutes an ‘employable’ newly
qualified staff nurse. These expectations are illustrated most clearly in two recent
Table 9.1 Core modules and units of learning in the BN programme
144

Core modules Units of learning

Biological Sciences Anatomy Physiology Pharmacology Pathology Microbiology
Social and Behavioural Sciences Sociology Psychology Health Psychology Social Policy Health Policy
Nursing Theory and Practice All Clinical Practice Nursing Theory and Adult Nursing Theoretical Organization
(Adult) Units Informatics Theory Level 2 Framework of and Management
Nursing of Care
Nursing Theory and Practice All Clinical Practice Nursing Theory and Mental Health Theoretical Organization and
(Mental Health) Units Informatics Nursing Theory Framework of Management of
Level 2 Nursing Care
Health Studies Neighbourhood Health Epidemiology Family Study Specialist
Study Promotion Practitioner Units
(Yr 4)
Professional Studies Communication Teaching and Counselling Skills Information All Research Units
Towards the enhancement of practice

Skills Assessing Technology

 The Skills plus project and nursing 145

Table 9.2 Range of learning, teaching or assessment activities in one mixed theory/
practice unit of learning

Lectures X
Seminars X
Tutorials X
Work on standard problems/case studies
Work on less structured problems
Structured work in peer groups X
Self-directed peer group work
Structured independent study X
Self-directed learning
Clinical work/visits X
Team work
Practicals (lab. or IT) to learn skill
Practicals (lab. or IT) to solve problems
Workshops
Web searching for materials X
Set reading books/articles X
Reviewing literature X
Use of original sources (e.g. archives)
Make video or tape-slide presentation
Essays
Examination X (summative)
Group project
Critique
Multiple-choice questions
Self assessment
Peer assessment
Oral presentation X (formative)
Poster or web poster
Experiential learning
Research dissertation

X indicates learning, teaching or assessment activity identified in this unit.

English Department of Health documents, The New NHS: Modern, Dependable

(DoH, 1997), and Making a Difference (DoH, 1999) and the UKCC’s Peach Report
(UKCC, 1999). The 1997 DoH document made recommendations for extending
the skills base of nurses’ roles, whilst the 1999 DoH document and the Peach
Report provide more detailed proposals to strengthen the nursing, midwifery and
health visiting contributions to healthcare. For example, the 1999 DoH document
outlines measures for new ways of working for nurses in healthcare that require a
greater emphasis on extended competencies and skills development, in the context
of a changing NHS. Our curriculum planning team was keen to embrace such
proposals to help our students to develop further skills for clinical decision-making
and care, leadership and innovation.
Before the findings from the audits could be widely used to inform curriculum
planning for the BN, student and employer inputs into Skills plus were sought.
146 Towards the enhancement of practice

Six BN graduates and their employers were interviewed. This offered another and
sometimes critical perspective of the quality of the BN programme, especially in
relation to how ready new practitioners felt for their role, and how employers
rated their skills and competencies. The interviews were analyzed and considered
alongside reports of interviews done elsewhere within the Skills plus project.
There were also distinctive nursing-specific elements which concerned the BN
team. For example, whilst both the new graduates and their employers were largely
positive about the utility and quality of the BN programme, there was less
enthusiasm from students about the ways in which practical nursing skills were
being developed:

things that you get asked as a health visitor all the time … I mean the basic
things like … everyday sort of development, things like that, I think we did
learn at university, em, – but apart from that, like, there was quite a lot that
was missed out, I’d say.
(BN graduate working as a health visitor)

Em … practical things like that you’re not allowed to do as a student, and

that’s sort of, I think it worries a lot of newly qualified nurses, that you know,
they’ve never done, they’ve watched things being done … hundreds of times
during their training, but they’ve never been allowed to do it, so, so I think
it’s something that worries.
(BN graduate working as a hospital-based nurse)

This illustrates a familiar issue in nursing education, whereby a division can

exist between the planned curriculum and what students perceive they learn.
Conversely, both students and their employers highlighted some of the theory and
practice components of the programme which they felt were really integrated
with the reality of clinical work:

They’re [the new graduates] quite confident … they speak out, em, and are
able to sort of argue your point and not be intimidated at all by other people
who might be on the working party.
(Employer)

I would hope doing the degree they [new graduates] would have some sort of
insight into other issues that are going on, wider issues, sociology issues,
whatever the latest White Paper is, and targets and some audit skills and, em,
– yeh – it’s what I’d expect to see.
(Senior ward manager)

It seemed to come when you were on the placements because you did, say,
em, a lot of, say, anatomy and physiology whilst you were at university, and
then you saw it in practice.
(BN graduate working as a hospital-based nurse)
 The Skills plus project and nursing 147

These interviews, although not representative of the total population of our

students and employers, highlight issues that have also been identified in routine
evaluations of the BN programme.
Finally, the perspectives of students, both beginning and nearing the end of the
programme, were sought. All first year (n = 71) and final year (n = 34) students
were asked to participate in a Skills plus survey to rate their skills attainment and
general beliefs about life as undergraduates. Students were asked to respond to 24
closed questions and four open questions. Forty-six (65 per cent) first year students
and twenty-one (62 per cent) final year students participated. There were some
interesting comparisons between the two groups: for example, 91 per cent of first
year students agreed that the amount of work they invested in their studies was
reflected in their assignment grades, whereas only 62 per cent of final year students
shared this opinion. This may reflect the difference in the demands and complexity
of assignments between the two groups. In another example, 57 per cent of first
years agreed that they liked learning in situations in which they could frame learning
activities, and this figure rose to 75 per cent for final year students. This difference
is consistent with findings from both written and oral evaluations of the BN
programme, where students appear to benefit from more structure and teacher
support in the earlier parts of their studies. This was a very important consideration
for preparations for the new programme for 2002, in deciding the extent to which
the BN would adopt problem-based learning as its main learning–teaching strategy.
This will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. In other parts of the
survey, responses from the two student groups were more similar. Eighty-seven
per cent of first years and 90 per cent of final years stated that they were stimulated
by the challenge of difficult problems, and all respondents from both groups
regarded employment as a good opportunity to learn new things. These findings
offered significant insight into students’ motivations for learning and meeting the
demands of clinical problem-solving.

Skills plus and the 2002 Bachelor of Nursing

(Hons) programme
The findings from the audits, interviews and survey, carried out as part of the
wider Skills plus project, were very influential in the design of the new curriculum
for the Manchester BN programme. Analyses that were supportive of the existing
programme highlighted strengths that could be continued into the new programme,
such as the development of research skills. Analyses that indicated where there
was scope for improvement, for example, for further development of problem-
solving skills, provided part of the rationale for making changes, particularly for
the learning and teaching strategy. In the past, several traditional curriculum models
have been used, with mixed success, for the development of nursing programmes
in England (for example, Lawton, 1983). However, nursing education has had
continuing difficulty addressing a so-called theory/practice gap (Spouse, 2001),
which is a practical and ideological difference between students’ classroom,
148 Towards the enhancement of practice

placement and employment experiences. It is therefore understandable that recent

reviews of nursing education provision in the United Kingdom (UKCC, 1999)
say that newly qualified staff nurses do not always have the necessary and/or
appropriate skills for their practice roles.
In order to address this in the 2002 BN programme, the curriculum planning
team opted for a unitized framework in which each unit would focus on the
development of nursing knowledge and skills for employability, lifelong learning
and personal development (Figure 9.1). This tackles one set of problems but the
concentration on courses/units makes it harder to achieve the programme coherence
which was so valued by the Skills plus project.
The team aimed to provide students with a stimulating and facilitative learning
environment, to enable them to acquire the in-depth understanding of multicultural
health and of causes of ill-health that underpins nursing and multi-professional
healthcare in primary, secondary and tertiary settings. Other aims for the new
programme included the development of students’ insight into clients’ needs and
the development of the nursing and generic skills necessary to deal with different
practice situations and to participate fully in the effective management of client
care.

Year one
Common foundation programme

Year two
Semester one Semester two Extended semester two
Care of people with Acute care of individuals Elective unit
common mental health with mental health needs (students choose
problems and their families a placement)

Year three
Semester one Semester two Extended semester two
Care of individuals with Care of older people Management and
serious and enduring with mental health needs consolidation of practice
mental health problems
in the community

Dissertation

Figure 9.1 The BN curriculum framework, showing the mental health nursing option
 The Skills plus project and nursing 149

The BN curriculum model

The BN curriculum model combines professional and academic criteria. The main
points of reference were:

• United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting1
(UKCC) nursing competencies (UKCC, 2001);
• Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) Academic and
Practitioner Standards for Nursing (QAA, 2001b);
• The USEM framework from Skills plus, adapted for undergraduate pre-
registration nursing education;
• The literature on problem-based learning, which was chosen as the major
learning and teaching strategy.

U KC C n u r s i n g c o m p e t e n c i e s a n d Q A A s t a n d a r d s f o r
nursing
The UKCC nursing competencies and QAA standards for nursing represent
statutory requirements for inclusion in nursing programmes. They represent the
basic range of skills and knowledge that students need to demonstrate in order to
register as a nurse and seek employment.

The Skills plus USEM framework

The USEM framework for the BN programme was appropriate because of the
project’s declared concern with graduate employability and – crucially – with the
‘low pain, high gain’ strategies for shaping undergraduate curricula to enhance it.
Unlike curriculum models previously used, USEM offered the BN a framework
adaptable to the outcomes associated with professional practice and with higher
education. In particular, efficacy beliefs and metacognition together facilitate the
integrated development of practice skills through the curriculum when they are
combined with a concern to develop knowledge, understanding and skills. The
task was then to design into units of learning, practice-based learning and classroom
teaching, a good range of opportunities or affordances. This was to stimulate
individuals to develop the range of achievements described by the programme
specification, and to explore beyond their immediate goals and consider what
they might become in the longer term in their chosen profession. In such ways
USEM combines a concern to ensure students’ fitness for practice (competence)
with the higher order cognitive skills required for the University of Manchester’s
academic awards. Figure 9.2 illustrates how the USEM framework was applied
for the BN programme. It outlines what core knowledge and skills are to be
developed for nursing employability, in tandem with personal development and
reflection.
150 Towards the enhancement of practice

The USEM framework

Understanding Skills
Nurses should acquire understanding of Competence to practise as a graduate
the subject areas they study. Evidence for nurse will be demonstrated using three
employers that an individual has passed a types of interrelated skills.
threshold of competence in under- Nursing-specific skills that meet the
standing complex nursing subject matter competencies set out by the UKCC (2001).
will be demonstrated by the academic Research skills required to engage in
qualification they receive in tandem with evidence-based healthcare and/or to
their professional registration. conduct further systematic inquiry into
nursing and healthcare.
Key transferable skills that relate to the
ability to do things that are widely valued,
but which are not tied to any particular
situation or subject area.
Efficacy beliefs Metacognition
Efficacy beliefs are the set of ideas that Metacognition is concerned with reflecting
people have about themselves: their and capitalizing on one’s own learning and
efficacy and scope and self-confidence actions to best effect. In nursing this means
that can make a difference in nursing being ready and being able to think about
practice or other given situations. the best way to act in a situation. It is a
necessary component of self-directed
learning, about planning for future
situations and for promoting life-long
learning.

Figure 9.2 The USEM Framework from Skills plus adapted for undergraduate nursing

A matched learning and teaching strategy

The teaching and learning approaches for the BN programme had to be designed
to promote the development of the outcomes implied by the USEM account and
appropriate for nursing practice and leadership. ‘Authentic’ learning and assessment
arrangements were needed, on the assumption that students will benefit from
‘authentic’ learning and tend to be more employable because they learn better
when goals, learning and assessment methods are in alignment. This emphasis on
‘deep’ approaches to learning was consolidated in the BN by adopting problem-
based learning, which is reported to facilitate a more student-centred approach to
learning and to encourage a closer relation of theory to students’ clinical work.
Problem-based learning is noted for its focus on the student’s experience of learning
through analysis, intervention for and evaluation of problems, situations or
circumstances that are posed within a programme of learning (Wilkie and Burns,
2003). It is characterized by small group learning in which students direct their
own learning process, supported by a lecturer who takes on the role of facilitator.
The problem, situation or circumstance is designed to emulate real-life situations
for students to work with. For nursing students, problems can be developed from
 The Skills plus project and nursing 151

a range of different learning environments they may find themselves in during the
course of their programme, such as a short stay hospital ward, a GP (general
practitioner) practice, or a visit to a mother and newborn baby at their home. The
process usually begins when students are provided with a brief scenario, from
which they have to clarify terms and identify key issues to address. Once this is
achieved they consider possible explanations, develop learning outcomes, agree
rules for group process, collect evidence, arrange periodic meetings with their
facilitator for feedback, support and further information, and finally, present their
findings and conclusions. This latter component is sometimes used as an assessment
strategy for problem-based learning-based curricula (Boud and Feletti, 1997).
Problem-based learning was initially introduced into the BN programme in
the mid-1990s. The nursing theory and practice module piloted the approach for
a number of years and was subject to formal evaluation in 1999. Drawing on the
accounts of students and facilitators, it highlighted strengths of, and disadvantages
with, problem-based learning. A particular strength was that students found that
they used more evidence from research to support their decision-making. However,
they also reported that the facilitator role was ambiguous and that there was
insufficient time to meet in groups due to the demands of the other, teacher-led
units. Facilitators experienced difficulties in supporting group learning, especially
in determining what support they should offer. The findings were used to improve
the learning and facilitation process on the existing programme, including proposals
for staff development for facilitation (Barrow et al., 2002). Several units of learning
in other modules subsequently applied problem-based learning, although there
was little or no co-ordination between units and/or the problems that were presented
to students. However, problem-based learning in the 2002 programme was designed
to integrate subject matter within units of learning, focusing on a core of profes-
sional practice, and sharing aims and learning outcomes. The new curriculum
also aimed to foster the development of positive efficacy beliefs and metacognition
by promoting student-centred learning through group experiences and individual
learning and reflection. Evidence of learning could come, for example, by referring
to developing competence in making clinical judgements and decisions, and to
skill in identifying clinical practices in need of further research.
While appreciating the likely benefits of problem-based learning, the BN team
recognized the value of more traditional systems to support learning. This hybrid
approach (i.e. problem-based learning and traditional teacher-led input) was
considered a strength for the new BN curriculum for several reasons. The audits,
interviews and survey findings from Skills plus demonstrated the existing strengths
and rigour within the theoretical components of the programme, particularly in
the development of research knowledge and skills. More traditional teaching
approaches also offered the facility for lectures and other presentations from
academic and practice-based experts who are the current innovators and leaders
within healthcare. It was considered essential to maintain these strengths by
continuing to include material and approaches that had been very positively
evaluated by students, lecturers, practitioners and external reviewers. For example,
152 Towards the enhancement of practice

Table 9.3 Problem-based learning applied in the Manchester BN programme

Year 1, Foundation Studies In the foundation year, the emphasis is on a combination

of teacher-led subject-based units of learning and
application of subject-based material within clinical
problem-based situations.
During this time students are also prepared for more self-
directed and small group learning techniques, with
particular emphasis on classroom/clinical interaction and
interpersonal relationships and group learning processes.

Year 2, Branch Year 1* In year one of the branch, students will still be guided by
pre-set modular learning outcomes and facilitator
guidance for small group work. However, the emphasis
will switch to student-led small group work, based on real
client case studies.

Year 3, Branch Year 2 In year two of the branch, students will be expected to
take increasing responsibility for developing their own
learning outcomes and for managing the small group
learning process with the support of a facilitator.

* Branch studies relate to the options for specializing: children’s, adult or mental health
nursing.

a core unit of learning in the final year of the BN programme involves writing a
dissertation. This unit had benefited from a project internally funded by the
university, to develop core content and standards for undergraduate dissertation
students and their supervisors. In addition, it had been our experience that beginning
students seek more support and structure within a programme of learning. A hybrid
model of problem-based learning was therefore agreed and the model designed
for the BN programme is presented in Table 9.3. It illustrates how the first year
focuses on orientation to learning and working, both in groups and individually.
The problem-based learning process described above is still applied, except the
facilitator provides more structure and support by developing learning outcomes
for students, setting meeting times and joining in group discussions. In year two
and particularly in year three, the process of learning will become more student-
focused. They will be encouraged to be more independent in problem-solving
and decision-making, in preparation for their initial employment.

Monitoring the impact of the new BN

programme
The revised BN programme started in September 2002, six months before this
chapter was written. The first year students and their facilitators evaluated the
first semester and early indications suggest that the skills focus of the USEM
framework, applied through problem-based learning, is having a positive impact
 The Skills plus project and nursing 153

on students’ development. In particular, problem-based learning appears to foster

closer relationships between students and their facilitators because of the emphasis
on interaction within the classroom. However, it is too early in the programme for
a robust evaluation, especially because students have not had sufficient problem-
based learning-based learning or work-based experience to measure attributes
such as a positive self-efficacy.
In addition to the internal monitoring mechanisms for the BN, a research-based
evaluation has been proposed. The key aim of this evaluation will be to explore
the assimilation of USEM, applied through problem-based learning, and employ-
ability. The evaluation will be conducted using case study research of students’
development, employability and initial employment. In carrying out this research
it will be possible to demonstrate the extent to which the curriculum model, and
application of USEM in particular, have equipped students with the necessary
knowledge, skills and qualities to fulfil the aims of the programme and meet the
current and future needs of employers.

Concluding comment
Since the Skills plus project began in August 2000 it has had a big impact on both
new and existing undergraduate nursing curricula at the University of Manchester.
The project has been particularly influential because USEM offers a user-friendly
design to help higher education providers and their partners (in our case, NHS
trusts) to focus on developing and fine-tuning their curricula; in the School’s case,
it has been able to draw on the work that has been produced from the main Skills
plus project to support BN curriculum development. The methods used (for
example, audits) have been a particular strength, especially for helping nursing to
challenge the usefulness of curriculum frameworks that were, perhaps, too
theoretically driven. They have also helped to highlight existing good practices in
learning, teaching and assessment from key stakeholder perspectives.
Most importantly, involvement in the Skills plus project has promoted cross-
fertilisation of ideas between participating institutions and across the different
disciplines represented in the overall project. This has further informed curriculum
planning in our School and brought to our educational research and development
the benefits of inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Note
1 It became the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) in 2002.
Chapter
154 Towards 10
the enhancement of practice

Skills plus and the

Construction Management
programme at Liverpool John
Moores University

Aled Williams

T h e c o n t ex t o f e d u c a t i o n f o r t h e b u i l t
environment
Currently there is much discussion of curriculum issues within the construction
and surveying bodies, which has led to divergent positions because of differing
perspectives on professional accreditation. The Chartered Institute of Building
(CIOB) has for some time maintained its course accreditation criteria and entry
standards. The rationale of the CIOB favours a largely ‘inclusive’, output-oriented
approach. This reflects the added value to student capabilities that derives from
the completion of a programme of study, evidenced through the assessment
outcomes and abilities as defined by the CIOB syllabus. At the time of the work
reported in this chapter the CIOB required that modules had to be evidenced against
a prescriptive mapping document, their Educational Framework (1995). This
makes certain areas of study compulsory for all students, thus putting a limit on
flexibility.
In contrast, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has developed
annual threshold standards for the accreditation of courses in ‘partner institutions’
(RICS, 2001). Each individual university partnership course is expected to meet
four threshold measures which comprise: entry standards, research quality, teaching
quality and employment of graduates. The recruitment policy adopted by the RICS
aims to attract ‘high flyers’, by working to a threshold that requires that 75 per
cent of the cohort at each level have an average of 17 points at ‘A’ level (230
UCAS points) or equivalent. This gives rise to an ‘exclusive’, input-oriented,
stratified intake and stratified profession.
The alignment of teaching, learning and assessment with the requirements of
professional bodies, industry and universities is of paramount importance.
Consequently, designers of built environment courses have to try to strike an
appropriate balance between education and training. Even though the emphasis
of the vocational courses in the area of the built environment is discipline-specific,
the courses also incorporate a grounding in general management, legal matters,
economics, finance and team building. In other words, on programmes in the
built environment, students learn both discipline-specific and generic skills
(including ‘soft’ skills).
 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme 155

Biggs (1999), following Leinhardt et al. (1995), makes a distinction between

‘professional’ knowledge and ‘university’ knowledge:

• Professional knowledge is procedural, specific and pragmatic. It deals

with executing, applying and making priorities
• University knowledge is declarative, abstract and conceptual. It deals
with labelling, differentiating, elaborating and justifying
(Biggs, 1999: 41)

Biggs suggests that, when teaching for the professions, the integration of
different fields of knowledge has tended to be left to the student. However, his
position does not describe very well an overtly vocational programme, such as a
built environment degree, in which the intention is to blend the declarative and
procedural forms of knowledge at lower and higher levels. The implication of
Biggs’s suggestion for this chapter is that the learning that takes place on built
environment courses (the acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding) is
differentiated from that integrative learning that occurs within the construction
industry. To complicate matters, the construction industry is in a state of flux and
there is an increasing emphasis on developing its professionals to be reflective
practitioners.

Background to the BSc (Hons) in Construction

Management
The School of the Built Environment (SOBE) at Liverpool John Moores University
participated in Skills plus. My role in this involved looking at how employability
skills interact within a construction curriculum, taking a programme perspective.
The course chosen for the School’s involvement in Skills plus was the BSc (Hons)
in Construction Management, which is vocationally-based and accredited by the
Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB).
Learning outcomes for the Construction Management programme are driven
by industry requirements and can to some extent be altered over time in order to
meet the requirements as they evolve. The School’s Industrial Liaison Group,
sandwich ‘year out’ employers, and professional body requirements inform the
course content. The CIOB Educational Framework (1995) is quite prescriptive as
to the recommended modules/elements to be included within the course syllabus,
although this has recently been revised (CIOB, 2002). The practice has therefore
been for the Head of Studies to map the course modules and compare them against
the CIOB core competencies for each academic level in order to secure professional
accreditation for the programme.1
The Construction Management course is a four-year sandwich degree where
the third year is the professional training element. Currently, there are approxi-
mately 24 students at each level. The selection of this programme for engagement
with Skills plus took into account the following:
156 Towards the enhancement of practice

• This long-standing course has a good employment track record and is highly
regarded within the industry.
• Participation would, it was hoped, inform any developments in the Construc-
tion Management programme.
• The School’s Teaching and Learning Co-ordinator was formerly the Head of
Studies for this programme.

The Skills plus project involved analyses, or audits, of the expectations of

the individual core modules within the Construction Management programme.
Auditing took place at each of the three levels in order to identify gaps or
duplications in provision and to highlight areas of the programme where further,
more detailed exploration might be required. The analytic work involved an
examination of the programme handbook. Contributions to the analysis were
made by the Teaching and Learning Co-ordinator and Head of Academic
Programmes.
Another engagement in Skills plus was an investigation of the contribution
that Built Environment courses in higher education make to graduate employability.
Structured interviews were carried out with graduates, line managers and human
resource managers at contrasting construction organizations. These were intended
to elicit understandings of how employability and skills development were
understood in the workplace, which, in addition to contributing to a wider set of
interviews for the project, would inform the Built Environment curriculum.

Skills plus analyses of the Construction

Management programme
The first audit involved mapping teaching, learning and assessment activities
against the outcomes in the programme specification. It was found that lecturers
used a range of different teaching methods and activities in order to develop the
variety of skills expected by the CIOB Educational Framework (1995). However,
some kinds of activity appeared to be under-used – for example, the development
of skills for the dissertation module and the need for ‘less structured’ problems.
The second audit involved mapping the 39 Employability Aspects suggested
by Skills plus, and described in Chapter 2, against the curriculum of the Con-
struction Management programme. Once these employability aspects were
mapped against the learning, teaching and assessment activities, the data gathered
were collated into tabular format for each level. The presence of each of the 39
aspects in the modules was coded as: ‘Explicitly’, ‘Implicitly’ or ‘Not at all’.
An analysis of this tabulation was subsequently carried out focusing upon the
following areas:

• Main qualities and skills that were explicitly developed over time;
• Qualities and skills that students were expected to develop over time, although
there was no explicit focus upon them;
 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme 157

• Aspects of employability that appeared not to be being developed in the

programme, either explicitly or implicitly.

The principal outcomes of both audits are given below.

To o f e w ‘ u n s c a f f o l d e d ’ p r o b l e m s
The audit revealed that there were plenty of structured and ‘scaffolded’ problems
throughout the programme, but little emphasis on the more open-ended, ‘unscaf-
folded’ problems that reflect the complexity of those that are met in the industry.
The programme was not progressively removing the ‘scaffolding’ from the
problems it set and was therefore not maximizing the chances of students
developing autonomy.
As suggested in Chapter 8, formative assessment is critically important to
learning. The sequence of learning tasks could benefit from a greater emphasis on
formative ‘low-stakes’ assessment in the early stages, since this would emphasize
the importance of the learning as students worked towards meeting the summative
assessment expectations. Learning could be better developed through the use of
mini-projects and/or practice tasks that would not necessarily be formally assessed
(if summative assessment were required, then the weighting could be sufficiently
low that a student could retrieve any initially weak performance). A consequence
could well be ‘deeper’ learning, supported by better and more timely feedback
from lecturers, tutors or peers.

Development of skills for the dissertation module

At Level 3 (final year) it was found that the dissertation module required students
to have previously developed a range of skills. However, preceding modules at
lower levels (Levels 1 and 2) showed no explicit preparation for many of them.
The dissertation module expects students to use the following skills which were
not evident at lower levels:

• Critical Commentaries
• Making a Bibliography
• Concept Mapping
• Literature Review
• Research Design.

Thus, there is a need to make these skills more explicit at lower levels so that
they are progressively developed and nurtured over the duration of the programme.

The need for interdisciplinarity

Traditionally, Built Environment courses in higher education have tended to operate
in separate ‘silos’ in which the various subject disciplines are seen as discrete.
158 Towards the enhancement of practice

Although many Built Environment programmes now have a largely common first
year, when students work in teams they still tend to be grouped by discipline. The
outside world involves problem-working, often without complete information,
which requires a multidisciplinary approach and understanding. A key question
to consider is how the School should seek to build interdisciplinarity into the
construction curriculum. The Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education
report believes that interdisciplinary education and teamwork is an area that needs
to be addressed:

Many current learning and teaching programmes are focused on single

discipline subjects that exclude multi-disciplinary understanding and team-
work experience. These reinforce rather than break-down the silo mentality
that exists between the built environment professions and within the industry
itself.
(Coulter, 2003: 7)

In recent years, the School’s curriculum has moved slightly towards inter-
disciplinarity. This has largely been due to ‘one shot’ activities such as the final
year joint project. The joint project involves students on the four professionally
accredited final year degree programmes in Building Surveying, Construction
Management, Quantity Surveying, and Real Estate Management. Normally, it
takes place over an intensive one-week period with a common theme bringing the
various disciplines together. The main aims and objectives relate to the undertaking
of effective group work within a multidisciplinary team. The joint project enables
students to develop a greater awareness of other disciplines’ roles, skills and
problems. Also, the individual student experience is enhanced through reflection
on the set of skills that have been developed during the module. The project is
assessed in two parts, reflecting the need to assess both the end product and the
process through which that product has been developed.
Even though there is some interdisciplinarity within the final year, as a result
of the joint project this is not foreshadowed earlier in the programme, and it is
evident that there is a need to provide more opportunities for the progressive
development of students’ capacity for interdisciplinary working over the duration
of the course. Further, feedback has indicated that students want integrative projects
at earlier levels in order to help them to contextualize their studies by exposing
them to the full range of professional work in property and construction.
There is a divergence of views between the academic staff, professional bodies
and employers regarding interdisciplinarity and teamwork. Employers argue that
there is not enough work on ‘real world’ problems, which are ill-structured and
‘messy’, within a true interdisciplinary perspective. This was corroborated from
interviews conducted for the Skills plus project where it was said that students
learn team-working skills throughout their period in education, from school to
university. However, as one human resource manager pointed out, the teamwork
that is organized in university is different from the kind of teamwork needed in
professional practice:
 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme 159

[The] concept of team-working is different in university compared to the

‘real world’. At university this tends to be peers [whereas] at the workplace
this tends to have different levels, which can be a quite difficult adjustment to
make for graduates.

However, common to both university and employment is the need to fit in and
co-operate with others, although in professional practice this applies to a hierarchy
of people at different levels within and outside an organization, including work
colleagues, clients, consultants and contractors (who have diverse requirements).
There may be the need to re-shape the notion of teamwork at university so as to
overcome the traditional ‘flat’ student teams. One approach could be the inclusion
of external practitioners or administrative staff and technicians as well as academic
staff and students in order to increase the hierarchical element in teamwork.
The increased use of interdisciplinarity and unstructured problems embedded
within the curriculum would help in the achievement of the following:

• The development of graduates who can deal with ill-structured problems.

• The gaining by professional bodies of graduates with enhanced professional
capability.
• Graduates who are able to ‘hit the ground running’ in employment.

One of the main aims of the sandwich ‘year out’ is to enable students to acquire
the ‘tacit knowledge’ which is necessary for them to be effective in the workplace.
The Skills plus interviews strongly confirmed that the sandwich ‘year out’ was an
important vehicle for the development of employability, in that it helped the students
to relate theory to practice. However, students are increasingly omitting the sand-
wich year and progressing directly into the final year from Level 2. The Chartered
Institute of Building takes the view that industrial placements are of importance
for the construction profession and has expressed concern at

the relatively low numbers of students taking sandwich placements. Further

investigation is needed … into the possibility of sandwich training becoming
mandatory.
(CIOB, 2003: 14)

If the sandwich placement is not to be made mandatory, then it would seem

that there is a need for some curriculum development to mitigate the effects of
losing the sandwich year and to help these students to get the most from their
final year studies. The curriculum may need more explicitly to prepare students
(or prime them) for the situations they can expect to find when they get into the
workplace. Would, perhaps, an alternative approach drawing on ‘non-sandwich’
student experiences (such as block vacation work experience within a construction
firm or university summer school integrative project) develop the ‘tacit knowledge’
that is desired of a graduate?
160 Towards the enhancement of practice

M a i n q u a l i t i e s a n d s k i l l s t h a t w e r e ex p l i c i t l y
developed over time
The main qualities and skills developed over time, as identified by the audit based
on the 39 aspects of employability, were:

• Independence (reference A4 in Box 2.1) – which ties in with self-confidence

• Adaptability (A6)
• Self-management (B15)
• Commercial awareness (C24)
• Teamwork (C39) – mainly discipline-specific group work.

T h e n e e d f o r a ‘r o u n d e d g r a d u a t e ’
As a provider of higher education, the School aims to produce a ‘rounded person’
on graduation. The interviews that were conducted for the Skills plus project with
six professionals in the construction industry showed that personal qualities and
attributes were seen as essential for graduate employability. Interviewees said
that, when they were appointing for graduate positions, the main personal qualities
needed by individuals were high levels of motivation and a willingness to learn. A
human resources manager stated that it was not just academic ability that made a
graduate employable:

When we’re looking specifically to appoint people we’re looking for the more
rounded person, not just the qualification, and it’s everything that goes with
having a mature attitude and disciplined approach to the way they deal with
problems, and not just relying on the education that they’ve had. We like to
think there’s a bit of lateral thinking going on as well; able to think a little bit
differently … and they need to be already showing those seeds of a thinker …

Brown et al. (2002: 11) in a paper about employability in a knowledge-driven

economy refer to the notion of an ‘employable and productive person’. This raises
the issue of whether the job-specific technical skills are taken as given, with
construction employers looking at what extra the graduate can offer. Brown et al.
quote a human resources manager to the effect that academic qualifications were
taken for granted and also as saying:

Judgements about one’s drive and commitment, communication skills, team-

working and self-management skills have become more important alongside
any consideration of paper qualifications. The value of an individual to an
employer is no longer represented by the denomination of academic currency
but the economy of experience.
(quoted in Brown et al., 2002: 19)
 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme 161

Getting students to deal with new situations

In the Skills plus interviews that I conducted, a recurring theme was how students
grapple with new situations. This is relevant both within the higher education
sector and to the wider issue of preparing students for employment. The students
pick up signals from the syllabus (and especially the assessment requirements)
regarding the need to deal with the challenge of new situations. If they perceive
that they are being faced with routine problems with a ‘right answer’, then they
may not make the leap to tackle situations ‘in the wild’. They may remain reactive
in their approach. The programme therefore needs progressively to support the
development of students’ capacity to deal with the complex, often not clearly
defined, problems that they will face in employment. This would mean working
with them, from an early stage in the programme, on the development of their
own individual cognitive learning strategies. Developing students’ capacity for
‘learning how to learn’ is an important curriculum aim, as it is desirable that
students become autonomous learners as soon as possible in the programme.
The construction employers who were interviewed perceived the set of skills
possessed by graduates as lacking some aspects of knowledge of professional
practice. The argument was made by one human resources manager that there
needed to be more bias towards the everyday working practices that graduates
had to implement as construction professionals. However, there is something of a
‘Catch 22’ in operation, in that the employers believe that many of these skills are
only acquired through experience in an employment role! One human resources
manager who was interviewed acknowledged the point when saying:

There is no substitute for experience, and the technical knowledge required

can’t be taught; it can only be gained by experience. I would expect universities
to be able to direct their students to know where to find information, but the
actual detail of that information just can’t be taught as there is too much
there.

In other words, the university could provide the framework for students to
develop their technical abilities, whereas the workplace could provide the opportu-
nity to refine them.
Graduates, too, acknowledged that the demands of their programme and of the
workplace differed. When interviewed about the skills they had had to acquire
since graduation in order to remain employable, they tended to focus on job-
specific knowledge and skills, which were not taught in enough depth at university.
It is not obvious how universities can respond to any calls that they should prepare
students for the specific demands of many different workplaces.
A fundamental problem on a vocational course, such as construction, is the
gap between acquiring discipline-specific knowledge and applying it in practice.
For example, statutory legislation is subject to change (sometimes quite rapidly)
and hence when graduates draw on the knowledge that they have gained whilst at
162 Towards the enhancement of practice

university, the information they have is sometimes dated. Of course, it is recognized

that graduates are expected to carry out continuing professional development (CPD)
or life-long learning, implying strongly that the acquisition of skills such as data
gathering and handling should have formed a significant part of the students’
university experience.

The development of qualities and skills without

specific attention being given to them
Whilst it may be assumed that reflection is automatically a component of a
vocational construction programme, the audit of the Construction Management
programme revealed that reflectiveness (A10) was under-represented. There was
only one module at Level 1 (Management and Organization) and two modules at
Level 3 (the dissertation and Project Analysis and Synthesis) which explicitly
developed reflection at the time of the audit. Hence it was acknowledged that
there was a need to review the relationship between Levels 1 and 3 and to discover
how the identified gap might be bridged.
One of the main problems making claims for employability is the problem of
dealing with certification of personal qualities and discipline-specific skills.
Following the Skills plus auditing, the RAPID (Recording Academic, Professional
and Individual Development) Progress File2 software was adopted by the school,
initially within a module at each course level. The web-based RAPID Progress
File software is used as a vehicle to support reflection and as a tool for auditing
and recording the development of student skills and competencies within a module.
This can be accessed both internally and remotely via the university intranet,
which gives flexibility in respect of student access. The RAPID software provides
a framework for the self-auditing of Key Skills, Personal and Professional Skills,
and discipline-specific Technical Skills and it also acts as a resource for the
production of a short reflective essay. This review is expected to include a summary
of the development and achievement of the skills expected as an outcome of the
student’s engagement in each module, and an identification of areas of strengths
and weakness. The students have an opportunity to acknowledge any aspects of
their progression that need further development through the incorporation of an
action plan within the reflective essay.
The adoption of the RAPID Progress File software and its subsequent
embedding within the Construction Management programme have provided a
vehicle for students to evidence claims to employability. Also, RAPID has served
to raise student self-awareness through the benchmarking of their own personal
progress and development over the whole degree programme. As a ‘carrot and
stick’ encouragement towards the completion of the Progress File, this element is
assessed, and attracts 15 per cent of the total marks available for one module at
each of the three levels.
The use of RAPID aligns with the expectations from the QAA that each student
will, by 2005–6, engage in compiling a progress file. Student feedback and staff
 Skills plus and the Construction Management programme 163

experiences have led to a belief that the use of RAPID will result in greater reflec-
tiveness on the part of students, and their increased capacity to demonstrate it.
The audit also showed that resolving conflict (shown as C36 in Box 2.1) and
negotiating (C38) appeared explicitly, and hence were assessed, but only at Level
3 – though they might appear less prominently at earlier levels in the programme.

Aspects of employability that appear not to be

d e v e l o p e d , ex p l i c i t l y o r i m p l i c i t l y
Whilst most of the 39 aspects of employability shown in Box 2.1 are incorporated
into the Construction Management programme, some of these may be so on an
implicit, rather than an explicit, basis. Skills plus has enabled the programme
team to think about the relevance of the following areas which, on the face of it,
do not appear within the programme:

• Malleable self-theory (A1)

• Creativity (B17)
• Political sensitivity (C25)
• Ability to work cross-culturally (C26)
• Ethical sensitivity (C27)
• Acting morally (C31)
• Influencing (C34).

Conclusions
The key issues from Audit 1 (teaching, learning and assessment activities) helped
the programme team to reflect on the related issues of interdisciplinarity and the
need for ‘less structured’ problems in leading up to the dissertation module. The
need became apparent for better-sequenced learning encounters through the
provision of ‘scaffolding’ at lower levels, which would be progressively removed
in the interest of developing autonomy in students. There was a recognition that
more ‘low-stakes’ assessment was required to encourage students’ learning, since
the current emphasis on relatively short-term assessment outcomes may be
distracting from the development of the individual in the longer term. Mapping
the 39 employability aspects (Audit 2) raised a number of pertinent issues about
the programme’s contribution to the development of students’ personal qualities
and skills.
The construction employer interviews imply that job-specific skills are taken
as a ‘given’, but that employers were looking at what the graduate could offer in
addition. They also gave a perspective on teamwork that contrasted with that held
within the university – in employment, teams often involve members from different
levels in the organizational hierarchy. It was recognized that it would be desirable
to include an element of hierarchy in the Construction Management programme
as a result. There was a general acknowledgement that the sandwich ‘year out’
164 Towards the enhancement of practice

developed students’ ‘tacit knowledge’ regarding employment situations. However,

there was a need for the programme to seek to build-in opportunities for students
not taking the sandwich route to develop ‘tacit knowledge’.
The recognition of personal qualities and discipline-specific skills has been
facilitated through the use of the RAPID Progress File software. The main benefit
of using RAPID is that students have reflected on the ‘tacit skills’ they have
developed before they make their job applications.
The rethinking stimulated by Skills plus does not necessarily mean wholesale
curriculum re-design, since much can be done by making adjustments to the
existing curriculum. Some of these adjustments may concern the teaching/learning
process, rather than programme content. As well as teaching students the skills
and knowledge that they will need if they are to become competent construction
professionals, their university education should also serve to develop other personal
qualities such as the ability to become ‘reflective practitioners’.

Notes
1 Further information on the CIOB Educational Framework and developments can be
found in Platten (2003).
2 Further information on the RAPID Progress File can be found in Maddocks and Sher
(2003) and at http://rapid.lboro.ac.uk/.
Chapter 11 Employability and social science 165

Employability and social

science
Margaret Edwards and Chris McGoldrick

Issues
This is a report on a local investigation of issues that pervade this book. Liverpool
John Moores University’s School of Social Science (SSS) was interested in
questions such as: is there any truth in gibes about the relative unemployability of
social science graduates?1 How employable are social scientists from new
universities, in comparison with those from older universities? Are curricula in
the School keeping pace with workplace change?
Small-scale enquiry produced material to guide reflection on ways of
maximizing the School’s contribution to undergraduates’ employability. The
evidence reported here was collected precisely because employability is of
immense current concern and involves difficult reflections about values, curricula,
management and resources. Attention focuses mainly on the work of Sociology,
the programme within the School which participated in Skills plus. It is instructive
to compare this with the position in another discipline that is also far removed
from being a vocational study (Chapter 5). The question that both chapters address,
albeit at one remove, is whether employability is mainly a concern for ‘vocational’
and ‘applied’ subject areas, or whether there is something enriching here for Arts,
Humanities and Social Science as well.

Employability and the School of Social Science at

Liverpool John Moores University
For many social scientists, ‘employability’ is a social construct, in respect of which
the education system, the structure of class relations and the labour market closely
interact (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Rhetoric at national and international
levels equates employability with economic competitiveness (Blunkett, 2001),
yet universities in the UK suffer substantial resource shortfalls (NCIHE, 1997;
Universities UK, 2002). Likewise, the UK’s lowly productivity position within
the G7 group of countries has been attributed to weak skill levels in the
employment-age population, but factors such as relatively sparse investment in
research and development by government and companies are also implicated (DTI,
2000). Emphases in much of the employability literature are on supply-side features
166 Towards the enhancement of practice

(such as the size and ‘skills’ of graduate populations); there is less recognition
that demand for graduates can fluctuate with economic conditions, and changing
organizational structures and cultures (Brown et al., 2002). Furthermore, graduates
from new universities may find graduate employment more difficult to achieve
than those from older universities, since some employers appear sceptical of new
university credentials (Harvey et al., 1997). ‘New university’ students may have
fewer family, financial, social and cultural resources upon which to draw than
students from older universities. At the time when the government’s intention is
to widen participation in Higher Education (HEFCE, 2001), employers increasingly
appear to be looking for the very characteristics, such as social confidence, which
are more likely to be part of middle class social capital (Brown and Scase, 1994:
142–3).
So, we have an under-theorized concept and loaded dice. Neither is a reason
for passive acceptance of structural disadvantage, however. The following sections
trace developments in thinking about employability within SSS.

S o c i a l S c i e n c e a t Wo r k : a s t u d y o f e m p l o y a b i l i t y
issues
The School commissioned a small-scale study (McGoldrick, 2001) which tracked
the post-graduation experience of a sample of 46 of the School’s 1997–2000
graduates, stratified by discipline (Economics, Geography, History, Politics and
Sociology). Seventeen employers were consulted about their recruitment criteria
for graduate-level jobs or jobs in which there was progression to this level of
work. The graduates reflected upon features of their personal histories, their
undergraduate curricula and post-graduation experience which had been helpful
or unhelpful in achieving and retaining employment, particularly at graduate level.
The employers mainly represented companies which were typical SSS graduates’
destinations and aspirations.
The work was impelled by two main concerns. The first was to raise the
profile of employability within SSS. The second was to use the information as
encouragement to curricular reflection, particularly because there was uncertainty
within the School about the compatibility of ‘employability’, as expressed in
many key skills analyses, with the School’s values. At the same time, there was
recognition that social science curricula needed to keep pace with workplace
changes.
Graduates have always left for a job market which has changed since their
tutors graduated, but there are indications that the generation and work experience
gap may now be more pronounced. Research by the Open University suggests
that between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, changes in higher education
curricula increasingly had ‘not been keeping pace with changes in the workplace’
(Brennan, 1999: 4). Graduates particularly reported some lack of preparedness in
oral communication and ICT (information and communication technologies). ICT
 Employability and social science 167

competence is required even at early stages of graduates’ job searches since a

high proportion of job advertisements and applications are now organized online
(Prospects, 2002).
There may be other areas where workplace preparation is needed. Feedback
from SSS graduates suggested that beliefs in ‘a job for life’ persisted, most
markedly among first generation graduates. There is still a core of work, mostly
in the upper reaches of the occupational hierarchy, which offers a measure of
security, financial reward and prestige. Many graduates now entering the labour
market, however, are more likely to experience flexibility – of work functions,
numbers employed, and hours worked. The reasons for labour market shifts have
been examined elsewhere (for example, Lechner and Boli, 2000). The ‘time
pioneers’ (Hörning et al., 1995) may relish flexibility. Other graduates, especially
those without family resources and networks, may find flexibility problematic.
Several studies including those by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (Hawkins
and Winter, 1995), Harvey et al. (1997), and Skills plus itself, illustrate how
employability goes beyond the first post-graduation job, important though this is.
The development of attributes such as self-awareness, adaptability, confidence
and a willingness to tackle new learning are identified by Skills plus as important
preparation for life and a changing labour market.
The SSS study was small-scale. The stratified random sampling of graduates
produced broad convergence with most characteristics of the social science
graduate populations as recorded in the university’s student information system,
but the findings reported here are tentative. Nevertheless, the study was a useful
catalyst in prompting academic reflection on the employability perceptions of the
School’s graduates rather than on those of ‘graduates’ in general.

Some key issues raised by Social Science at

Wo r k

Graduate employment destinations

In interview, the graduates showed a clear awareness of the importance of study
following degrees in less-obviously vocational disciplines. For a good number,
however, especially those without family financial resources, earning a living and
paying off debts were imperatives. There has been a reduction in the proportion
of Liverpool JMU students, and SSS graduates in particular, undertaking further
study as a first destination. In 1997, 22.5 per cent of SSS graduates entered directly
into further study but by 2000 the proportion had fallen to 17.5 per cent (see Table
11.1).
It appears that for an increasing proportion of SSS graduates, first degrees
carry a greater weight of preparation for life and work. Careers guidance emerged
as a key feature of this preparation. Graduates who had been unemployed for
some months after graduation typically had not consulted the Careers Service
168 Towards the enhancement of practice

Table 11.1 Liverpool JMU: first destination returns to the Higher Education Statistics
Agency, for the year 2000

First destination SSS (%) Liverpool JMU (%)

Permanent employment 60.4 66.4
Temporary employment 5.8 4.6
Further study 17.5 15.4
Unemployment 11.7 9.2
Other 4.6 4.4

independently or gone to arranged talks. As one unemployed graduate, who had

ignored Careers talks, ruefully commented: ‘I thought that if I concentrated on
my degree, it would all work out’. The workplace was tougher than he had thought.
Among the sample, several months’ post-graduation unemployment meant a
weaker record in achieving graduate work, a finding which follows the results of
larger studies (for example, McKnight, 2003).

Influences on graduate employment

There is evidence that employers use degree class and further study as ‘filters’ in
order to process the increasing volume of graduate applications following the
massification of HE, particularly in the 1990s (Nove et al., 1997). Degree class
and further study were the most significant predictors, at the 90 per cent confidence
level, of graduate employment within the SSS sample. In summary, the likeliest
achievers of graduate employment were: male; aged 18–19 on entry; and holders
of an upper second degree (there were no Firsts in the sample). They had also:
often undertaken further study; had graduates in their families; hunted for jobs;
and sought careers advice.
Family history was important in that those who had a graduate parent, partner
or other close family member seemed to have an edge: more respondents with
this experience had achieved upper second class honours degrees, undertaken
further study and consulted careers advisers. Some explanations of this were: ‘It
was an uncle [a graduate] who helped me most with my CV’; ‘My parents pushed
me to the careers service … it was good advice’; ‘They [graduate parents] agreed
to support my MA’.
Graduates without family graduate experience and resources were more likely
to refer to the ‘different world of uni’, to mention financial difficulties which
could mean the imperative to ‘take any job’ upon graduation, and to identity other
factors that led to over-modest job aspirations. The relationships between social
class, the education system and job aspirations have been explored, for example,
by Bernstein (1975) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977).
Nevertheless, there were female graduates with lower second class honours
degrees and no further study or family graduate experience who had progressed
 Employability and social science 169

to successful, graduate employment. An important factor here appeared to be

purposeful work experience, either through SSS’s work experience modules or
during vacations on the advice of the university’s Careers Service. In interview,
it was clear that employers used the good quality work experience ‘credential’
as an alternative, or an additional, filter to a good degree and further study. One
employer spoke for several, however, when she observed: ‘they [the students]
have a degree to get’. The quality of the work experience, including reflection
upon it, appeared more important to these employers than the length of the
experience.

The Social Science curricula and employability

The traditional academic skills of critical analysis and synthesis were considered
helpful in gaining and surviving in graduate-level employment by nearly 98 per
cent of the graduates. Most employers claimed that a key reason for employing
graduates was that, as one expressed it: ‘graduates generally learn faster … they
have been trained to think … to find out’. The capacity to learn and a willingness
to adapt in the changing workplace were highly valued attributes among the
employer sample. Graduates and employers shared the perception that critical
thinking was, as one graduate commented, ‘at the core of the degree’. Another
said ‘this is the transferable one’. Disciplinary knowledges were helpful to nearly
two-thirds of graduates, but all recognized the need to adapt to changing
circumstances.
The following sections will mainly focus on work within Sociology, the SSS
programme which participated in the Skills plus project.

Sociology ’s contribution to employability

The British Sociological Association summarizes Sociology’s contribution to
employability in the following way:

Studying sociology involves continuous interplay between matters of concern

in society and concepts and theories of society. The requirement to reason
and critically analyse the workings of society makes sociology an effective
medium of intellectual development in the course of an undergraduate degree
or other programme of study. Employers recognise this.
(BSA, 2002: 1).

The QAA subject benchmark statement for Sociology (QAA, 2001c) makes
similar points about a ‘characteristically dynamic discipline’ which is both
‘theoretical and evidence-based’ (p. 4). However, the benchmark statement goes
further and specifies that programmes should include opportunities for the develop-
ment of ‘transferable skills’ in seven main areas:
170 Towards the enhancement of practice

• learning and study

• written and oral communication in a variety of contexts and modes
• statistical and other quantitative techniques
• information retrieval
• ICT
• time planning and management
• group work.
(QAA, 2001c: 5)

Within the small Social Science at Work sample, Geography graduates were
most likely to obtain graduate jobs; Sociology graduates were the next most likely.
In both disciplines, however, there were accounts of failed attempts to achieve
graduate-level jobs. Graduates’ perceptions were that curricular differences would
have encouraged earlier progression to graduate-level work, especially in more
prestigious areas of work, and better survival ‘on the job’. This is consistent with
findings from a small study of unemployed graduates reported by Knight and
Knight (2002).
Sociology graduates remarked upon the following contributions their
undergraduate programmes made to their employability and personal
development:

• Curricula which had given them ‘more understanding’ (of clients in difficult
circumstances). Reflection was encouraged: ‘I am more sympathetic … I
know where people are coming from better’.
• Analytical approaches to social issues and policies: ‘It was a maturing process
to come across new ideas … and dissect them’.
• Supportive academic staff.

There is a notable difference between these reflections on the contributions

made by undergraduate work and the reports from the main set of Skills plus
interviews with new graduates and their co-workers (see Chapter 4).
There were requests from this sample of SSS graduates for:

• A wider range of written work, such as reports and summaries, although the
strengths of the academic essay as an opportunity to explore in some depth
and develop arguments were recognized.
• More applications of theoretical perspectives in case studies.
• Higher-level ICT, numeracy and statistics.
• Further guidance in giving presentations.
• More group work.

This ‘wish-list’ is more consistent with the main Skills plus findings. So too is
the finding that graduates who had not sought advice from the Careers Service
were, in retrospect, likely to regret it.
 Employability and social science 171

In summary, Sociology offers insights and approaches which are valued in the
workplace, as the graduates and several employers who had recruited sociologists
to their companies testified. Nevertheless, graduates and employers recognized
that there were gaps in the curriculum which could limit work opportunities. It
was felt that ICT, numeracy and statistics could be particular weaknesses among
social scientists.
Sociology benchmark statements and reports, for example by Dearing (NCIHE,
1997) and Harvey and colleagues (1997), give very general indications about what
ICT competence, numeracy and statistics involve, so the employers and Sociology
graduates were specifically probed on this point. They identified the following as
helpful in achieving and retaining graduate-level work:

• Competent email use and the ability to locate and use information and opinion
from a variety of sources, including Internet.
• ‘Ability beyond the basic level in all areas of standard software such as
Microsoft Office … including spreadsheet, database … word-processing we
take for granted … PowerPoint can be a very useful plus’ (Employer).
• Numeracy and statistics. Graduates and employers felt that weaknesses in
these areas were more likely to hamper social scientists, including Sociologists,
than graduates in some other disciplines. As one graduate – now in marketing
– commented: ‘there’s hardly a job now that doesn’t demand the ability to
handle numbers with confidence’. Employers said that they were not generally
looking for high-level competence from social scientists in these areas. One
added: ‘… but we are looking for an ease in reading and constructing tables
(n and %); the ability to spot trends … basic statistics – such as mean, median,
mode – up to … correlation (a word which is often used loosely) … basic
stuff. Can graduates spot “iffy” statistics – is too much being claimed for too
little – are visual representations misleading?’ Another employer welcomed
‘SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) – even at basic level on
the CV … if they’ve done that, they are likely to have a nodding acquaintance
with key statistics’.

Re p r e s e n t i n g a n d e n h a n c i n g S o c i o l o g y ’ s c o n t r i b u t i o n
to student employability
The focus of this section is on representing employability to prospective Sociology
students, undergraduates and academic staff. Key issues are who is representing
what to whom, and at what stage in the progression from university entry to
graduation? Are there stages in the undergraduate career when an explicit approach
to employability may be counter-productive? Might a more coy approach, however,
do students a disservice?
There are reasons other than those already identified in this chapter why
‘employability’ can be a slippery concept to represent to school students and to
Sociology undergraduates. There may be misperceptions arising from careers
172 Towards the enhancement of practice

advice prior to university about what ‘Sociology’ involves and where a degree in
the discipline might lead. There can be, as one graduate expressed it: ‘the naïve
view that if your heart’s in the right place … and [if] you have done [your] best’,
graduate work where you can ‘make a difference’ will be achievable. The majority
orientation amongst these predominantly female students was one of ‘social
commitment’ (Brown and Scase, 1994: 91) in which financial rewards tended to
be regarded as secondary to the rewards of ‘making a difference’. This social
commitment led some Sociology graduates to successful jobs in the public sector.
In other cases it led to more tenuous work in the voluntary sector. The choice of
Sociology itself may be associated with a pre-higher education belief that social/
community orientated work does not require the abilities, for example, to structure
policy, give professional presentations and cope with ICT and quantitative data
analysis.
Now that further study immediately following graduation is becoming harder
for a number of social scientists to afford, however, there is a more pressing
need – in sympathetic and realistic ways – to give more direct focus to some
undergraduate thinking about post-graduation. Sociology undergraduates were
less likely than other SSS undergraduates to seek Careers Service advice, in
spite of encouragements from academics. Women graduates in SSS were
generally more likely to express diffidence in aiming for graduate-level work.
Students from non-graduate families appeared less likely to plan for post-
graduation, hold misperceptions about where a first degree could lead and to
express diffidence that ‘Careers were only concerned with high-fliers’. The
commitment of SSS to social justice could extend still more actively to raising
the aspirations of some students.

H o w d o e s S o c i o l o g y ‘r e p r e s e n t ’ e m p l o y a b i l i t y t o
undergraduates?
In addition to outlining the programme content, resources and student support,
the Sociology student handbook identifies key features of the programme as the
development of confident, effective and independent learning, time management,
communication and presentational skills, the ability to work with others and to
undertake problem-working and ICT. The work-based learning module stresses
the need for applied work, the enhancement of personal qualities such as intellectual
maturity, initiative and independence of thought, and increased understanding of
how organizations work.
That group work, discussion and presentations, for example, provide experience
which is valued in the workplace is not, at the moment, spelt out in official module
or programme documentation. Other important practices, such as oral presenta-
tions, ICT and work in numeracy and statistics (typically unpopular with a number
of social scientists) are developed when students work on some mainstream
curriculum topics which are also presented as the sort of activities that students
 Employability and social science 173

will encounter upon graduation. The priority is building confidence, especially

for students who may have unhappy experiences of these types of work from
schooldays. So, the programme contributes to employability in an apparently
incidental, but purposeful way.
It is important, though, that students appreciate what they have learned, know
that many features of the undergraduate curriculum, including those which they
may initially find more difficult, are valued by employers, and understand how to
represent their achievements. The ‘embedded’ approach may not sufficiently
pinpoint connections between undergraduate learning and employability. The
School is developing learning contracts which include student reflection upon
learning and making more explicit connections between undergraduate curricula
and employment. Another approach is to encourage students to reflect on
achievements in order to draft curricula vitae a few months before they apply for
first long vacation work, when there is a powerful extrinsic reason for reflection
and claims-making (Kneale, 1997).

Representing employability to academic staff

Staff in the Sociology programme were involved in four main ways with work
designed to enhance the contribution their activities make to student
employability:

• Feedback was received from Sociology graduates and employers.

• The programme participated in Skills plus, which encouraged a more subtle
view of employability than some previous key skills discussions within the
literature. An important message of Skills plus is that ‘intelligent’ employ-
ability is compatible with, and may well enhance, the academic learning of
the programme.
• It was suggested that undergraduate employability could be enhanced by a
mix of ‘tweaking’ the existing curriculum and some wider changes. This was
done by illustrating the potential contribution of existing learning and teaching
approaches to student employability.
• Staff were involved in an Away Day for the Sociology programme which
included discussion of employability and key issues from Skills plus.

One member of the Sociology team, reflecting on this set of activities, said
that they ‘helped [us] to reflect on what we do – across the programme … we
have a good record at looking at the programme overall … but this [Skills plus]
helped to pinpoint … strengths and gaps’. The mapping of methods of learning
and teaching and forms of assessment across programme levels (see Chapter 12)
had shown how certain methods of learning and teaching at particular levels were
bunched. For example, students need to develop critical writing in extended form,
but the mapping suggested a heavy reliance on academic essays which tended to
174 Towards the enhancement of practice

Table 11.2 Curricular development in Sociology which was encouraged by Social Science
at Work and Skills plus

Actions In progress, 2002 Developing from 2003

1 The curriculum
Enhancing case studies and Student feedback Enhanced work-based
problem-working favourable module at School level
Increasing use of study Student feedback:
visits ‘enjoyable and facilitated
learning’
Reducing curricular ‘Situating Sociology’ Positive feedback:
content (level 1) and option introduced ‘Situating Sociology’ to
increasing study of learning become core
techniques
Enhancing existing ICT E.g. Improved email and Diagnostic ICT testing at
familiarization work wordprocessing techniques; level 1. Some students,
embedding e-information including standard-age entry,
search (e.g. Internet, lack basic ICT
e-journals, Blackboard);
chat room analyses; basic
Excel
Developing Excel work to Student lack of ICT Prior ICT enhancement and
include own analyses confidence and resistance focus on problem-working
to ICT learning has within sociological context
inhibited development in should assist
this area in the past
Introducing SPSS and Cross-disciplinary pilot A cross-school approach
further statistics
Enhancing more formal A difficult area for some Year-long modules will allow
oral presentation work students. With high student/ time for more development
staff ratio; it is time- of this work
consuming to assess
Embedding the above In progress
more widely across levels
of the degree

2 Assessment
Reviewing assessment Substantial academic
methods within essays retained but reduced
programme in number. More assess-
ment based on e.g. reports,
pamphlets, précis
Enhancing student self- Enhancing self-assessment Changes in university’s
assessment and diagnostic, and formative assessment modular framework will
summative and formative facilitate wider range of
assessment assessment
Enhancing assessed group An area of difficulty for More year-long modules
work within the some students, especially will assist here
programme in short (semester-long)
modules

3 Other
Encouraging closer In progress
contacts with Careers
Service
 Employability and social science 175

exclude more varied forms of writing, especially at levels 2 and 3, and to create a
considerable assessment burden for academic staff.

Actions contributing to employability and work in

progress
Table 11.2 summarizes the work that was encouraged by Social Science at Work
and by Skills plus, and that was facilitated in part by a changed modular structure.
There has been a great deal of wide-ranging work to enhance the existing provision,
principally by making explicit things that were implicit and by bringing more
coherence to the programme.

The impact of Sociology ’s work in the enhancement of

employability
Although it is not possible to produce valid numerical data, feedback from SSS
Sociology graduates and employers, and the findings of the Skills plus project,
suggest that recent changes in the Sociology programme are likely to be helpful
in further assisting Sociology graduates to obtain and succeed in graduate-level
work. At the time of writing, the main outcomes of the programme’s deliberations
on employability were as follows:

• Social Science at Work reinforced programme leaders’ ideas about curricular

change. Sociology agreed to participate in Skills plus because the project
combined an elaborated view of employability and a workable methodology
– it called for direct reflection on what was taught and how it was assessed at
programme level. Skills plus was felt to:
• illustrate that employability is a much broader issue than key skills
discourses had been suggesting;
• show how curricula that encourage employability could be compatible
with existing approaches within the discipline;
• demonstrate that employability could be enhanced by tweaking and
embedding rather than by complete curricular overhaul;
• identify points where more radical re-design was needed.
• It became increasingly appreciated that embedding the knowledges and
techniques of disciplines across academic programmes and expressing them
in different contexts encourages better learning among students, especially
where complex outcomes of learning are concerned (see Chapter 12). For
example, developmental, formative assessment assists deep learning but it
is difficult to achieve if skills are divorced from the disciplinary context or
if the programme is divided into short modules. The university is moving
away from a framework of semester-long modules which is a constructive
development.
176 Towards the enhancement of practice

• Oral communication (especially presentations, including group presentations)

and work in ICT and numeracy need enhancement. One advantage of embed-
ding a variety of learning methods across the programme, including the more
difficult ones for some students, is that student confidence can be built up –
and avoidance is more difficult.
• Nevertheless, the embedded approach is not problem-free. As Dearing
(NCIHE, 1997) recognized, the development of some employability skills
among academics may take time. The School is adopting a ‘semi-embedded’
approach whereby cross-disciplinary working assists in the teaching of SPSS
and statistics which are relevant to analyses within Sociology.

Further advice
‘Advice’ may imply that SSS is expert in employability work. This section will
more modestly summarize approaches which are proving helpful in our consider-
ation of curricula and employability.
‘Team-working’ is often cited as a key feature of employer wish-lists and applies
to academic practices as much as it does to students about to enter the graduate
labour market. Protecting academic values, sifting good change from the bogus
and implementing good change in higher education is, to the best of one’s extent,
a collaborative effort. The following advice has emerged from teamwork, mainly
at programme level.

• Recognize that ‘employability’ is not an invasive alien. ‘Intelligent’ employ-

ability, as advocated by Skills plus, is usually being promoted by most HE
programmes; the challenges are to recognize the familiarity of employability
and to articulate learning in terms of life and work, to colleagues and to
students.
• A review of employed graduates’ reflections on their university and work
experiences is rewarding, sobering and a stimulus to change.
• Try curricular mapping (see Chapter 12). These ‘maps’ or audits are revealing
of gaps, overlaps, duplication and bunching of content and assessments.
• Consider whether you are over-teaching (content) and over-working (staff),
looking particularly carefully at assessment practices. Can you release space
for more variety in learning and teaching – can you increase the amount of
problem-working, applied work and study visits? Is more variety of student
experience needed if students are to claim the diverse achievements that
employers value?
• Focus on staged curricular adjustment. A ‘big bang’ approach is seldom
necessary. Staff and other resources are such that innovation fatigue could
hinder changes that would serve students well after graduation.
• As far as possible, embed skills elements within different levels of the
programme and integrate with the knowledges and analyses of the disciplines.
 Employability and social science 177

Staff development and some flexible realignment of teaching responsibilities

may be necessary.
• Careers Advisers are allies and might helpfully contribute to some programme
discussions.

Finally, keep faith in the best of academic traditions: up-to-date knowledge of

the discipline, rigour in inquiry, independence, adaptability, creativity and the
encouragement of student understandings. They too are highly marketable.

Note
1 One of the more printable is: Q. ‘What do you say to a social scientist in a job?’ A.
‘Big Mac and fries, please’.
Chapter
178 Towards 12
the enhancement of practice

Principles and practices for

enhancing employability at
programme or departmental
level

The false promise of innovation projects

There have been thousands of projects to improve learning, teaching, assessment
and the curriculum more generally in different phases of education and in different
countries. The range of interventions, most with the aim of ultimately, but not
necessarily directly, improving student learning, is considerable. Some, such as
innovations based on formative assessment, have secure evidence that there are
substantial results when they are properly implemented (Black and Wiliam, 1998);
for others, such as the use of group learning methods, the evidence is more
ambiguous and suggests a more limited potential (Slavin, 1996); and in many
cases, such as training primary teachers to be better at task setting, delivery, assess-
ment and planning (Bennett et al., 1984), any impact seems short-lived. Our reading
of this history of innovation is that the difficulty is not so much in making
innovations work as generalizing them, because interventions that have short-
term impact when they are in the hands of enthusiastic, well-resourced and well-
informed volunteers seem to wilt when transplanted to general practice, where
they compete for attention with the full press of daily life. Innovations that had
some beneficial effects in vitro frequently falter when released into the wild of
daily practice.
Is there any reason to believe that the sorts of innovation described in Chapters
9–11 will fare better? The odds are against such a belief, given a history of innova-
tion that shows most failing to have any significant, long-term impact. Yet the
USEM approach was designed in some knowledge of the forces that tend to favour
what is over what could be. Research into change and the failure of most
innovations to make a difference suggests three main conclusions:

• The first phase of innovation is atypical: it often involves volunteers and

volunteers tend to be more confident and enthusiastic than non-volunteers; it
usually has some extra resources; considerable attention is paid to making
sure that the innovation and the thinking behind it are properly understood;
and it is a centre of attention. These conditions do not always hold in later
phases, yet the first phase innovation may only have ‘worked’ because of
them.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 179

• Although there has been some tendency to blame teachers for the failure of
innovation and shortfalls from best practice, attributing to them a lack of
competence, commitment, or both, an alternative view concentrates on the
ecology of practice (Bennett et al., 1984). Here, (school)teachers are very
busy people who make thousands of decisions a day as they try to cope with
the fast-moving uncertainties of practice. Faced with multiple demands on
their time, having to hand practices that are routinized and generally safe,
and working within established systems of expectations and possibilities, they
are attracted to behaviours that may be educationally less than ideal but which,
in a real sense, work. Although it may be necessary to change their ideas
about learning and teaching in order to improve practice, these new ideas
will struggle to make a difference in the face of the established cycles into
which teachers’ practices are attracted. We suggest that this position, that
practices are created by systems of beliefs, expectations, habits, constraints,
possibilities and roles, can be extended to higher education.
• Small changes that are compatible with these systems are more likely to ‘stick’.
If teachers themselves initiate them or have a direct part in their development,
so much the better, although mandated change – change required by
administrators or policy-makers – can have effects.

The tuning approach was designed so that:

• A set of small changes, negotiated with module leaders, would be a sufficient

response, certainly in the first few years of an attempt to enhance student
employability.
• Changes would be compatible with engrooved practices because they would
be negotiated and intentionally small.
• Teachers did not need to learn complicated new teaching procedures, although
they did have to consider the claims, set out in the first chapters of this book,
that good pedagogic practices tend to promote achievements that employers
value.
• Although changes make some resource demands, the tuning approach is
deliberately not dependent on new resources for its success: the very idea of
tuning the curriculum is about working with what is there.
• The approach is highly flexible. It was used across the range of subject areas
in universities with research strengths, as well as with ones with other claims
to distinctiveness.

There are points of difficulty as well. Reports from participating departments

at the end of the second year spoke of nine in particular.

• The language issue. One participating department reported that, ‘some

participants found definitional problems and omissions’. An implication is
that some of the dimensions of employability, and the ways in which they
180 Towards the enhancement of practice

relate to teaching/learning experiences in existing programmes, need to be

made more transparent to both staff and students.
• The need for ‘knowing students’. Students need to appreciate how their
employability is being developed and how the learning, teaching and
assessment activities relate to its different elements.
• The Year 1 and progression issues. There is a need to introduce the dimensions
of employability early in a programme and then to revisit them regularly.
Curricular coherence and progression may easily be lost in systems that offer
students free-ish choice from many modular alternatives.
• The assessment issue. Departments reported that their assessment methods
were not always consistent with an employability-sensitive curriculum or
with the rather general expectations included in those subject benchmark
statements1 that have been published by the QAA. Even if employability were
not a concern, it is likely that many departments’ assessment practices would
give cause for concern (Knight and Yorke, 2003b). Where employability is a
concern, then in addition to actions necessary to embed decent assessment
practices, work needs to be done on a number of difficulties – technical,
economic and ethical – outlined in Chapter 8.
• The need for more tools. One report said that the project needed to develop
more ‘pitch pipes’, by which it meant tools to help teams with the business of
tuning their curricula. Those that had been developed were useful but it would
be valuable to have more.
• Dangers of overload. Curriculum overload was a problem. The enrichment
of curricula with employability-related teaching/learning activities implies
pedagogical substitution and rearrangement rather than addition of further
content. However, some of the teaching, learning and assessment methods
that need to appear in a programme to enhance employability can also be
quite time-consuming – in-class presentations take more public time than
essay assessment does. Where professional and statutory regulatory bodies
exert control over content, the challenges are more severe, since it is more
difficult to win an argument for emphasizing the quality rather than the quantity
of learning.
• The cost of out-of-class activity. Some activities (e.g. fieldwork) which should
enhance employability are becoming increasingly problematic for institutions
because of safety and insurance considerations.
• Unrealized possibilities. Many students have part-time employment to finance
themselves through higher education. This situation has some potential (as
yet little tapped) to enhance claims to employability. The CRAC Insight plus
project and others show how this sort of work can be translated so as to
support good claims to employability.
• The evidence of success issue. Although there is a demand for evidence that
this tuning approach works, an issue to which we return later in the chapter,
some resistance was reported to the language of social science when it was
used to explain the good research sense of what is proposed. There were
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 181

some reports of academic impatience with the work of Dweck and with the
term ‘metacognition’.

Nor can it be said that the project had managed in two years what might be
better seen as a six to ten year task. In the June 2002 reports from participating
departments, colleagues referred to the need for further funding for research,
networking and development; head of department and team leader training; more
sponsors; embedding; and extending from project departments to other parts of
universities. Above all they pointed to the limits to what projects can be expected
to do. The external evaluator, Alan Wright, who is director of first cycle
(undergraduate) education at the University of Quebec, was enthusiastic about
project achievements and asked a dozen questions about the project’s work once
funding ceased (Wright, 2002). There was, he considered, more to do.
In being open about difficulties reported at the end of the second year of these
departments’ engagement with the project, we are putting aside the overwhelming
reports that Skills plus is an effective way of working on these and other problems,
as indicated in Box 12.1. However, the reports lead to two important conclusions:
first, that the tuning approach implies a need for sustained attention – it is not a
two-year fix; second, that attempts to tune curricula to enhance employability fall
foul of endemic problems with the quality of curricula in higher education, the
most obvious of which is the dishevelled state of assessment practice. (This is not
primarily an ‘employability problem’ but attempts to enhance employability high-
light it.) Although this approach recommends actions that should ease underlying
assessment problems, it is a little hard to criticize an innovation for failing to
solve a problem, namely incoherent assessment practices, that should have been
addressed anyway through general quality assurance and quality enhancement
procedures. The enhancement of employability is not the only ambition that will
come to nothing if fundamental issues to do with curriculum (for example the
issues of coherence, progression, amount of demand on students, and assessment)
are not tackled.

Tu n i n g – t h e a p p r o a c h i n o u t l i n e
The project was about:

• Working with departments on undergraduate programmes

• Infusing programmes with entitlements
• ‘Stocktaking’
• ‘Tuning’ existing curricula.

Participating departments needed to agree with this agenda and to identify one
person to liaise with other teachers and with the project. The project contributed
‘low cost, high gain’ methods of tuning the curriculum to enhance both its
educational power and students’ employability. It supported developments with
modest funds, research-based practical support, on-demand in-service events,
182 Towards the enhancement of practice

Box 12.1 Departments’ favourable comments on Skills plus, June 2002

1. ‘Although on their own such changes may be marginal, they should
have an overall cumulative effect. [Changes in 2002 included:]
• Sandwich placement year
• Graduate enterprise module
• Re-vamping an existing study skills module around USEM
• Continuing review of assessment practices.’
• ‘[We have made] several modifications to modules across the four
years without altering the existing curriculum plan and design:
• Student self-identification of achievement
• Fourth year self-assessment and reflective workbook
• Two students each did a project that provides baseline evidence of
student skills achievements.
The concepts proposed by Dweck influenced my own thoughts … a
paper is in preparation.
Value for quinquennial professional accreditation review.’
2. ‘The concept was well worked out and consistently applied:
• Concept and interpretation flexible enough to accommodate
difference
• The concept seemed to “grow” but without losing its base
consistency
• The “background” which was supplied and the discussion at
colloquia were interesting
• I was happy with the emphases … which are mostly not explicit
within key skills discourses.
A good move to involve practising teachers at the grassroots, rather
than at the “centre”.
Reporting instructions have been clear.’
3. ‘A useful model.’
‘The model is seen by the programme team as particularly helpful in
providing a simple concept of “graduate skill”.’
‘In contrast [to some benchmark statements], Skills plus offers a much
more coherent notion of what constitutes undergraduate education
and its relation to personal development.’
‘Skills plus was the approach I was seeking. I was deeply dissatisfied
with key skills curricular approaches … [in contrast, Skills plus gives]
“to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name”.’
‘The cross-disciplinary approach is valuable.’
4. Commonly reported influences on curriculum development processes:
• New discussions amongst staff, course, programme and School
teams
continued…
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 183

Box 12.1 continued

• More thinking about learning – e.g. a new interest in problem-
based learning
• Curriculum audits
• Curriculum tuning, consolidation, clarification and innovation
• A greater emphasis on metacognition/reflection/‘knowing’ students
• Explicit documentation for students and reviewers
• Some increase in personal development planning, the keeping of
learning portfolios and counselling students about their choice of
modules and pathways
• Achieving the maximum, 24 points, in Quality Assurance Agency
Subject Review.
5. Miscellaneous project benefits
• Has stimulated research, including student research: surveys of
students, their achievements and the contribution made by their
degree programmes; and research with recent graduates
• Has led to more connections with employers
• Has led to successful bids for internal funding and scholarships
• Has led to successful external bids and collaborations
• Has raised awareness of the significance of activity outside the
classroom (especially of part-time work and the co-curriculum)
• Has raised awareness of metacognition
• ‘The [six] colloquia were excellent.’

colloquium meetings involving representatives of all participating departments,

and the status and attendant publication opportunities that came from working in
a high-profile national project.
We now describe each of the four project elements in turn.

A programme focus
It should be clear that the concern is with complex learning, which takes years
and involves plenty of practice, in which mistakes are made, judgement improves
and capacity increases. If there is to be any hope of complex learning transferring
from one context to another, then there is agreement that the learner needs to use
that learning in different situations, to be aware of using it, and to reflect on the
sorts of situations in which it would be good to use it in future.
One-shot approaches to skills development, such as a first year module on
time management, usually fail or have little impact because complex learning is
being treated as if it were pretty simple learning. It is not that the one-off module
is inherently useless but rather that the key points need to be encountered repeatedly
184 Towards the enhancement of practice

in somewhat different guises by learners who are aware that they are engaging
with time management issues, for example, and who think strategically about
how they could use what they are learning in the future. What is true of skills2 is
more compelling when it comes to embedded, encultured and embodied self-
theories and habits of thought – when we look at efficacy beliefs and metacognition.

Complex learning needs whole programme attention, the full three or four
years of the undergraduate experience.

The learning we wish to encourage is not easily captured in the form of

propositions and information. By and large it depends on repeated and diverse
experiences accompanied by feedback designed to prompt strategic thinking.
Agreed, students can be informed about the value of reflection or the ways in
which helplessness becomes an acquired way of meeting the world. However,
changing their self-theories and habits of thinking or strengthening their skills,
depend, on a sequence of learning encounters and on thinking about them. This
means that the programme should be seen in terms of its key concerns (with skills
and much more besides), its key messages (for example, malleable self-theories
are superior to fixed ones), and processes (the ways in which people learn, teach,
assess or are assessed).

This view of curriculum means that we do not ask departments to change

the subject matter they teach. It does mean thinking about learning, teaching
and assessment experiences and considering the ways in which they are
distributed across the three or four year programme.

In curriculum development work with departments we need to avoid mistakes

that are recognized by the literature on curriculum change in schools but which
are little known in the higher education community. Four mistakes are:

• To rely too much on rational curriculum planning, which begins with

statements of goals and learning outcomes. Learning arises from worthwhile
engagements with worthwhile material. Outcomes can then be recognized
and, if there seem to be imbalances at programme level, teaching, learning
and assessment methods may be ‘tuned’ to get a better balance. It is a different
matter to write content- and context-free outcomes and try to make the material
and learning and teaching practices fit these abstractions.
• Scorched earth change, when the old is totally displaced by the new.
• Fast change.
• Paper changes, otherwise known as change without change.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 185

A major implication is that we do not ask departments to begin by drawing up

statements of learning outcomes or by signing up to someone else’s list. A project
view, which is derived from work on school curricula, is that learning outcomes
tend to look after themselves when learners engage with worthwhile content
through a variety of well-conceived learning, teaching and assessment processes
that provide occasions for metacognition and consideration of self-theories.
However, outside bodies do want to see learning outcomes set out in programme
specifications and they want to know where each outcome is promoted, developed
and assessed. As it is, departments often do not know. A set of ‘maps’ (see Table
12.1) can satisfy them on these scores. So, we are clearly saying that it is necessary
to explain what programmes do in terms of learning outcomes and that it is best to
start with good content and good teaching and learning sequences, then identify
the outcomes that they could legitimately be claimed to foster. If there turn out to
be gaps then programme leaders can ‘tune’ the curriculum to fill them or decide
that the learning outcome in question really ought not to be a part of the programme
specification.

Project work with departments was not dominated by wrestling with

statements of learning outcomes. Stocktaking and mapping led to some
tuning of programmes to deal with gaps in the range of learning, teaching
and assessment practices and in the outcomes that they served. The
outcomes did not lead the work but the work was checked against lists of
outcomes that might be associated with a programme in a subject area.
Further tuning work dealt with any gaps that had been identified.

Entitlements
A key principle in the project is that all students taking a programme and its
constituent courses should be entitled to messages and encounters that develop
understandings, skills, efficacy beliefs and metacognition. It is likely that the
entitlements in different departments will have a great deal in common and it is
inevitable that each set will be distinctive.

Messages
The key messages that pervade the programme are likely to include:

• A major goal of the curriculum is to develop subject understanding, named

skills, efficacy beliefs and metacognition. All four matter.
• Skills are widely valued. Students need to take stock of their achievements
and create claims to having important skills; to take responsibility for
identifying where their claims need development and for doing things to make
Table 12.1 Learning, teaching and assessment methods in the key modules of an undergraduate programme
186

Teaching, learning and 101 102 103 200 201 202 203 204 301 302 303 304 305 306 311
assessment activities
Lectures
–



–
–

–

–
Seminars
– –


–
–

–

–
Tutorials All modules offer students opportunities to consult tutors on a one-to-one or small group basis, according to student
preference.
Workshops –

– – –


– –
– – –
Problem-working All modules engage students on problem-working activities, which vary within and between modules in complexity
and the amount of scaffolding provided. EDS 300 is the capstone, involving complex problems that are typically
identified and defined by students.
Structured work in
peer groups


– – –


–

–
–
Self-directed peer
Towards the enhancement of practice

group work –
– – – – – – –

–

–
Group projects –
– – – – – – –
–
– – –
Structured
independent study – –


– –


–




Self-directed learning – – – –
– – – –
–
–


Web-enhanced
teaching – ? ?

–

–




–
Web searches – ? ? – – –









Practical work –
? – – – – – – ? ?
– –

Critical
commentaries – – – –


– – – – –

–
Teaching, learning and 101 102 103 200 201 202 203 204 301 302 303 304 305 306 311
assessment activities
Essays
–







–
–
–
Set reading
–










– –
Analyses of target
documents
–




– – –

–
–
Interpreting data.

–



–



– –

Student
presentations –
– – – –

–
–


–
Written
examinations

–










–
Making a
bibliography –
– – – – – – –
– – – –

Literature review –
– – – – – – – –
– –


Research design/
strategy –
– – – – – – – –
– – –

Concept mapping – ? – – – –

–
– – – ? –

Note:
In some courses learning opportunities vary according to students’ choice of task.
Principles and practices for enhancing employability
187
188 Towards the enhancement of practice

them stronger; to know how they will publicly support their claims to skills
mastery to different groups – employers, for instance. (Some students are
unaware of the skills they have acquired through higher education and their
wider lives. Good personal development planning practices can make a lot of
difference here.)
• People tend to be more effective in what they do, the more they have the
following characteristics:
• A belief that they can often (but not necessarily always) make a difference,
i.e. they have self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997).
• They have developed learned optimism in their approach to life, rather
than learned helplessness (Seligman, 1998).
• They have ‘malleable’ rather than fixed self-theories (Dweck, 1999).
• They are motivated and determined in what they do (Pintrich and Schunk,
1996).
• They use their experiences, positive and negative, as opportunities for
further learning.

Encounters, experiences and processes

If a degree simply warranted that a person had acquired a lot of information, or
that they had a body of propositional knowledge, then there would be little need
to worry about how that information or knowledge was acquired, as long as it was
fit for the purpose.
However, a complex account of the aims of higher education implies that the
nature of undergraduate encounters, experiences and processes do matter because
some sorts of learning demand certain educational encounters. Information about,
say, Heidegger’s Being and Time can be acquired in many ways but skill at oral
communication cannot be developed on the Internet; reflection benefits from there
being people to reflect with; and developing self-theories that give weight to effort
and mindfulness demands plenty of appropriate feedback on performance,
including feedback from peers.
Three things to stress are:

1 The project team’s knowledge of research into student learning is behind the
list, in Box 12.2, of encounters, experiences or processes to which students
should be entitled if we hope that they will have an undergraduate education
aligned with the Skills plus model. Recall that not all encounters will be
appropriate to all subjects and situations, and that others may be added.
2 If a programme is planned so that students have these encounters, and if they
are organized in such a way that students experience progression – their
engagements become progressively more challenging – then it is probable
that those students will have satisfied learning outcome requirements of the
sorts found in benchmarks, level descriptors and the like.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 189

Box 12.2 Principles of good teaching that are consistent with the
development of employability (from Knight and Yorke, 2002)
1. Students’ teaching encounters across a programme and in any one year
of it should:
• Alert them to the ‘rules of the game’ – make them aware of what
is valued and how it may be produced, both in general and in each
case.
• Use the requisite variety of media (face-to-face, audio-visual, online
conferencing, asynchronous information and communications
technology).
• Use the requisite variety of methods (presentations, Action
Learning Sets,3 work experience, seminars, proctoring, tutorials,
computer-assisted instruction, independent study projects).
• Be in a variety of styles (coaching, instructing, facilitating, clarifying).
• Meet the standard indicators of good teaching, namely, interest,
clarity, enthusiasm.
• Be structured across the programme as a whole so that they get
progressively less help and guidance from teachers as they
encounter more complex situations, concepts, arrangements, etc.
This entitlement should be explicit in a programme-wide teaching summary.

2. Students’ learning activities across a programme and in any one year of

it will be largely determined by their teaching entitlement. In addition:
• There should be opportunities for depth study.
• Curriculum should not be so crowded that ‘surface’ learning is
encouraged at the expense of understanding.
• Information and communications technology should be treated as
a normal learning tool.
• Students should expect to work collaboratively, whether learning
tasks require it or not.
• Time for strategic thinking, reflection, planning and portfolio-
making should be written into the programme. Students should
know that, and they should know that they are expected to engage
with these learning activities and involve peers, friends and tutors
at appropriate times.
• There should be plentiful feedback that is intended to help future
performance (rather than identify informational lapses), especially
by encouraging self-theories that value effort and mindfulness.
This entitlement should be explicit in a programme-wide teaching summary.

3. Entitlements for assessment encounters across a programme and in

any one year of it were summarized in Box 8.1.
190 Towards the enhancement of practice

3 This is a practical approach centring on what people do. It is much easier to

tune a programme using it than it is if you begin with benchmarks or other
statements of learning outcomes and then try to make the curriculum fit.

What’s new?
What is new about these claims? Surely, this Skills plus model is only a set of
practices that have been widely endorsed in the literature and by official agencies?
Yes, Skills plus does commend practices that are already widely admired. However,
the claim that the best way of planning coherent curricula that support complex
learning goals is to concentrate on learning processes – encounters, environments
and messages – is contrary to a preoccupation with module-level planning, on the
one hand, and to the orthodoxies of ‘rational curriculum planning’ (RCP) and
outcomes-led planning on the other. It establishes an alternative way of thinking
about employability, one that is securely located in research and theory.
The model sketched here is direct because it is about what people do, not – as
with outcomes thinking – about abstractions, nor – as with RCP – about logical
accounts of what they ought to do.

• It is realistic, because the position that many complex learning outcomes

cannot be precisely specified and cannot be reliably, ethically and cheaply
assessed frees faculty from the Sisyphean search for valid, reliable and afford-
able ways of assessing them, or from trying to crush such assessments into
traditional formats.
• It is accessible because it is easier to orchestrate key messages, encounters
and environments than it is to write learning outcomes and work back from
them to curriculum.
• It is more respectful of academic freedom than some attempts to assure and
enhance quality have been.4

Of course, departments and universities must continue to gather the best, most
reliable evidence of student achievements in terms of criteria that are valued by
employers, funding bodies and governments. It is right that they should state, as
clearly as possible, what they expect students to understand and be able to do, and
it is proper that evidence of student achievements should be publicly available.
However, it may be easier to do these things if we start by planning for entitlements
to vital learning, teaching and assessment engagements that are suited to complex,
important and often hard-to-measure learning outcomes.

Stocktaking
Existing programmes will already deliver many of these entitlements, which means
that most programmes could make strong claims that what they do is educationally
good and enhances students’ employability.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 191

These educational and employability claims would be strengthened if

programme leaders knew where and when students got these entitlements and
had these encounters. For example, it is common for oral work, such as presenta-
tions, to appear in professionally- and vocationally-oriented modules in the first
and final years. Programme leaders need to know this in order to judge whether
students are getting sufficient and sustained engagement with oral communication
for them to have a reasonable chance of becoming proficient in it. Conversely,
programme leaders need to know which entitlements are absent from the pro-
gramme, rarely appear, or are not evenly distributed across the programme. Finally,
leaders need to know whether the people teaching first and final year courses, say,
deal with the same skills or learning processes in suitably different ways – they
need to know about any planned progression. This ‘stocktaking’ or auditing is a
key part of planning the curricula that are needed if the Skills plus approach to
complex learning is to be effective.
We recommend three refinements on the obvious procedure of sending each
module tutor a questionnaire.

• By all means include all teaching colleagues but it is the modules that are
central to an award that matter most. If need be, concentrate on them.
• Make the enquiry in stages – (1) ask about teaching and learning methods,
then (2) about module learning outcomes, then (3) about assessment methods.
This does not overwhelm colleagues and also gives two points (between
enquiries a and b, and between 2 and 3) to talk with colleagues about any
matches/mismatches in their answers.
• Recognize that colleagues will claim to promote a myriad of learning outcomes
and perhaps to use a wide range of learning, teaching and assessment methods,
which is admirable. In each case, though, ask them to identify just the two,
three or four that get sustained and deliberate attention or use. The reasoning
is that there is a better chance of teaching, learning and assessing things that
are clear priorities: other things may be fostered but will be hard to pick out
of the background. Concentrate instead on three or four highlights, checking,
of course, that this does not end up excluding anything truly important.

Departments will, if they broadly accept our position, wish to take stock of
their programmes to establish the pattern of coverage of learning, teaching and
assessment entitlements and the ways in which they are organized to promote
progression.
Table 12.1 shows the edited results of the audit of learning and teaching methods
in core courses on one programme. It led to an audit of the priority outcomes of
learning for each of these modules and thence to an audit of principal assessment
methods. Some ‘tuning’ or rearrangements followed each audit.
192 Towards the enhancement of practice

Tu n i n g
It follows that departments should tune their programmes so that gaps are filled or
deliberately left unfilled and so that progression is planned into the sequence of
encounters.
This is not a mechanical matter because it depends on judgement about, and
sensitivity to, what is possible in the circumstances. The aim is that at the end of
the process each participating department will be able to make a confident claim
that its programme contains well-sequenced encounters and messages that, taken
together, offer learners a good chance of being able to make strong claims to
employability. At the same time those engagements should enhance the learning
that takes place during the programme and also help undergraduates to become
genuinely useful in a variety of workplaces.
This is not a simple process. That is not because we think that the Skills plus
model is difficult or demanding – our knowledge of the research into curriculum
planning in schools makes us think that ‘tuning’ is simpler and far more intuitive
than starting with statements of learning outcomes (and project experience points
in the same direction). However, the use of negotiation to orchestrate the elements
of a programme into a harmonic set means that the approach can be slow.
Each department needs to have someone who has confidence and authority to
work on programme-wide development. Notice the implication that employability
is one facet of programme enhancement and that it ought to be given to someone
who has at least an understanding of (and preferably responsibilities in respect
of) student retention and success, assessment, teaching quality appraisal, course
reviews, and so on. Where such quality enhancement functions are distributed
amongst several people there is a considerable danger that teachers will be harassed
by colleagues with different missions.
The tuning work generally comprises five major activities:

Orchestrating
Employability co-ordinators need to ensure that the curriculum, as a whole, contains
a fitting, well-sequenced blend of the messages and encounters. Their job of
orchestration is crucial to the project’s success.

Negotiating
There will be continuing conversations with module tutors to encourage them to
tune their modules by, for example,

• Replacing some learning, teaching and assessment practices by others, thereby

helping to get a balance of encounters across the programme.
• Identifying opportunities to highlight some of the key programme messages,
particularly in module handbooks and task specifications.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 193

• Adopting new ways of marking work and giving feedback so that self-theories
are addressed and key messages are communicated.
• Developing, as need be, new ways of organizing teaching and learning – for
example, by setting group projects or requiring web-based inquiries to be
done.

The aim of this negotiation is to get colleagues to agree to present their modules
in ways that allow it to be said that the programme, as a whole, gives a good,
sustained and progressive coverage of the valued encounters and key messages.
Inevitably, the specific circumstances of each department mean that what is
negotiated is:

• Provisional – things will continue to change as opportunities emerge, possibili-

ties for improvement are seen and some things are abandoned because they
prove too difficult.
• The best that can be done at a time, in a place, given the circumstances.
• Nevertheless, an improvement on what went before.

Learning
Co-ordinators themselves have learning needs, particularly needs to become
confident with this approach to enhancing employability and the quality of students’
learning. The Skills plus project was able to go some way to accommodate these
needs, but in general there is remarkably little professional education in pedagogy
and curriculum for heads of department, team leaders and other change agents.

Clarifying
The project used low cost, high gain methods to make a difference, relying on
clarification of existing good practice as much as on innovation. However,
incremental approaches run the risk that casual observers, and even students, might
not appreciate how well-crafted the revised programmes are. Of course, this is
less likely if the key messages really do saturate the programme and its docu-
mentation. Nevertheless, the gains will be greatest when it is clear to all involved
that the programme is distinctive because it has embedded good practice in order
to enhance learning and employability.
Programmes are seriously weakened if students do not know what it is they are
learning, formally and non-formally. In what sense has learning taken place if
students are not able to identify it, describe it and support claims to it with evidence?
This point can be summarized by asking whether we know something if we are
not aware of knowing it. If students, teachers, employers and colleagues do not
know that the tuned programme is a powerful means of improving learning and
employability, then in what sense can it be a powerful means?
194 Towards the enhancement of practice

Sharing
When people who lead programme reform are networking with each other and
with institutional leaders who have responsibility for teaching and learning, then
more can be achieved, and with greater efficiency, than if they work alone. The
UK Learning and Teaching Support Network5 offers cross-institutional brokerage
and advice to departments and HEIs, and has a commitment to employability
through its Generic Centre and Subject Centres.

Ta r g e t i n g a n d a c u r r i c u l u m f o r a l l
This approach is concerned with the mainstream curriculum and with the sorts of
entitlements that should be available to all students. However, consideration of
employment statistics makes us wonder whether the employability of some students
might need to be ‘over-enhanced’ because the labour market does not work even-
handedly and certain groups of students face systemic disadvantage when it comes
to looking for graduate work. However attractive the Skills plus approach might
be, it might reasonably be seen as being misconceived, in that it could be seen as
favouring those who will often already have plenty of social and cultural capital
and offering little to those who may lack sufficient capital to even appreciate the
significance of employability-enhancing work, let alone benefit from it. Within
higher education, targeting of particular student groups is a possibility but this
can be construed negatively in terms of stigmatization. However, the problem
probably lies – to a greater extent – outside the boundary of higher education, in
the recruitment of graduates. Though we might wish to do something to improve
matters in that realm, this lies beyond our reach.

Beyond the module

The ‘tuning’ approach is clearly a programme-level approach that, through the
principles of subsidiarity and negotiation, touches the modules that contribute to
an award – certainly the most popular ones. Some will see this as an erosion of
academic freedom and although we have been at pains to argue that it is not, there
is no doubt that it does require teachers to be mindful of their contribution to
programmes of study. There is also a benefit.
We have often observed colleagues in despair because they have failed to assess
professional competence in a module, or they cannot see how to turn students into
poised writers in ten weeks, or because they cannot see how to cover the main
elements of employability in their course. Hargreaves (1994) has written a good
account of the ways in which schoolteachers tend to give themselves a hard time
and feel guilt, shame and despair by trying, individually, to solve problems that
are not soluble (the reliable assessment of some complex achievements) or which
can only be solved by department or school. Teachers try to do alone things that
are beyond the reach of individuals and, sometimes, beyond the reach of any wise
person.
 Principles and practices for enhancing employability 195

We have argued that employability and associated judgements of achievement

are like that. Agreed, enthusiasts can have a great impact in the co-curriculum but
it falls to programme teams to plan for the assessment of fitness to practise,6 the
development of slow-to-grow achievements and the presentation of well-founded
claims to be highly employable. This leads us to a conclusion that is, we think,
important and often overlooked: individual teachers should not be expected to
rectify leadership, design and management failures. The teacher expected to assess
fitness to practise in a single module is probably working in a badly-designed,
supinely-led programme. We have often seen this with assessment, where
colleagues ask how to solve what they think of as assessment problems but which
are really design or leadership issues and therefore not their problem – and certainly
no reason for shame and guilt.
Heads of department may, in their turn, say that they are constrained by insti-
tutional leadership and policies and we agree that some aspects of employability
carry implications for whole institutions, or substantial parts of institutions, and
could cause intra-institutional difficulties if programmes or departments ‘went it
alone’. Chapter 13, then, moves ‘up a level’ to that of the whole institution and
considers some of the issues that have a strong supra-departmental significance.

Notes
1 Note that these expectations have an element of piety about them, since they do not
address the (admittedly difficult) question of how to assess some of the personal
skills and qualities they commend.
2 The term is used for convenience. Objections have been described in Chapters 1 and
2.
3 Action Learning Sets are small co-operative learning groups that meet regularly to
work on members’ problems. Problem-working should lead all members to learn
with each other, the underlying belief being that learning comes from action and that
good actions are based on learning.
4 Although there is no direct comparison between the way government treats schools
and higher education, it is salutary to hear that between 2000 and 2002 the English
education ministry sent 75 official documents to secondary schools.
5 See www.ltsn.ac.uk. At the time of writing it is not clear what will replace the LTSN
in 2004.
6 Recall from the discussion of reliability in Chapter 8 that such judgements should be
based on repeated observations in a variety of settings (or on a variety of tasks) by
different trained observers using performance indicators that are understood similarly
by all parties. These technical requirements can only exceptionally be met at module
level.
Chapter
196 Towards 13
the enhancement of practice

An institutional perspective
on employability

Re p r i s e
We begin this final chapter with a reminder that our view is that there is a
considerable degree of overlap between the aim of supporting good learning and
that of enhancing employability, and that it is a misperception to see these as
being substantially oppositional. The Sunday Times quotes the head of the policy
unit at the UK Institute of Directors, saying that

The view of our members is that, providing that a course is intellectually

demanding, it will turn out people with potentially employable skills …
Classics and medieval history turn out people with super brains and the
employer can be satisfied that someone has stretched themselves.
(11 May 2003: 13)

Although we think there is more to employability than a demanding course in

Classics, the general position that employability is enhanced by good programmes
is in line with our thinking. If we aim for the development in students of good
learning in the discipline and of achievements that are more ‘generic’ in character,
then success in employment (and in life generally) is likely to be greater.
However, there is a view that academic programmes can be ‘diluted’ by material
that is not subject-specific, to the point that the organization might choose not to
recruit graduates who have followed such programmes. Utley (2003), reporting
on a CRAC conference, quotes David Lathbury, the Head of Process Chemistry at
AstraZeneca, as saying that ‘businesses were increasingly frustrated by degree
programme add-ons, such as computing skills and foreign languages, that aimed
to broaden course appeal but distracted from the core subjects’ (p.1).
Lathbury was further quoted as saying

This is a very worrying trend. There seems to be an emphasis on generalist

skills at the expense of core subjects. But the fact is we don’t mind whether
someone can use PowerPoint or not. We are interested in whether they are
scientifically able.
(Utley, 2003: 1)
 An institutional perspective on employability 197

We see here a hint of the view that generic achievements are oppositional to
those in the discipline. Our line is that the generic has to be located within an
academic context if the student gain is to be maximized, and in subsequent
correspondence Lathbury (2003) indicated that he shared this view. However, the
interview data summarized in Chapter 4 show that in some employment contexts
the disciplinary requirement is stronger than it is in others. There is no ‘one size
fits all’ approach to facilitating student success, as far as curriculum design and
structure is concerned. For some types of curricula the emphasis is primarily on
the discipline, although it is usually said that a number of generic achievements
go with developing expertise in the discipline; for others the emphasis may be
more definitely on general intellectual development across one or more subject
areas. The difference does not imply that some curricula are intrinsically ‘better’
than others for developing ‘graduateness’:1 they may, however, be better in respect
of some employment opportunities than others.
Let us, for a moment, reflect on what ‘scientifically able’ might mean. Obviously
the term incorporates disciplinary understanding, the capacity to conduct
investigations rigorously, and probably some capacity for innovative thinking.
The scientist employee also needs to be able to communicate well with colleagues.
We prefer to think in terms of graduates being ‘scientifically effective’, which
would stretch beyond a narrow interpretation of ‘scientifically able’, in that our
term captures something of the more generic achievements that are needed in
addition to an individual’s expertise as a scientist in the laboratory. Whilst an
ability to handle PowerPoint may be useful, the more fundamental requirement is
an ability to present proposals and findings convincingly to others, and in a manner
that does not jar with the intended recipients’ expectations (which implies some
sensitivity to matters such as internal politics, and how best to handle them).
Where the science is conducted on a team basis, as is often the case, the ability to
work constructively with others is another important component of scientific
effectiveness.
Although we have addressed the relationship of subject discipline to employ-
ability by discussing one particular disciplinary area, we believe that what we are
saying has a general applicability. The challenge, as we see it, is how institutions
might exploit, through their curricula, the commonalities of good learning and
employability to maximize the chances of student success.

The institutional aspect

Knight and Trowler (2001) and Trowler et al. (2003) argue that the department
(or similar academic organizational unit) is where much change is instigated and
carried through. In the UK higher education system of forty years ago, there would
have been little point in making the argument, since by and large academic
programmes were run in departments which had a considerable degree of
independence. Departmental autonomy was the norm. Today, government in the
UK2 exercises considerable influence over an expanded system, through both
198 Towards the enhancement of practice

policy-making and its implementation through funding and other agencies3 (such
as the Quality Assurance Agency). The same applies, mutatis mutandis, elsewhere
in the world.
Other developments have militated against departmental autonomy. The rise
of modular schemes in the UK, paralleling from the late 1980s developments of
far longer standing in the US, sought to achieve flexibility in student choice and
also to make more efficient use of institutional resources. This is not the place to
discuss the merits or otherwise of the move (there are arguments on both sides),
but the integration of hitherto freestanding programmes brought with it a need for
institution-wide structures and processes. The institution developed as a corporate
entity as the powers of departments became constrained.
The consequence of changes such as these is that the institutional dimension
cannot be ignored. Pro-Vice-Chancellors and the like are given institutional respon-
sibilities in respect of policy development and implementation. Contemporary
policy concerns in the UK are widening participation, learning and teaching,
student retention and completion, and student employability. Life-long learning
was a major concern a few years ago but seems to have exceeded the politicians’
attention-span. However, our view that employability has life-long implications
would lead us to assert the value of an approach to institutional policy-making
that would integrate life-long learning with the contemporary concerns we have
listed. We make the point because some institutional structures disperse
responsibilities for these policy concerns amongst various senior colleagues who
may be so pressed (often by bureaucratic requirements) that they have little time
to think deeply about and research the policy areas for which they have
responsibility, let alone join up their thinking with that of colleagues. There is a
need for senior colleagues to have time for thinking about the complex challenges
facing their institutions: this may imply some reduction in the time given to
‘administrivia’ and committee work.
All of the five policy concerns noted in the preceding paragraph bear in some
manner on the ways in which an institution approaches curriculum design and
implementation. The focus of attention of this book has been employability, but
there have been a number of points at which the connection with other policy
concerns has been readily apparent. We seek in this chapter, therefore, to examine
some of the institutional implications of engaging with employability as we have
described it. Our alignment of employability with good learning makes it inevitable
that we do this by concentrating on curriculum-related issues. We exemplify our
concern for learning and employability by addressing four institution-level
concerns.

Four institution-level concerns

Whilst employability can be accentuated in particular curricula, we address here
four concerns that need attention at institutional level: learning environments,
personal development planning, assessment, and quality assurance and
enhancement.
 An institutional perspective on employability 199

Learning environments4
In Chapter 7 we described a number of ways in which aspects of employability
can be built into curricula, or promoted through the co-curriculum, including:

• Employability through the whole curriculum.

• Employability in the core curriculum.
• Work-based or work-related learning incorporated as one or more components
within the curriculum.
• Employability-related module(s) within the curriculum.
• Work-based or work-related learning in parallel with the curriculum.

Let us repeat our appreciation of the useful gains that can be made from free-
standing modules focusing on aspects of employability and say again that gains
are likely to be greater where the opportunity is taken to use the subject discipline
as the site for learning of a more generic kind. We therefore concentrate on
employability in core curricula, acknowledging that it is difficult to get pedagogic
coherence when there are many optional and elective modules. We also
acknowledge that some work-based or work-related learning frequently takes place
relatively independently of the academically-driven parts of the core curriculum.
Our view is that any appraisal of a programme in which employability is a priority
should consider the way that employability is being fostered through the variety
of learning opportunities that are available in the co-curriculum, but always with
a concern that these extra-curricular opportunities should be widely taken up and
not confined to a privileged minority.
As we said in Chapter 6, learning is not only tied to instruction, but develops
from non-formal settings as well as from the set-piece engagements typical of
higher education. This draws us to plan in terms of the total learning environment.
We highlighted four areas of significance:

• Students’ approaches to learning in general.

• Students’ approaches to studying in undertaking a particular task.
• Whether the learning environment is generally rich in possibilities for learning.
• The degree to which the curriculum is internally consistent or, in Biggs’ (2003)
terms, ‘aligned’.

The institution has explicit responsibilities in respect of the last two, and some
implicit responsibilities in respect of the first two (in that staff are in a position to
influence students in their approaches to learning and studying). However good
the learning environment is, student success is influenced by motivations,
perceptions, and self-theories – and hence the outcome in terms of student success
is only probabilistic. As Goodyear puts it:

… we should recognize that we cannot influence directly the learner’s cogni-

tive activity… the best we can do is help set up some organizational forms or
200 Towards the enhancement of practice

structures that are likely to be conducive to the formation and well-being of

convivial learning relationships. Learning communities may then emerge.
Thirdly, we must recognize that the learner has freedom to reconfigure or
customize their learnplace.
(Goodyear, 2002: 66)

It then follows that curriculum design has to be seen as the provision of a

facilitating framework for learning rather than a tight prescription (see Ganesan
et al., 2002). This opens up the possibility of incorporating, via devices such as
personal development planning and portfolio construction, learning that is tailored
to the needs of the student whilst remaining true to disciplinary expectations. In
this way the challenge regarding equity that was introduced in Chapter 1 and
revisited briefly towards the end of Chapter 12 begins to move towards some
form of resolution.

Pe r s o n a l d e v e l o p m e n t p l a n n i n g
In Chapter 8 we considered some of the implications of recommendation 20 of
the Dearing Report (NCIHE, 1997), which was that institutions, over the medium-
term, should develop the concept of a progress file designed to assist students to
identify their achievements and to provide information to others about these. Two
elements were envisaged:

• A transcript recording achievement (which should follow a common format).

• A means through which students could monitor and reflect upon their personal
development, and thereby build on their achievements. This has become known
as personal development planning (PDP).

The programme transcript is likely to be little more than a list of courses,

levels and credit ratings. It will have the advantage of relating to the European
Diploma Supplement, which is intended to create a European currency for educa-
tion qualifications. It should have important implications for the portability of
qualifications but, as Adelman (1990) warns, it should not be anticipated that the
transcript alone will be very informative about student achievements.
As we have said, PDP is a set of processes that are valuable in their own right
and also a product – a portfolio of achievements – that can help in securing employ-
ment. If it is to optimize the chances of student success, PDP is likely to require
an institutional approach that brings together academic departments and student
support services (particularly specialists in generic study and learning support,
and the Careers Service). A fully coherent PDP scheme will ensure that the
following are provided:

• Guidance that addresses generic learning and study needs.

• Guidance on how to address subject-specific learning needs.
 An institutional perspective on employability 201

• Guidance on career planning and job seeking.

• Support for, and guidance on making and maintaining, portfolios that will
sustain strong claims to employability.

In many institutions this is a novel challenge because, although there may be

informal contacts between those with an interest in PDP, and collaboration between
some of them on particular projects, there is seldom a history of them coming
together to see how the experience of students following particular tracks or
pathways of study can be effectively supported. The demarcation of responsibilities
may differ from institution to institution, although there is often a bifurcation
between generic student support on the one side and programme-specific concerns
on the other, which is reflected in senior managers’ spheres of responsibility.

Assessment
As we suggested in Chapter 8, and more extensively elsewhere (Knight and Yorke,
2003b), the inclusion of some facets of employability in assessment schemes is
fraught with difficulty: the validity, reliability and affordability of assessing contri-
butions to team activity – to give just one example from the many possible – are
highly problematic. Some kinds of performance are not amenable to grading with
the robustness that is desirable when students are to be ‘labelled’ with an overall
grade point average or honours degree classification. Hence there is a tendency
not to include such performances, or alternatively to give them a weighting that
trivializes them in the eyes of students, with predictable consequences for student
behaviour.5
Whereas a self-contained programme in a particular discipline might have the
scope to revise its approach to assessment, the same may not apply so strongly in
the case of an institution-wide modular scheme. However, when a student embarks
on a programme involving a combination of subjects their experience of assessment
is likely to be a somewhat haphazard consequence of module choice,6 rather than
the kind of structured experience it can be in the core modules of a single honours
programme (which is tantamount to a self-contained programme). For an institution
operating a modular scheme, then, there is a need to address the assessment of
employability – and assessment in general, for that matter – at an institutional
level. This attention to the coherence of assessment practices is one aspect of the
need we see for institutions to pay more attention to programme coherence.
There is also the challenge of representing a student’s performances (the plural
is deliberate) in respect of the curriculum that they have followed. It is uninforma-
tive – to the student and to anyone seeking to infer the student’s potential – to
combine, in a single grading, performances that have been achieved against quite
different curricular expectations. As the English White Paper on higher education
(DfES, 2003) recognizes, a preferred approach to the representation of variegated
achievements is a matter for national systems rather than for individual institutions,
since the latter could disadvantage their students if they chose a reporting
methodology that was at variance with the norm.
202 Towards the enhancement of practice

Quality assurance and enhancement

On the assumption that the curriculum aims include the development of students’
employability, five of the seven questions7 that underpinned the quality audit
process run by the erstwhile Higher Education Quality Council in the UK make
helpful starting points. They are:

• How are you doing it [i.e. developing students’ employability]?

• Why are you doing it that way?
• Why do you think that is the best way of doing it? [Presumably an inferior
way would not knowingly have been selected.]
• How do you know it works?
• How do you improve it?

The fourth of these questions might better be phrased ‘How do you know that
you are achieving what you should be achieving?’, since there is a risk that the
appraiser might be satisfied if what was originally specified was believed to be
sufficient and that things ‘were being done right’ as far as curriculum imple-
mentation was concerned. The question ‘Is there a better way of doing it?’ might
therefore be overlooked, yet those involved in quality enhancement hold that there
is always the possibility of ‘doing things better’ – sometimes through incremental
change, sometimes through radical change:8 however, to do things better involves
critical appraisal of what is being done. We have indicated in Chapters 9–12 how
some critical appraisals were conducted under the Skills plus project, using a
finer-grained operational conception of employability than the broad definition
we have given in Chapter 1. Critical appraisal, of course, leads on to the fifth
question, which takes us into the territory of institutional learning and development.

Models for the development of excellence

Two models that have gained currency on either side of the Atlantic in recent
years are the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework (latterly differentiated
into business and education strands) which guides organizations towards
application for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the US, and the
EFQM Excellence Model which does likewise in respect of the European Quality
Award.9 Whilst it is not our purpose to discuss in any detail these models or other
quality-related processes, such as the ISO 9000 series, the models contain pointers
to ways in which institutions might think about approaching the development of
employability (amongst many other things).
The Baldrige and EFQM models share some common features, though the
language used differs. For anyone familiar with thinking about organizational
development, the list of commonalities will generate little surprise: leadership;
strategic planning; an orientation towards results; the effective and efficient
management of processes; staff development; and learning from experience. How
might these models be applied to employability? The models exhibit considerable
 An institutional perspective on employability 203

cross-flow between components, and our brief treatment here makes no attempt
to treat each component in a compartmentalized way.
The academic leadership commitment to employability has to be associated
with sufficient institutional sponsorship if it is to be taken seriously. This does not
mean that a senior academic has to be ‘the institutional expert’ on employability,
but rather that such a person has to understand enough about what it implies to
take the role of institutional champion (and the role has to be sustained if it is to
be effective) in respect of development and implementation. Others may well
have the specialist expertise that can be drawn upon for curriculum and staff
development. The view of employability that we have set out in this book carries
messages about the way that student learning might best be facilitated – active
learning, enhanced formative assessment, and so on. Some staff will already be
well acquainted with the kinds of expectation that follow a commitment to employ-
ability; others will be less so, implying a need for appropriate staff development
activity if the pedagogic processes are to be optimally effective and efficient in
the development of employability. In making this point, we remark that those in
managerial positions, especially heads of department and deans, may need to
develop their professional understanding of what is implied in a commitment to
employability, how this might interlock with other policy initiatives (such as
widening participation, and learning and teaching), and impact on the pedagogic
practices of other colleagues.
The Enhancing Student Employability Co-ordination Team in England
(ESECT), in collaboration with the UK-wide Generic Centre of the Learning and
Teaching Support Network, is making available a range of resources that support
the ‘employability agenda’ in the UK.10 In England, the need for institutions to
produce, and act on, learning and teaching strategies11 provides a vehicle for the
enhancement of employability, broadly in the way that the Enterprise in Higher
Education initiative a decade and a half earlier contracted with UK institutions to
inculcate ‘enterprise’ in their students.12 We anticipate that the Teaching Quality
Academy13 that has been proposed in the government White Paper on higher
education (DfES, 2003) has the potential to stimulate a wide range of pedagogical
development, including employability.
Institutions that draw significant funds from the state will often be under some
pressure to develop a set of criteria against which their performance can be
achieved. For example, Dary Erwin, director of James Madison University’s Center
for Assessment and Research comments that

Nonprofits are being asked to show evidence that they’re doing what they’re
supposed to be doing … since we are in another economic downturn, there is
even greater pressure for accountability … every national task force report
shows people in industry and business questioning the knowledge, communi-
cation skills and quality of thinking that job applicants bring to them with
their diplomas.
(Dolan, 2003: 24)
204 Towards the enhancement of practice

Institutions need to establish ways of judging the employability of their students

(‘measurement’ may be too strong a word here, given the difficulties that exist
regarding the assessment of employability). We reiterate the point that
employability should not be confused with the gaining of employment, be this a
‘graduate job’ or otherwise. The purpose of criteria is twofold: first, they allow
indexing of student achievements; second, they allow the institution to assess
how successful it has been. They thus provide a basis for institutional learning,
and hence an opportunity to feed this learning into future plans and processes.
This kind of information provision for learning would, in the US, typically be
undertaken by offices tasked with ‘institutional research’ (Volkwein, 1999). The
notion of institutional research is, on the whole, less well developed in the UK
and Europe, and this could be seen as an institutional shortcoming when juxtaposed
with the expectations of the Baldrige and EFQM ‘excellence’ models.
If employability is merely seen as a ‘bolt-on’ extra to curricula, then its promo-
tion within the institution is perhaps more a tactical than a strategic matter. Where
employability is seen as suffusing curricula (which, as we noted earlier, has wide-
ranging implications for learning environments, pedagogy and assessment),
strategic planning becomes much more important. Without it, the development of
employability-sensitive learning opportunities could become a matter of chance,
depending on the extent to which particular groups of staff and individuals were
actively engaged in its promotion. We repeat that a strategic approach does not
imply that developments have to be identical, and that any multidisciplinary
institution has to be responsive to its intra-institutional constituencies’ characters
and aspirations. The principle of subsidiarity is important here, with the managerial
imperative being to find a balance between tightness and looseness that optimizes
the effectiveness of both the overarching framework and local adaptation.

Managing change and innovation

Fullan (2001: 69) reminds us that, whilst innovation may be technologically simple,
it is socially complex. The same is true of change that might not merit the label of
‘innovation’. In other words, it is relatively easy to design responses to challenges,
but considerably less easy to implement them in any system that requires the co-
operation of others. The problem of staff engagement probably has a lot to do
with the ‘false promise’ of innovation projects that we noted at the beginning of
the previous chapter.
Academics respond differentially to change, as Trowler (1998) found in his
study of change in a new university in the UK. In the institution studied by Trowler,
individuals’ strategies for coping varied. He identified four types of response:
‘sinking’ fatalistically; living with the change at the expense of their performance
in other aspects of their work; seeing opportunities arising from the change; and
finding ways in which they could reconstruct policy relating to the change. The
challenge for those with managerial responsibilities is to encourage a positive
engagement with necessary change – something that requires more than merely
 An institutional perspective on employability 205

‘talking the talk’. If a reasonably broad commitment to change cannot be gained,

then implementation is seriously at risk.
Figure 13.1, developed from Klein and Sorra’s (1996) theoretically-driven
analysis of innovation in industrial/commercial organizations, catches something
of the complexity inherent in the implementation of an innovation. A higher
education institution can be represented as a matrix of disciplines and managerially
functional levels (with, in some institutions, not every discipline being represented
at the uppermost level – labelled F4 in Figure 13.1 – comprising, say, Pro-Vice-
Chancellors and Deans of Faculty). A number of factors will influence the commit-
ment of any segment (horizontal or vertical) of the institution:

• Perceptions of the institutional climate.

• The perceived validity of the innovation.
• The incentives or disincentives that are present.
• The capabilities of those who are expected to implement the innovation.
• The perceived advantages and disadvantages of engaging in the imple-
mentation process.
• The ‘fit’ between the innovation and the values of those involved.

The more positive each factor is, the greater the likelihood that commitment
will be engendered and that the implementation process will be effective. If any

feedback

Institutional
climate

D1 D2 D3 D4
Perceived
F4
validity
F3 Implementation
Commitment effectiveness
F2
F1 Incentives and
disincentives
Institution as a
matrix of
disciplines [D]
Capabilities
and functional
levels [F]

Perceived
advantages and
disadvantages

Innovation–
values fit

feedback

Figure 13.1 Factors influencing the implementation of an innovation

206 Towards the enhancement of practice

factor is perceived to be strongly negative, then this could be sufficient to outweigh

any positives elsewhere. For example, if colleagues believe (against the argument
of this book) that employability has no proper conceptual underpinning,14 or if
they place their academic emphasis heavily on the subject discipline (in the sense
that employability is not a significant component of their educational value
systems), then the implementation of curricular initiatives designed to enhance
employability may be fatally compromised from the outset. Whether the innovation
‘works’ or not, there will be feedback effects on the factors that govern commitment,
and hence future effectiveness.
The successful adoption and implementation of innovation in an institution
depend upon the skill with which staff become acquainted with the need for change,
and with which change is introduced. As Elton (2003) remarks – and as the Skills
plus project sought to do – it is sensible for senior managers to work with the
grain of the culture rather than against it.
The cultures of higher education institutions are quite varied, and some
approaches to the management of change that appear in the literature on organi-
zational change may not fit well the culture of a particular institution. There are
perhaps two ‘ideal types’ (in the Weberian sense) of institutional approach to
organization and management – the top-down and the bottom-up. The top-down
approach locates power at ‘the centre’, whence policy directives emanate for
conversion into action by departments and smaller groups of staff. The bottom-up
approach leaves innovation largely to departments and similar units, on the grounds
that this is where the driving force for change is located, and that the role of the
senior managers is to support initiatives (provided that they are consistent with
broad institutional policy, according to the principle of ‘subsidiarity’), and to add
value to them. Some years ago, higher education in the UK exhibited a very marked
polarity in management style, though latterly the gap has narrowed as governmental
agencies have encouraged institutions to be corporate in their behaviour (by
promoting initiatives such as the requirement for institutional learning and teaching
strategies), and as strongly centralized institutions have appreciated that the
liberalization of educational markets places a premium on educational innovation
and entrepreneurialism.
Much of the literature on organizational change and development relates to
industrial and commercial bodies in which chief executive officers exert consider-
able authority and power. The increasing pressures on institutions to ‘behave cor-
porately’ do, however, give some of the points from this vast literature a resonance
that they might not have had in earlier times, though translation into the world of
higher education needs to be accompanied by plenty of caution and a preparedness
to make adjustments. The following eight points, based primarily on Argyris (1990),
Burnes (1992), Cherniss and Caplan (2001), Kotter (1996) and Trowler et al.
(2003), may be helpful both to the head of the institution and to senior managers
and leaders of academic organizational units, provided that they are interpreted in
a manner appropriate to the context.
 An institutional perspective on employability 207

1 Understand approaches to change

2 Justify the need
3 Undertake groundwork
4 Establish an implementation team
5 Communicate well
6 Develop a shared commitment
7 Generate some early successes
8 Consolidate and embed the gains.

Understand approaches to change

Trowler et al. (2003: 7) tabulate five theories about change: technical-rational;
resource allocation; diffusionist; continuous quality improvement; and complexity-
based. The tabulation is useful since it succinctly summarizes a range of
considerations that apply in respect of each of the five theories. For example, the
technical-rational theory uses engineering as its guiding metaphor, and assumes
that a well-designed intervention will bring about the desired change. The trouble
is, of course, that a change introduced ‘from the top’ is likely to become attenuated
as it is interpreted (perhaps misinterpreted) by members of the complex human
system that makes up a higher education institution.
None of the other theories probably ‘works’ in a pure form where institution-
wide change is being sought. However, each has something to offer the change
agent: the skill of change lies in knowing which theory is being called on at any
particular time, knowing why it is the most appropriate for the purpose in hand,
and in being able to operate in a range of ways appropriate to the circumstances in
such a manner that this does not compromise the integrity of the promoter of
change. Blackwell and Preece (2002) draw on Buchanan and Badham (1999) to
point out that the promotion of change has a pragmatic, rather than perfectly
ideal, aspect, since universal ethical principles are difficult to apply to political
behaviour in organizations. Decisions (and, we would add, the consequential
actions) need to be based on ‘informed judgement of what is possible, what is
acceptable, of what is justifiable and of what is defensible in the situation’
(Buchanan and Badham, 1999: 206). Trowler et al. (2003: 18–19) offer some
useful thoughts to those with leadership roles in respect of change.

Justify the need

A precondition for innovation or change is that there is an identifiable need that is
related to the institution’s mission (or, perhaps, that might change the institution’s
mission). If the institution is to make a feature of employability (or any other
aspiration, for that matter), there is a need to make the case for it and to explain
why it has to be addressed at this particular point. The development of students’
employability is a policy objective of the UK Government, and institutions are
expected to respond – hence there is a strong external rationale for action, rather
208 Towards the enhancement of practice

than an internally-focused rationale such as seeking some form of improvement

in staff performance. The first challenge for the institution is to find a way of
responding that is consistent with academics’ expectations. The alignment of
employability with good learning offers a rationale with which many academics
would be reasonably content. The second, and for some institutions greater,
challenge is to justify the need for action at a particular point in time. Kotter
(1996) claims that by far the greatest mistake in seeking to implement organiza-
tional change lies in pressing ahead without having established the necessary sense
of urgency.
The urgency of enhancing students’ employability is likely to vary with the
institution. In those in which the completion and employment indicators are high,
the reaction is likely to be the question with which we began this book: ‘Where’s
the problem? Our students are succeeding anyway.’ As Hannan and Silver put it:

For certain traditional institutions the nature of their intake has remained
more or less constant, the demands of employers fairly distant and the
temptations of government-advocated reforms generally resistible, despite
the necessity of some minimal effort in response.
(Hannan and Silver, 2000: 140)

They go on to observe that

One of the biggest problems confronting universities … is to convince their

teaching staff, who have so far not been tempted to jump on the innovation
‘bandwagon’, of the desirability of the new directions advocated by senior
managers.
(Hannan and Silver, 2000: 141)

For other institutions, a commitment to employability may be perceived as

attractive to the body of students that it sees as forming its intake. It may also be
seen as contributing to institutional survival: the provisions of the recent White
Paper on higher education (DfES, 2003) portend considerable upheaval in the
sector (particularly for the new universities and colleges), and institutions are
having to re-evaluate how they should position themselves in the market. For
some institutions, a reshaping of their academic portfolios is likely to meet the
criterion of urgency.
The problem with Hannan and Silver’s analysis is the implicit assumption that
it is the senior managers who have a superior wisdom and/or connection to external
constituencies. Whilst this might have a measure of validity in some institutions,
in others it probably does not, since academics have their own networks through
which they can acquire understandings of what external constituencies expect.
The hint of ‘command and control’ in the analysis does not fit well with a politicized
institution whose components have considerable knowledge and power. It is less
a matter of ‘convincing their teaching staff’, and more one of the need to discuss
 An institutional perspective on employability 209

and negotiate with them how the institution and its components should deal with
the encroaching realities. For a higher education institution, the development of a
vision and a strategy through consultation is likely to meet with more success
than the enunciation of them from ‘the centre’, because colleagues tend not to
accept ready-made visions and strategies uncritically since their socialization into
higher education has led them to take a questioning approach to the things that
confront them. Consultation and negotiation are anathema to those who think in
terms of ‘action this day’ and rapid results, but wise when the need is for a very
varied group of staff to sign up to something that they can ‘live with’ even though
it may not reflect their ideal preferences.

Undertake groundwork
Someone in the institution has to have the authority (derived from their track
record and personal characteristics) that enables them to champion, sustain and
protect whatever exploratory and developmental work is necessary. Where
employability is concerned, there may be a need for a team to establish how the
various sections of the institution construe employability, how they are approaching
the development of employability in their students, what they are currently
achieving, and what they think they ought to be achieving in, say, five years’ time.
This implies some research activity in order to establish baselines, and it is wise
to ascertain colleagues’ feelings about what they are currently doing before suggest-
ing solutions. It may be necessary to commission an existing group of staff (such
as an educational development unit) or a cross-institution group to conduct this
kind of work – but any such group needs to be sensitive to the need to bring the
wider academic community ‘into the loop’, and keep them aware of what is going
on.
Groundwork is always necessary, for at least two reasons:

• a body of support has to be established if the innovation is to take root; and

• whatever is to be implemented needs to be sensitive to local culture, customs
and practices.

In order to ground an innovation firmly, it is generally a good idea to pilot it

and to evaluate the pilot work in order to build up an internal evidence base that
can be examined against whatever external evidence is available. Academics are,
in general, cautious about innovations that are parachuted in – and not unreasonably,
since there are many examples of innovations which have not wholly lived up to
the prospectuses of their advocates (modularity/semesterization and total quality
management being two rather different examples). Academics need to be
reasonably convinced that any change is worth while and that they have the personal
and institutional resources to make it work.
The development of students’ employability is something that is essentially
institution-wide. Where changing practices to enhance employability involves more
210 Towards the enhancement of practice

than tinkering at the edges of curricula, it is likely to involve both academics and
support staff since curriculum change could well involve some reconfiguring of
the way that institutional resources are provided. For example, less use might be
made of lecture rooms, and more use might be made of resource-based learning
in conjunction with small task-defined groups (problem-based learning is one
approach that demands a move away from traditional modes of engagement in
lectures, seminars, tutorials and laboratories or studios). Hence institutional
managers need to have a considerable appreciation of what is involved. This may
necessitate, as part of the groundwork, the establishment of a senior staff
development programme, perhaps involving facilitators who have a considerable
understanding of the issues at stake and of institutional cultures.

Establish an implementation team

A lone champion of change (even a very senior manager) is rarely able to have
widespread influence across an institution, as P. Taylor (1998) pointed out in his
examination of what he termed ‘lone ranging’ in respect of educational innovation.
For any innovation to run deep and wide in an institution, there is a need for the
various parts of the institution to be engaged – in other words, for a team-based
approach to be adopted both to whatever groundwork is needed and to subsequent
implementation. Some thought needs to be given to the composition of the team,
since it needs to include not only those with formal power but also those with
ideas to contribute (not necessarily the same people). Any team needs people who
can work well together as professionals (they do not have to like each other greatly,
but they do have to co-operate effectively).15
Belbin’s (1981) work on management teams showed how important it is for
action-oriented teams to be composed of people with complementary capabilities.
During a team’s life-span the need for particular capabilities fluctuates. There is
always a need for a person to steer the work (who may not be the primary fount of
creativity but exercises skills of overseeing, orchestrating, and making connections
with developments outwith the project), and for day-to-day project management
in order to ensure that things are done as closely as possible to what was intended,
to time, and in a manner that capitalizes on possibilities for synergy. People in the
team who have a particular creative bent may find that their contributions are
particularly needed at the beginning and at intervals throughout the project – but,
as T.S. Eliot might have said with reference to this context, ‘Human kind cannot
bear very much creativity’. Once the creative decisions have been made, the need
is simply to get on with the practicalities of implementation. There is an important
need for expertise in monitoring and evaluation – not as almost an afterthought in
a project, but built in from the start. Educational projects almost always need to
be adjusted with respect to the initial intentions as unexpected events occur (so
there is always a potential need for creativity), and the monitor/evaluator should
have more of a role than that of ‘sweeper up’ and report writer at the end.
There is often a status-differential in teams. When a team operates in a
 An institutional perspective on employability 211

hierarchical manner the outcome can be indifferent, since the leader is implicitly
assuming the role of hero and omnicompetent which their capabilities may not
warrant. We recall a workshop in which groups of staff were given a puzzle whose
solution required that everyone pooled the different bits of information from the
cards that they had been given. In one group there was a head of department who
decided that he would be the group chair and structure the problem-solving. The
‘team’ failed to complete the task in the (ample) time allotted, got very fractious
about its failure, and became very embarrassed when its members realized that
other groups had succeeded. The moral of the tale is clear: to be effective, a team
is likely to need to draw on ideas from all of its members, irrespective of their
hierarchical status, and the best idea should prevail. It is a distinct leadership skill
to let ideas flow and to accept that someone else may have the best idea. Wise
leaders see that they can use contributions to the benefit of their teams – and they
are well aware that, by extension, reflected glory may accrue to themselves as
well.

Communicate well
Success in communicating widely implies the use of language that is relatively
straightforward, and is preferably not saturated with ‘bureaucratese’ or other jargon
(we note again the cautionary tale that ‘metacognition’, which we felt had an
adequate degree of currency in higher education, proved problematic for some of
our colleagues in Skills plus). It is necessary to have a communication strategy
that goes some way beyond activities such as the circulation of newsletters and
the construction of websites, since there is a tendency for newsletters to be
submerged under accumulating layers of paper or to be filed below the desk, and
for websites not to prove as engaging as protagonists expect. Involving others in
the work implies finding ways in which the ideas can be shared, discussed and
criticized. The Skills plus project ran a number of ‘colloquia’ to which participating
departments were invited. At various times the colloquia involved workshop-type
activities, the giving of reports on how activities had gone in the departments, and
discussion of papers produced by the core team. They were generally held to have
been successful in sharing understandings and to have provided common starting-
points for subsequent activity, as we showed in Chapter 12.
Engagement with others lowers the risk that the intentions of the project are
misunderstood. Others will bring differing perspectives to bear, and there is a
need for these to be appreciated so that the need for appropriate compromises can
be understood and the compromises effected. The advocates of innovations risk
being so blinded by the ‘rightness’ of their own point of view that the existence of
other, perhaps competing, ‘rightnesses’ is overlooked. After all, higher education
institutions are political organizations (see, for example, Baldridge, 1971) with
various groups fighting for their own preferred positions.16
It is sometimes overlooked that communication is a two-way process which
also implies listening well. A place has to be made for those at the sharp end of
212 Towards the enhancement of practice

developments to feed back their experiences and concerns. The prospect of change
can be threatening and, if colleagues believe that their concerns are not being
taken into account, they are less likely to make the adjustments that may be needed
for the change to be successful.

Develop a shared commitment

Higher education institutions do not fit well into ‘command and control’ and
‘technical-rational’ models of organization even when the management chart seems
to suggest that this is the operational reality. In practice, groups of various sizes
have considerable freedom as to how they conduct their work. Developing a shared
commitment involves negotiation and compromise, and some willingness to move
outside custom and practice – individual and organizational ‘comfort zones’. After
all, as the chairman and chief executive of Levi-Strauss once observed, one of the
most difficult things to do is to unlearn the behaviours that led to success in the
past.17
A shared commitment does not imply clone-like behaviour. Recognizing the
autonomy of academics, the principle of subsidiarity should obtain, under which
institutional components are permitted to interpret the broad expectations in the
light of their own norms and values, but within negotiated limits so that ‘ownership’
is developed at the same time as coherence with the broad expectations is
maintained. The possibility of a productive creative tension exists, but a balance
has to be struck between cohesive advance and a tolerance for divergence and
creativity. We note, in passing, a point made by Beatty and Ulrich (1991) that in
mature organizations a shared mind-set can be a particular liability.
One way of developing a shared commitment is exemplified by the LTSN
Engineering Subject Centre which organized a summer workshop for two senior
colleagues from each of 17 Engineering departments. The five days allocated
were dispersed in 1-3-1 format across a longer period in order to allow time for
sustained engagement with the issues.18 As the Skills plus project well understood,
academics are on the whole unlikely to undergo Damascene conversions.

Generate some early successes

As Skills plus demonstrated, a lot can be achieved with a series of relatively small
activities – the ‘low cost, high gain’ approach. The managerial task is to determine
where the ratio of benefit to effort is likely to be both high and worthwhile.
Successes that are relatively small in scale can be celebrated and are likely to help
to generate momentum for subsequent work: as the truism has it, success tends to
breed success. For hard-pressed staff, this might be the optimal way of increasing
the sensitivity of curricula towards employability. There is little to be gained –
indeed much to be lost – by over-reaching in the pursuit of change.
If the intention is to be more ambitious, then subdividing the proposed develop-
ment into manageable chunks has a similar advantage to the ‘low cost, high gain’
 An institutional perspective on employability 213

approach in that it also offers the possibility of establishing early successes. Phasing
the programme of developmental activity, with markers or ‘milestones’ established
to index progress, helps to focus attention and maintain manageability whilst
moving things on.

Consolidate and embed the gains

‘Chunking’ the development plan runs the risk that, once a section has been
completed, the gain is left to lapse as attention shifts elsewhere. The need is for
achievements to be retained and built into future phases. The history of educational
innovation is littered with successes that were not embedded by the time that their
funding ran out, and hence faded from view.
There is a need for the ongoing appraisal of practices and achievements, in the
interests of enhancement (as all the ‘quality gurus’ assert). The temptation is always
there to proclaim success too soon, or to take success in a few components as
indicating the success of the whole development. Adopting a ‘continuous quality
improvement’ approach minimizes the risk of resting on laurels. After all, a garden
quickly reverts to a weed-strewn patch if it is left untended.
If pilot work has been reasonably successful, then the innovation has gained a
toe-hold within the institution, even if adaptations have been needed in the light
of experience. The ‘rolling out’ of the innovation across the institution requires
sustained commitment, especially on the part of the person who is responsible for
championing it. If the momentum is lost, then it is difficult to regain it. Many
worthwhile developments in higher education have faded away because sustained
commitment was lacking, and/or something else demanded attention.

Po i n t s o f l e v e r a g e
The focus of the Skills plus project lay at the departmental level. One of the
conclusions from the project was that a lot could be achieved by incorporating
employability-relevant activities into routine departmental practices and by
introducing new, low-profile activities. Box 13.1 identifies some of the opportuni-
ties that exist for embedding a concern for employability, and good learning
generally, within a team or department’s practices.
There is a sense in which the champion’s task is not so much to ‘sell’ employ-
ability to the programme team as to infiltrate employability-enhancing activities
and prompts into taken-for-granted practices. For example, the Department of
Educational Research at Lancaster University added to its programme specification
a set of four messages about efficacy and metacognition. Students all received the
programme specification, with the messages, which were also taken up in module
handbooks. Triennial module reviews asked students how far they thought the
module had promoted the items in the programme specification, including the
four key messages. Another innovation was a two-year course to support personal
development planning (PDP) for Education majors. This was incorporated into
214 Towards the enhancement of practice

Box 13.1 Opportunities for promoting employability

• Write employability into programme specifications.
• At the institutional level, ensure that new module and programme
proposals are appraised in terms of their contribution to student
employability, with reference to the way in which we have described
it.
• At departmental and programme levels, ensure that the contribution
of (a) the programme and (b) the main constituent modules to employ-
ability is spelt out in handbooks, on websites, in assessment and teaching
plans, and in recruitment material.
• Ensure that there is a variety of assessment methods in a programme.
• Use auditing to make sure that modules – certainly core modules –
have learning goals that are aligned with the programme specification;
that teaching and learning methods mesh with the most important
learning goals; and that assessment is aligned with goals and methods.
• From the beginning of the programme, use all possible opportunities
to explain to students – and to teaching colleagues – what is meant by
employability and how the programme contributes to its development.
Talk about co-curricular opportunities as well.
• Explore opportunities for basing student projects on problems that
can be represented as contributing strongly to claims to employability.
• In England, use the government’s progress files initiative to highlight
the complex achievements that employers value, and which have often
been rather neglected because they have resisted affordable and reliable
assessment. Help students to translate their achievements into
employer-friendly language.
• Apply the concept of ‘tuning’ to existing curricula, since this has consider-
able potential as a powerful, low cost, high gain way of enhancing student
employability.
• Use existing review and evaluation systems to highlight employability
issues. For example, ask about employability in meetings of staff-student
committees, in annual module reviews, in student evaluations, in
(perhaps) triennial peer reviews of modules, in (perhaps) quinquennial
programme reviews, and in accreditation procedures.
• At the institutional level, ensure that enhancing student employability
through the curriculum and co-curriculum is evidently a concern for
instructional and education development units, for careers services and
other student support groups including, where possible, student unions.
• In England, institutions are expected to show how their widening
participation strategies and their teaching and learning strategies are
sensitive to the mission to enhance student employability. This might
imply making employability a quality enhancement priority.
 An institutional perspective on employability 215

the compulsory dissertation module, and preparation for what was essentially a
final year activity was extended back into the first half of the second year. The
cost was slight, but incorporating PDP in a compulsory course brought it before
all Education majors.
Whereas the Skills plus project spanned 17 departments in four universities,
some institutions have taken up employability as an institution-wide commitment.
Harvey (2003) cites the examples of the universities of Exeter and Newcastle.

The University of Exeter is an example of an institution that has developed a

strategy for embedding employability skills and attributes into curricula. The
university’s employability group is composed of staff from across the
institution with an interest in employability and is chaired by the deputy vice-
chancellor for learning and teaching. The employability group works to
implement the employability strategy, which is managed by the employability
co-ordinator … The university is committed to embedding employability skills
and attributes within all programmes of study. To achieve this, academic
schools are encouraged to incorporate team development, work experience
modules and materials, work-based projects and reflective learning into pro-
grammes of study. The employability co-ordinator sits on the accreditation
committee with a particular interest in the section on module description
forms dealing with intended learning outcomes for ‘personal and key skills’.
A network of careers and employability tutors has been established with an
academic representative appointed from every school. This network meets
once a term and is facilitated by the employability co-ordinator. One of the
duties of these tutors is to complete the annual careers and employability
audit for their school, which is reported to the employability group and the
university learning and teaching committee. This helps the employability
group to identify which schools may need more support in certain areas.

Similarly, the University of Newcastle sees enhancing employability as a

long-term strategic challenge... The institution is moving to a strategy-led,
rather than project-led, approach by fully integrating project activity to ensure
‘fit’ with institutional, regional and national priorities. The development of
the University of Newcastle’s Employability Statement and Strategy reflects
the university’s commitment, as stated in the 1999–2004 institutional plan. It
places high importance, in the teaching and learning strategy on improving
the employability of the students. Appropriate resources, often through pump-
priming, and practical suggestions help academic staff implement the strategy.
Furthermore, senior management support has created a culture that promotes
and recognises innovative practice. At the school level, ‘champions’ with
empathy for the employability agenda have helped to build an environment
receptive to curriculum change. Crucial has been the embedding of project-
led developments in the curriculum from the outset to overcome problems of
sustainability.
Harvey (2003: 17–18)
216 Towards the enhancement of practice

The significance of these two examples is not only that the institutions adopted
a whole-institution approach, but also that their activities show a consistency with
the eight points relating to the management of change that were listed earlier. As
with Skills plus, there are indications that these institutions are working with the
grain of departmental and disciplinary cultures.

W h a t n ex t ?
Colleagues participating in Skills plus appreciated the attempt made in the project
to put employability on a sound theoretical and empirical footing. They also
recognized the limitations on what could be done within the two-year period of
the project’s life. They considered, partly because it had been necessary to
‘translate’ – albeit plausibly – theory and findings from other sectors of education,
that there was need for the project’s approach to employability to be tested more
extensively in order that more direct evidence of its potential could be gained.
They suggested three directions for further work:

• Longitudinal studies tracking students into, through and out of higher

education, paying particular attention to their experiences of transitions. A
substantial amount of useful data could be generated through sustained
institutional research activity. (It would be particularly useful if this work
could extend into the early years of employment, so that a more distant
perspective on students’ higher education experiences could be gained.)
• Unemployed graduates should be studied in more depth than the pilot study
(Knight and Knight, 2002) had allowed.
• There was a need to develop ways of engaging academic staff with the task of
enhancing employability. This needed work at several levels: national bodies
might work with educational developers to establish central strategies and
approaches; there would be value in guidance for departmental champions
on ways of helping colleagues to get to grips with employability (see Box
13.1 for some suggestions); and it would be useful to have straightforward,
‘to the point’, briefings for individual academic staff to read. These actions
would be more powerful if heads of departments and deans had some research-
informed professional education in the design and implementation of
educational programmes.

There is also a need for employability to be studied in relation to other policy

initiatives. In the UK, significant relevant and overlapping initiatives would include
those relating to widening participation, learning and teaching (including assess-
ment), retention and completion, and life-long learning. There has been something
of a tendency for institutions to deal with each policy initiative from government
or elsewhere in isolation, as it has come forward. This is understandable, but it
lessens the chance of synergy. Charles and Benneworth point to the problem of
intra-institutional disconnectedness:
 An institutional perspective on employability 217

Departmental structures and the legacy of fragmented funding and initiatives

can leave higher education institutions with a proliferation of outreach
activities and internally competing units.
(Charles and Benneworth, 2001: 70)

A major, and continuing, challenge for institutions is that of optimizing their

internal loose-tight couplings – or, put another way, of ‘joining up’ strategies and
policies and using the principle of subsidiarity to maximum beneficial effect.
Higher education is a human system, not a precise mechanism, in which causes
produce a range of effects – some intended, some unintended (and perhaps
antagonistic to what was intended). If we are interested in enhancing students’
employability, we need to have a better understanding of how best we can mobilize
educational resources to that end. This, too, points to the importance of institutional
policy-making, implementation, and research activity.

Notes
1 The multidimensionality of ‘graduateness’ was shown in HEQC (1997), and an
argument for valuing different configurations of graduate achievements can be found
in Knight and Yorke (2003b).
2 This phrase elides the differences that exist in political structure in the various nations
of the UK, which do not alter the general point being made.
3 Note that the ‘ownership’ of different agencies varies, though government is usually
in a position to exercise influence.
4 This section draws upon a fuller discussion in Knight and Yorke (2003a).
5 We acknowledge, of course, that some curricula – particularly those closely linked
with professions (such as teaching, healthcare and social work) – do incorporate
employability in assessment criteria since the graduate’s licence to practise depends
on being able to satisfy examiners that they have reached a standard appropriate to a
beginning professional.
6 There is anecdotal evidence that some students choose modules on the basis of their
assessment methods.
7 The first two of the seven questions are: ‘What are you trying to do?’ and ‘Why are
you trying to do it?’
8 Argyris and Schön (1974) drew the distinction between ‘single-loop learning’, in
which the existing framework for action is accepted, and ‘double-loop learning’ in
which the framework is subjected to challenge. There are correlations between single-
loop learning and incremental change, and between double-loop learning and radical
change.
9 Details of the Baldrige Award, as it applies to education, can be found in Baldrige
National Quality Program (2003). Those of the EFQM Excellence Model can be
found at http://www.efqm.org/model_awards/model/excellence_model.htm (accessed
6 April 2003).
10 See www.ltsn.ac.uk/ESECT.
11 Acceptance by HEFCE of these strategies results in the release of earmarked funding.
12 ‘Enterprise’ took on different colourings in different institutions, but had to be accepted
by the Employment Department and its predecessor bodies which were responsible
for managing the initiative. One might say that this was an example of subsidiarity in
action.
218 Towards the enhancement of practice

13 This involves bringing together three UK agencies focusing on enhancement. At the

time of writing the name had not been finalized, nor had other structural matters.
14 Note the problem that ‘core’ or ‘key’ skills have in this respect (Wolf, 2002).
15 Argyris (1990) issues a reminder – and experience bears out – that ‘the management
team’ in an organization is often something of a myth.
16 In his discussion of learning organizations, Senge (1992) gives insufficient weight to
internal politics.
17 See Bennis and Townsend (1996: 97).
18 This is reported briefly in Trowler et al. (2003: 12–13).
 Envoi 219

Envoi

We have argued that employability is a construct that is far richer than that of
‘skills’, irrespective of whether we are invited to believe in ‘key’, ‘transferable’,
‘core’ or ‘generic’ skills. Importantly, we align it with the kinds of achievements
that are valued by academics who might reject ‘skills’ because of philosophical,
theoretical or empirical difficulties.
The USEM (understandings, skilful practices, efficacy beliefs, and meta-
cognition) account has a credible theoretical and empirical foundation – indeed,
as we have been working on this book we have turned up material of which we
were previously unaware yet which has buttressed the argument that we have
been developing. We are therefore confident that this book does have something
useful to offer to higher education systems which are increasingly being pressed
by governments to demonstrate their contribution to economic prosperity.
Institutions, as collectivities, are expected to respond to the expectations of
governments and their agencies. Some of that response has necessarily to be
addressed at institutional level but, because of the variations that exist in
disciplinary cultures, practices and expectations, there is no sense in an institution
adopting a monolithic approach to the enhancement of employability – in the
vernacular, ‘one size does not fit all’. An analogue of the European Union’s
principle of subsidiarity should prevail, under which a general conception of
employability is given different colourings according to the characteristics of
programmes and departments, with the proviso that whatever is done must correlate
reasonably well with the general conception.
The Skills plus project, which triggered most of the work reported in this book,
was based firmly on ‘tuning’ – doing what could be done at relatively modest
cost, whilst offering the prospect of high gain. It did not ask participants to
overthrow what had been built up over a period of time; rather, it asked them to
consider what could be done without the need to send programmes through a
burdensome revalidation process, yet could be expected to improve student learning
in ways consistent with the aim of enhancing employability. We suggest that this
modest approach to innovation and change may turn out to have been more
acceptable and influential than some of the other, more dramatic, interventions
that are envisaged from time to time.
220 Envoi

The implications of the case we have laid out in this book are, however, more
far-reaching than might appear at first sight. Curricula (and, more specifically,
pedagogic practices) will need refocusing in some contexts if students are to be as
fully equipped as possible to make claims for employability. The staff development
implications should not be overlooked. For the institution, it would be a mistake
to box-off employability from other aspects of institutional policy and practice.
However their policies are determined, institutions need to ensure that there is
coherence in what they are seeking to achieve in respect of widening participation,
learning and teaching, retention, employability and life-long learning.
We said at the end of Chapter 1 that we saw considerable challenge in convincing
our colleagues that employability was not inimical to their values and practices.
Anyone who has reached this point in the book will probably have come to a view
as to whether we have succeeded. We hope you agree that we have.
 References 221

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234 Index

Index

Access to What? project 9–10 132–3; warrants/claims 133–4, 135,

achievement, communicating 133–8; 136
criteria/indicators of 124; due to far Association of Graduate Recruiters
transfer tasks 135, 140(8n); generic (AGR) 106, 108, 167
197; judgement of 130, 139(5n); Association for Sandwich Education and
learners/assessors know/understand Training 107
indicators 124; and use of scaffolding Astin, A.W. 46
135, 140(9n); warranting 120 Atkins, M. 19
Adelman, C. 136, 200
AGCAS MERITS (Minority Ethnic Bachelor of Nursing (Hons) programme,
Recruitment, Information, Training, adoption of USEM model 141–2;
Support) Project 117 audit/review (1997–2001) 143–7; core
Ainscow, M. 117 modules/units 144; curriculum
Allen, D. 110 framework 148; matched learning/
Allen, G. 111 teaching strategy 150–2; model 149;
Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R. 35, monitoring impact of new programme
40, 87; and Sosniak, A. 35, 40 152–3; range of learning, teaching,
Argyris, C. 206, 218; and Schön, D. 217 assessment activities 145; Skills plus/
assessment 105, 107, 201, 217(5n); 2002 programme 147–52; student
challenge for employability 139; perspectives 147; UKCC
claims, portfolio, personal competencies/QAA standards 149;
development planning 136–8; and USEM framework 149–50
communicating achievement 133, Baldridge, J.V. 211
135–8; concept 120–1; demand side Baldrige Performance Excellence
aspects 138; engagement of student Framework 202
with task 124; favourable conditions Ball, L. 113
123–6; good feedback 125–6; high- Bandura, A. 90, 92
stakes/low-stakes 121–6; implications Banta, T. et al. 121
for courses, modules, units 127–30; Barnett, R. 17, 84
implications for programmes 130–2; Barrow, E. et al.. 151
importance of 120–1; methods 121; Beatty, R.W. and Ulrich, D.O. 212
and need for knowing students 126–7; Becher, T. 97
and problem of warranting Belbin, R.M. 93, 210
achievements 120; process standards Bennett, N. 84; et al.. 30, 77, 99, 179
135; programme overview of 134; and Bennis, W. and Townsend, R. 218
reliability 122; sufficient task Bercuson, D. et al.. 136
provision 123–4; summative/formative Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. 13–14,
121–6; tasks appropriate/matched to 16, 35, 46, 97, 98
learners 125; and teacher workloads Bernstein, B. 168
 Index 235

Bibbings, L. 26 Claxton, G. 17, 96

Biggs, J. 17, 155, 199 Code of Practice for placement learning
Black, P. and Wiliam, D. 123 107
Blackwell, A., et al. 104; and Harvey, L. Coleman, S. and Keep, E. 8, 18, 97
112 communication, of achievement 133–8;
Blackwell, R. and Preece, D. 207 graduate/employer 52, 53; importance
Bloom, B.S. 35, 40, 87 of 211–12; skills 32
Blunkett, D. 23, 165 Community Service Volunteers 115
Boekaerts, M. and Niemivirta, M. 40 Confederation of British Industry (CBI)
Boom, M. 35 23
Boud, D. 92, 93; and Feletti, G. 151; and Construction Management BSc (Hons),
Solomon, N. 102 aspects of employability 163; audits
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. 165, 168 156–7; background 155–6; develoment
Bourgeois, E. 7; et al. 18 of skills for dissertation module 157;
Brennan, J. 20, 166; et al. 34, 73, 76; and development of skills/qualities without
Little, B. 119; and Shah, T. 118; and specific attention given 162–3; getting
Williams, R. 75, 76, 77, 81 students to deal with new situations
Bridges, D. 15 161–2; key issues 163–4; main
Bridges, P. et al. 136 qualities/skills 160; need for
British Sociological Association 169 interdisciplinarity 157–9; need for
Brown, G. 110 rounded graduate 160; Skill plus
Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. 14 analyses of 156–63; too few
Brown, P., et al. 160, 166; and Scase, R. ‘unscaffolded’ problems 157
171 Coulter, E. 158
Brown, R. and Puddick, R. 112, 113 curriculum 103; co-curriculum 46, 49(9n),
Brown, S. and Knight, P. 121 103, 140(13n); design/structure 16–17,
Buchanan, D. and Badham, R. 207 18, 197; designing for complex
built environment courses see learning 96–101; mistakes in
Construction Management BSc (Hons) developing 184; planned/created 17;
Burnes, B. 206 problem-based 109; and student
performance 201; tuning 46; and
Cambridge, B.L. 46 USEM 43
Cannon, D. 43
capability 22, 95–6 Darrah, C. 31
Cappelli, P. 31 De Corte, E. 42, 98, 100
careers 22; case studies 79–84; English Deaf and Creative website 117
graduate patterns 72–8; secrets of Dearing report (1997) 24, 200
success 29 deskilling 65
Careers Service 167, 168, 172, 200 Dickerson, A. and Green, F. 26
Centre for Higher Education Research and Dochy, F. et al. 94
Information (CHERI) 72–8 Dolan, T.G. 203
change management 204–7; justifying the Donnelly, J.F. 112–13
need 207–9; understanding 207, see Donovan, M. et al. 37, 41
also innovation Doyle, W. 99
Charles, D. and Benneworth, P. 217 Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. 14
Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) Dweck, C.S. 89, 97; et al. 48
154
Cherniss, C. and Caplan, R.D. 206 efficacy beliefs 42, 43, 88–91, 185; and
Chisholm, C. 108 assessment 92–3; developability of
citizenship 22 91–2, see also self-efficacy; USEM
claims-making 16, 133–4, 136–8 model
classroom instruction, and clarity of goals EFQM Excellence Model 202
39; meta-analysis of 37, 39–40 Elton, L. 206
236 Index

emotional intelligence (EI) 90, 93, job satisfaction 75; level of

101(3n) employment 74; motivations to study
employability, and academic values 1–2, 73; and notion of individualism 71;
21; achievement of 78; as bolt-on extra relevance to work situation 70–1;
to curricula 204; claims 37, 48(1n); statistical dimensions of study 69–70;
co-ordinators 192, 193; as complex set workplace relevance of 75–8
of diverse achievements 16; concept English Subject Centre 72
9–10, 119(3n); concern over 1, 6; core enhancement 85–6, 104–10, 138,
skills 27; definitions of 8–9; demand- 140(13n); assessment issue 180;
side problem 8; development of 67–8; beyond the module 194–5; and cost of
dynamics of 46–8; elements of 33–4; out-of-class activity 180; dangers of
endnote 219–20; enhancement of 6, 8, curriculum overload 180;
85–6, 104–16, 138, 140(13n), 175–6; entrepreneurial 111–13; evidence of
as function of personal circumstances success 180–1; and innovation 178–94;
19–20; institutional perspective 196– knowledge of students 180; language
217; as international concern 6; as job issue 179–80; and learning 22; need
of higher education 18–19; meanings for funding 181; need for more tools
of 25; as more than skills 29–31; 180; principles/practices 6, 8, 178–95;
opportunities for promoting 214; progression issues 180; of skills
personal qualities 27; process skills 110–11; and sociology 175–7;
27–8; and promotion by programme targeting/curriculum for all 194; tuning
arrangements 96–7; as relative not approach 179, 181–90; and unrealized
absolute concept 33; skills-based possibilities 180
views 24–33; sociology’s contribution Enhancing Student Employability
to 169–71; and subsidiarity 2–3; Co-ordination Team (ESECT) 9,
supply-side interventions 8; ways of 20(3n), 203
judging 204, see also individual named Enterprise in Higher Education 203,
case studies 217(12n)
employers 23; and good learning 22; entrepeneurship 111–13
graduate expectations 41; and Entwistle, N. 120
importance of critical thinking 169; excellence models 202–4
and link with higher education 110;
and participation in work experience feedback 122, 173; appropriate 125;
108; preference for graduates from developmentally useful 125–6; focus
older universities 135, 140(10n); of 92; and future tasks 92; manner of
recognition of graduate achievement 92–3; as purposeful 125; received/
15–16; satisfaction with graduates 29; attended to 126; related to achievement
and use of assessment centres 138; use indicators 125; successful conditions
of graduates 8; views on economic for 123–6; timely 125
need 22–3; wish-lists 34 Fischer, K. 48
employment, concept of 9–10; ethnic Flavell, J.H. 93
9–10; gender differences 9; graduate 9; Frost, M. 143
and socio-economic background 9, see Fullan, M. 17, 204
also graduate/employment relationship Future of Higher Education, The (2003)
engineering manufacture training 104
organization (EMTA) 109
English, abilities, competencies, skills Gaff, J.G. and Ratcliff, J.L. 102
76–8; case studies 79–84; destination Ganesan, R. et al. 97, 99, 200
of graduates 70, 84(5n); and Gibb, A. 113
employability 69–72; employment Gibbs, G. 94
sectors 74–5, 76; generalized subject Goleman, D. 61, 90, 95
choice/career patterns 72–8; history of Goodyear, P. 17, 99, 200
discipline 70; issues concerning 70–2; graduate apprenticeship scheme 109
 Index 237

Graduate Employability Award 111 transformation 16–17; and support/

graduate/employment relationship, and development of work-based learning
communication skills 52, 53; and 106; and symbolic analysts 36;
degree experience 51–2; junior 51–2; transition into 14–15; and transition to
knowledge/skills 53; and personal work 11, 13–14, 15; and translation of
qualities 52, 53; pragmatic aspects 52; achievements 15–16; withdrawal from
problems/dilemmas 71–2; quality of/ 92, 101(2n)
performance in education 53; senior Higher Education Active Communities
employees 52–3; and work experience Fund (HEACF) 115
52, 53, see also Skills plus project Higher Education Funding Council for
graduateness 72, 77, 84(6n), 197, 217(1n) England (HEFCE) 2–3, 104, 115
graduates, as being scientifically able 197; higher education institutions (HEIs) 8;
destinations 167–8; development of attention to employability factor 102;
36; employment rates 9; employment and need for change 10–11
wish-list 170; family history/gender Higher Education Quality Council 202
aspects 168, 172; generation/work Hillage, J. and Pollard, E. 18, 19, 22, 33
experience gap 166; helpful college Hodkinson, P. and Bloomer, M. 15
schemes for 102, 118(1n); importance Holmes, L. 31
of critical thinking 169; influences on Honeybone, A. 19
168–9; jobs 10, 20(4n); lifetime wage Hopkiss, I. 111
premium 7; as over-educated 23; Hornby, W. 136
preparedness of 166–7; responding to Hörning, K. et al. 167
disadvantage 116–18; and self- Hounsell, D. et al. 121
presentation 67–8; skill attributions human capital 31; effect on productivity
29–30; supply/demand balance 23; 7; higher education contribution to 8
transformation aspects 16–17;
translation of educational experience IMPACT project 111, 117
into practical jobs 15–16; and work information and communication
experience 168–9 technologies (ICT) 166, 171
Guile, D. 18, 28 innovation 219; atypical 178;
communicate well 211–12;
Hannan, A. and Silver, H. 208 compatibility with system 179;
Hargreaves, A. 194 consolidate/embed the gains 213;
Harris Report (2001) 115–16 develop shared commitment 212;
Hartley, J.L. and Smith, B.W. 88 difficulties 179–81; establish
Harvey, L. 10, 48, 104, 105, 110, 112, implementation team 210–11; factors
119, 166, 215; et al. 20, 118, 167, 171; influencing implementation of 205;
and Knight, P.T. 16 generate some early successes 212–13;
Hawkins, P. and Winter, J. 167 impact/benefits 178; justifying the
Hedlund, J. and Sternberg, R. 41 need 207–9; managing 204–16; phases
Heywood, J. 121 178–9; points of leverage 213, 215–16;
higher education, contribution to teachers blamed for failure 179; tuning
economic development 36–7; approach 179, 181–90; understanding
contribution to human capital 8; and 207; undertake groundwork 209–10
employability-enhancing practices 6, Insight plus 104
8; and employer wish-lists 34; institutions, and assessment 201;
encounters, experiences, processes background 197–8; and consequences
188, 190; good 6; increase in of change 198; developments 198; and
participation rates 8; and responsibility employability 196–217; future
for employability 18–19; and role in directions 216–17; and judging
lifelong learning 37; and sociability employability 204; and learning
agenda 19; (super)complexity of environment 199–200; managing
curriculum 17–18; as support for change/innovation 204–16; models for
238 Index

development of excellence 202–4; and sequential 184; single-loop/double-

personal development planning 200–1; loop distinction 217(8n); statements of
policy concerns 198; and quality outcomes 185; student reflection on
assurance/enhancement 202 173; studying in a domain 98–9; and
subject understanding 43; transference
JEWELS (Joint Systems to Enhance Work 43
Experience Levels of Service and Learning and Teaching Support Network
Satisfaction) Project 111 (LTSN) 9, 203, 212
Jobbins, D. 20 Lechner, F.J. and Boli, J. 167
Leicester Employment Skills within an
Keep, E. 23 Accessible Curriculum (ESAC) 117
Kelly, J. 29, 33 Lent, R. et al. 41
Keynote Project 26, 110 Leon, P. 60
King, P.M. and Kitchener, K.S. 90 Light, R. and Pillemer, D. 48
KITTS project 106 Linke, R. 10
Klein, K.J. and Sorra, J.S. 205 Little, B. 10, 106, 110
Klenowski, V. 138 Liverpool John Moores University see
Kneale, P.E. 173 Construction Management BSc
Knight, P.T. 17, 20, 122; and Saunders, (Hons); School of Social Science
M. 51; and Trowler, P.R. 197; and Locke, E. 41
Yorke, M. 90, 94, 121, 180, 201, 217 loose-tight coupling 2, 17
Knight, T.T. and Knight, P.T. 12, 15–16,
67, 170, 216 McKnight, A. 168
knowledge, disciplinary 169; procedural Maddocks, A. and Sher, W. 164
42; professional/university distinction Maharosoa, M. and Hay, D. 10
155; rich factual 13; tacit 12–13, 15, Marzano, R.J. 37, 39–40
41, 42; types of 13–14 Mason, G. 20, 23
knowledge economy 7, 10–11 Mayer, J.D. et al. 90
Kohlberg, L. 90 Mentowski, M. et al. 123
Kotter, J. 206, 208 metacognition 37, 39–40, 41, 42, 65–6,
123, 125, 185; and applicability to task
Lathbury, D. 197 in hand 93; and assessment process 94;
Lawton, D. 147 learning to learn 66; and personal
Lazarus, F.C. 93 development planning 94; and personal
Leadbeater, C. 7 self-awareness 93; and self-regulation
learning, adaptable 40–1; authentic/deep 93–4; and strategic thinking 93, see
150; complex/complicated difference also USEM model
96; context-work/problem-based 110; Millennium Volunteers 115
design of 100–1; different forms of Minder, R. 136
97–8; direct/indirect assessment of Modernising HE Careers Education
127–9; and efficacy beliefs/self- (2002) 116
theories 43, 46; embedded approach Morgan, G. 2
172–3; encounters, experiences, Morley, L. 23–4
processes 188, 190; as enhancement to Mortimore, P. et al. 117
career/citizenship 22; environment 99, motivation 124
199–200; in general 98; good 22, 34, Murphy, J. 18
43, 97, 98–101; hybrid model 152;
instruction, task sequence, assessment National Centre for Work Experience 107
processes 99; life-long 37, 48; link Noble, M. 114, 116; and Paulucy, B. 105
with work 41, 48(7n); and nursing see Bachelor of Nursing (Hons)
metacognition/self-theories 37, 39–40;
in practice 97; problem-based 150–2; Oakland, R. 118
and reflection/self-knowledge 46; Open University (OU) 72–3
 Index 239

part-time work 114 deep/surface learning 89–90;

Pascarelli, E.T. Terenzini, P.T. 46 determination/commitment 62–3; and
Perry, R. 68, 90 emotional intelligence 90; and locus of
personal development planning (PDP) 94, control 90; and making a difference
116, 136–8, 200–1 90–1; motivation 62; performance
Peterson, C. et al. 94 goals 89; and practical intelligence 90,
Pintrich, P.R. 89 see also efficacy beliefs
Piper, W. 101 Seligman, M. 90, 95
Pownall, H. and Rimmer, J. 26 Senge, P. 218
practical intelligence 11, 31, 41–2; Shell Technology Enterprise Programme
developability of 91; and expertise (STEP) 106
13–14; and rules of the game 14; and Sidhu, B. 114
self-efficacy 90; and tacit knowledge skilful practices 88, see also USEM
11, 13, 15 model
programme-wide planning 103; audits 98; skills 7, 8, 185; assessment 128, 139(1n);
coherent/progressive 130, 139(6n); attributions 29–30; communication 32;
concerns 2–3; implication of competency areas 30; complexity of
assessment on 130–2; learning, 72, 84(7n); core 27; critique of 32–3;
teaching, assessment methods 186–7; demand/supply 22–3; development of
mapping of 130–2, 139(7n), 185; and 19, 109; employability as 24, 26,
principles of good teaching 189; 28–31; and English graduates 76–8;
priority/target outcomes 132; enhancement of 110–11; essential 26;
stocktaking of existing 190–1; tuning gaps/shortages 8; generalization
132; use of audits 130, see also tuning problem 33; generic 24, 28–9;
approach interpersonal 60–2; job-specific 24;
Prospects 166 key 24, 26; language of 31; low
Prosser, M. and Trigwell, K. 98 equilibrium 23; as muddled concept
Purcell, K. and Elias, P. 74 28–9, 30–1; one-shot approaches
183–4; ontological/epistemological
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) 69, issues 32; process 27–8; proliferation
129, 162, 169 of 32; and relevant subject matter
108–9; reliance on low-skill
RAPID (Recording Academic, enterprises 8; shortages/gaps 108; and
Professional and Individual significance of context 31; as social
Development) 137, 162–3, 164 practices 120; soft/generic 16, 36, 43;
Reich, R.B. 7, 36, 37 subject-specific 43; taxonomy of 28,
Rhem, J. 10 35, 40, 48(6n); transferable 26, 32–3;
Rogers, C. 43 vocational 24
Rotter, J.B. 90 Skills plus project 12, 33, 37, 50, 219;
Rowley, G. and Purcell, K. 115 assertiveness 63–4; assessment
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors principles 131; autonomy 64; and
(RICS) 154 changing individual intelligence 91;
confidence 63; and construction
Salovey, P. and Mayer, J.D. 90 management programme 154–64;
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health coping with stress 64–5;
Visiting at University of Manchester determination/commitment 62–3;
see Bachelor of Nursing (Hons) enterprise 59–60; general
School of Social Science at Liverpool understanding 55–8; informants 50–1;
John Moores University see Social interpersonal skills 60–2; junior
Science at Work study employees 51–2; learning to learn 66;
self-efficacy 62, 101(1n); acquiesence- metacognition 65–6; motivation 62;
autonomy dimension 90; assertiveness organization/prioritization of work 60;
63–4; autonomy 64; confidence 63; organizational understanding 58;
240 Index

problems 67–8; research study 50–68; University of Cambridge Programme for

self-efficacy 62–5; senior employees Industry 108
52–3; subject understanding 54–5, see USEM model 37, 48(2n, 3n), 219;
also graduate/employment account of employability 38, 40;
relationship; named case studies; advantages of 42; and assessment 121,
tuning approach 123; and curriculum design 96–101;
Social Science at Work, and academic elements of 87–94; and expertise 42;
staff 173; actions contributing to face validity of 37, 39–42; and model
employability/work in progress 173–5; of adaptable learning 40–1; and
advice 176; curricula 169; and nursing project 141–53; objections
employability 165–6, 169; graduate 43–6; and practical intelligence 41–2
employment destinations 167–8; Utley, A. 30, 102, 196
impact on enhancement of
employability 175–7; influences on Valentin, E.M.M. and Sanchez, J.J.N. 118
employment 168–9; issues 166–7; Van Geert, P. 11
report on 165–77; representing/ Vieira, F. 43
enhancing employability 171–3; Volkwein, J.F. 204
sociology’s contribution to
employability 169–71; team-working Walvoord, B.E. and Anderson, V.J. 121
176; and undergraduates 172–3 Ward, R. and Pierce, D. 48
Spouse, J. 147 warrants/awards 133–4, 135; criteria-
Stenhouse, L. 96 related 136; and norm-referencing 136,
Stephenson, J. 95 140(11n); performance/learning goals
Sternberg, R.J. 11, 41, 90, 138; et al. 13, bias 136, 140(12n); problems/
15, 46; and Grigorenko, E.L. 41, 93, weaknesses 136
95 Watton, P., and Collings, J. 119; et al.
Stigler, J.W. and Hiebert, J. 99 114, 119
Student Volunteering UK 115 Weick, K. 2
successful intelligence 95–6 Wenger, E. 14, 97
White Paper on higher education (2003)
Taylor, P. 210 7, 24, 141, 201
Teaching Quality Academy 203, 218(13n) Wilkie, K. and Burns, I. 150
teamwork 210–11 Wolf, A. 8, 18, 23, 94, 218
Teichler, U. 19, 29 Wood, D. et al. 100
Torrance, H. and Pryor, J. 123 work experience 52, 53, 104, 108, 166,
transfer process 15, 26, 32–3, 43, 135, 168–9
140(8n), 169 Work Experience Award 111
transition process 11, 13–15, 64–5, 75 Work Experience Group 8, 115
Trowler, P. 204; et al. 197, 206, 207, 218 work-based learning 103–4; advice,
tuning approach 46, 179, 219; clarifying design, operation of 107–8; awards for
193; entitlements 185; favourable 111; batch processing/customized
comments on 182–3; learning 193; provision distinction 105–6; and better
messages 185, 188, 190; negotiating careers guidance 115–16;
192–3; orchestrating 192; outline 181, characteristics 105; embedded/external
183; programme focus 183–5; sharing placements 104; employer costs 106;
194; stocktaking 190–4, see also enhancing entrepreneurial disposition
programme-wide approach; Skills plus 111–13; help in 106–7; and learning
project from part-time work 114; local/
Turiel, E. 48 national organization/network
involvement 106; and part-time
understanding 43, 54–8, 87–8, 185, see students 107; and personal
also USEM model development planning 116; preparation
 Index 241

for 106; project work/other work-related learning 103–4, 119(4n)

‘contextualizing’ activities 109–10; Wright, W.A. 181
reflections on 104–5; and relevancy of
subject matter 108–9; and skills York Award 111
enhancement 110–11; visits, work Yorke, M. 48, 87; et al. 136; and Knight,
shadowing, mentoring 111; and P.T. 48
volunteering 115