Pedagogy for employability - Higher Education Academy

identified in these ‘gaps’ lists have tended to remain relatively constant in recent years, this is not
a useful measure around which to define curriculum intervention. As we identify in Section 5,
curriculum design for employability is more than language and skills. However, skills awareness is
essential, for example, in understanding and articulating the tools of graduate recruitment found in
a person specification relating to an employment opportunity.
Skills ‘auditing’ is now a commonly used tool for embedding employability in the curriculum;
the use of skills experience and development as a measure of employability also forges an easy
connection with the personal development planning (PDP) initiative – alongside self-awareness,
reflection and action planning. However, although employability, as defined by skills, is common,
there is no agreement in the employment and employability sectors about the notions of definition
of ‘skills’. ESECT defined skills as “skilful practices in context” (Pedagogy for Employability Group,
2006), but there is an ongoing and powerful academic debate about skills and attributes. Hinchliffe
and Jolly (2011) offer a critique of ‘skills-based lists’ for understanding employers’ definitions –
they suggest that we should be interested in defining the ‘graduate experience’ against, values,
intellectual rigour, performance and engagement. They agree with Hagar and Hodkinson (2009)
that there is no simple ‘transfer of skills’, but instead it is a process of ‘becoming’ related to
graduate identity. Hinchliffe and Jolly conclude that: “universities and government would be
better employed promoting student employability indirectly through the promotion of graduate
identity and well being (through the provision of opportunities for functioning) rather than directly
through employability skills” and that “employers themselves are not unsympathetic to this
approach”(2011, p582).
In recent years there has been a shift in terminology away from skills; the penultimate bullet point
in the CBI report (2011) cited above clearly illustrates this: “underpinning all these attributes, the
key foundation, must be a positive attitude”. The continued foregrounding of ‘skills’, ‘attributes’ or
‘capabilities’ to access and describe employability endures, as it is a quick and relatively easy way to
engage employers, curricula and students with employability and with career management.
This brings us to the last definition dilemma, because employability as it is practised in the HE
curriculum is likely to include, or be exclusively, aspects of ‘career development learning’ (see
Watts (2006) for a discussion of the language and definitions). In 2010 the Quality Assurance
Agency (QAA) defined Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) as a “range
of teaching and learning activities, associated with career contexts, preparation, development
and planning”. Bridgstock (2009) has created a model of career management for maximum
employability, which she sees as:
... an ongoing process of engaging in reflective, evaluative and decision-making processes
using skills for self-management and career building, based on certain underlying traits and
dispositional factors, to effectively acquire, exhibit and use generic and discipline-specific skills
in the world of work. (2009, p35)
Bridgstock goes on to suggest that learning how to manage a career needs to begin early in the
student’s higher education experience and that it should be both mandatory and credit bearing in
academic programmes. However, because of the different ways employability is defined, career
management may not be included in models used for curriculum design. Furthermore, as we go on
to discuss, there is lack of agreement about the value and evaluation of such models.
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