What does employability mean?

It is imperative that tertiary graduates are prepared for work and employment by having the appropriate skills and knowledge for the sector in which they intend to work. This encompasses both discipline specific skills and generic skills. Many employers (and clients) place significant emphasis on the latter, whereas the focus of universities is arguably the inverse. As a consequence there are significant gaps between what employers expect graduates to know and to be able to do, and their actual graduate attributes. For the growing number of graduates who create their own work and juggle multiple roles to make it sustainable, the gaps are even more pronounced. These issues are magnified in disciplines in which graduate destinations are highly diverse, with a lack of obvious career paths, intense competition for work and complex models of work. This paper focuses in on this cohort, bringing examples from the arts and humanities to illustrate what knowledge, skills and attributes graduates need to negotiate the world of work and their perceptions of whether or not these were developed during their higher education studies. The presentation reports on the development of a framework for employability skills development, including best practice in employability skills education and our learning from the review of manifold prior work on employability, generic skills and the labour market; case studies of students in transition from study into work; and retrospective studies on graduates who have been in the workforce sufficiently long to meaningfully reflect on their transition experiences.