Abstract
The challenge of ensuring that graduates of higher education are employable has become a pedagogical issue for teaching colleagues at universities worldwide. Employability, as a theme, has changed the general environment of higher education (Frankham, 2017, p.632) and is strongly emphasised on degree programmes’ planning for desired outcomes (Moore and Morton, 2017, p.591). This paper reports on an evaluation of an intervention that was conducted with eight final year (Level 6) students from multiple disciplines to investigate to what extent a translation exercise can raise student awareness of employability skills gained through their higher education experience. This study shows that through a skills translation exercise, students’ ability to highlight their graduate skills, which align to personal specification skills such as communication, organisation, and business acumen, increased. This paper reports on an intervention that was valued by the participants as having a positive impact on their understanding of their own employability and explores how translating discipline specific skills through short conversations can have relevance in the pressurised world of higher education.
Highlights
The challenge of ensuring that graduates of higher education are employable has become a pedagogical issue for teaching colleagues at universities worldwide
Stage 1: Why higher education? The participants were asked why they chose to come to university, to benchmark the sample of participants against recent literature and reports outlining that a high proportion of United Kingdom (UK) students come to higher education to strategically secure graduate employment (Unite, 2017; UUK, 2017)
As stated in the reflection of the translation process section above, the facilitator drew upon personal skills such as persuasion, motivation, improvisation, and an accessible manner, which could have enhanced the opportunity for the student to gain greater understanding from the process. If this process is used on a wider scale, more translation facilitators would be required and the personal skill sets of those individuals would differ and this could mean the outcome of the translation intervention could be different. This small intervention followed the terminology of Tran who argued that it takes time and effort for graduates to ‘translate’ and ‘transform’ the knowledge and skills they have learnt in higher education into a working context (Tran, 2015, p.211)
Summary
The challenge of ensuring that graduates of higher education are employable has become a pedagogical issue for teaching colleagues at universities worldwide. ‘Employability’ and ‘student success’ have become key phrases that describe desired outcomes for university graduates These notions have gained increasing traction in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the United Kingdom (UK), due to increased governmental and policy pressure (BIS, 2009; Department for Education, 2017; Office for Students, 2018). This list provided the focus for this study, which both communicates and encourages students to ‘religiously record the skills you gain’ for future applications (Target Jobs, 2017) These skills are listed below and will be explored in this paper through the intervention with students to evaluate whether there is a need to translate discipline specific skills into the skills listed below.
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