Critical considerations of career enrolment data: Challenges, limitations, and possibilities

Abstract

The advent of Career Enrolment Data (CED) in Higher Education is an important development for graduate employability practitioners and other stakeholders seeking to understand, analyse and enhance students’ career readiness. CED, collected annually from all students in participating universities, requires students to self-report on their own career readiness, and is described as having ‘the potential to be a component of a standardised measure of learning gain in relation to student employability’ (Cobb, 2019, p.23). Reflections are offered by two graduate employability practitioners currently tasked with introducing CED to educators and recommending its use to support careers-focused components of their curricula. Drawing on different disciplinary backgrounds to inform their approaches, both practitioners are keen to explore opportunities to capitalise on the strengths of data insights. However, they advocate for a carefully nuanced and contextualised approach, openly acknowledging relevant limitations and risks when presenting the data to educators and other stakeholders. Drawing on one author’s background in psychology, it considers the process of self-reporting on which the data wholly relies, noting potential influences and biases that may be relevant. The second author offers a sociological perspective, using the concept of neoliberalism as a framework for engaging with concerns about an employability agenda driven by corporate and economic interests, and a culture of auditing sometimes associated with hardship for academics and a detrimental effect on pedagogy. While it should be noted that experts in CED such as Gilworth and Cobb take care to acknowledge limitations and risks (Cobb, 2019; Gilworth, 2023) this reflective account grapples with the challenge of ensuring that these important nuances are not lost as the context shifts from theory to practice.