Focusing in on employability: using content analysis to explore the employability discourse in UK and USA universities

Deesha Chadha,James Toner

doi:10.1186/s41239-017-0071-0

Abstract

In this paper, we have taken initial steps towards highlighting the employability discourse in higher education by using content analysis to explore website data at 40 higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and 40 HEIs in the USA by searching for ‘employability’ in respective web engines. The findings from our preliminary data analysis were inserted into a MIT SIMILE software package to create a bespoke, interactive webpage that could be disseminated for discussion by higher education managers. The initial findings suggest that, in the UK, the broad discourse is centred upon government policies and targeted preparation for employment while in the USA it is centred upon the institutional vision and social inclusion agenda. Recent graduates’ views were sought on these initial findings to validate whether their experiences corroborated with our suggested employability discourse claims. These insights are a useful first step for HEIs to question and re-evaluate employability at an institutional level.

Highlights

In this paper, an attempt is being made to unpack the current discourse around employability in higher education by comparing the situation in the UK with that in the USA so that we can better appreciate the differences and similarities that exist in national settings, their influences and impact, and start exploring practices and policies that can be shared more widely
We were hoping to answer some of the following questions by conducting this research: is the discourse dependent on national or local policies? How large an impact did massification, tuition fees and globalisation have on how higher education institutions (HEIs) presented their employability discourse? How much could the institution rely on its brand to retain its own independent strategies of securing graduate jobs? The rationale behind this work being carried out is that the current discourse around employability has become increasingly muddled, and yet employability is a key performance indicator when demonstrating institutional success
Concluding remarks Having used the internet to conduct content text analysis, inserting our findings into a MIT SIMILE software package to visualise the data sets and seeking comments from recent graduates to verify our initial findings, it has been possible to attain an initial idea of the actual employability discourse within higher education in the UK and USA

Summary

Introduction

An attempt is being made to unpack the current discourse around employability in higher education by comparing the situation in the UK with that in the USA so that we can better appreciate the differences and similarities that exist in national settings, their influences and impact, and start exploring practices and policies that can be shared more widely. More recent definitions include ‘that students and graduates can discern, acquire, adapt and continually enhance the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make them more likely to find and create meaningful paid and unpaid work that benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’ (Oliver 2015) These definitions encompass related, but slightly different ideas around the meaning of employability making it difficult to determine upon one solitary definition. A second example of perplexity highlighted by Tomlinson (2016) exists in establishing a clear role for the university in preparing graduates when the relationship between student and higher education has become increasingly transactional For this reason, it may be useful to simultaneously look at employability definitions and discourse and use them to shape a definition that might work for higher education in a national context

Results

Discussion

Conclusion