Pedagogy for employability - Higher Education Academy

The format for the day was simple. There was an initial introduction and scene setting and
then students and staff were separated and facilitated to reflect on and discuss issues relating
to employability and assessment. Some genuine surprises emerged in the plenary, e.g. at each
of the development days staff commented that they thought they were doing a lot to embed
employability but their students felt more could be done! Faculty and course groups then
negotiated a plan of action to make the improvements and changes identified and agreed. How
the money given to the academic staff would be spent had to be part of the plan, but there
was a lot of flexibility for its use. Some of the ideas put forward by teams were wonderfully
creative, inventive and suggested some very powerful learning.
Initial and ongoing evaluation suggests that both staff, students and programmes of study
benefited from these days, and they have made a significant contribution to changing the
culture of many of our programmes from ‘androgogy’ to ‘heutagogy’ (Hase and Kenyon 2000).
For more information contact Ruth Lawton: ruth.lawton@bcu.ac.uk.
If the second challenge is in achieving cultural change, the third, and equally important, challenge
is to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population – diverse in relation to
characteristics and individual students’ relationship to employability development issues. In
particular we are aware that widening participation students, part-time and mature students
(and these are often overlapping categories) are less likely to participate in co-curricular and
extra-curricular activities and are less likely to access careers services provision (Redmond
2006; Stevenson and Clegg 2011). Indeed students may have different interests and motivations
in participating in higher education (Pegg and Carr 2010; Little 2005, 2011). Attending to
employability development as personal development planning in the widest sense is one way to
capture this diversity of interests, and to acknowledge and build upon the prior experiences and
skills of mature and part-time learners. The issue of personal development planning is discussed
further in Sections 4 and 5.
We suggest that for practitioners in HEIs supporting the development of student employability,
the national and institutional context is subject to a high degree of variability and change.
Possibilities and constraints for work are felt at the local level, and understandings and definitions
of employability are subject to institutional policies and cultures. It is to definitions of employability
that we turn to next.
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