Abstract
Supporting students to develop transferable skills and gain employment is a vital function of Universities in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A key area is work readiness, which has steadily grown in importance over the last 2 decades as tertiary institutions increasingly aim to produce graduates who perceive and are perceived as work ready. However, a large majority of graduates report a lack of skills and confidence needed for the effective transition from study to work. This may be particularly problematic for disciplines that impart both discipline-specific and transferrable skills, such as psychology. The aim of this paper is to addresses the concept of work readiness within Australian psychological training and explores the need to shed light on and integrate work readiness within the pedagogy of psychology within Australia. Specifically, this paper calls for a review of work readiness skills developed in psychological courses to ensure industry needs are met. Beyond such a review, it is suggested that tertiary centres need to facilitate students in capturing and reflecting upon the transferable skills that they develop; and build assessments that allow students to demonstrate transferable skills in a meaningful way. Further, this paper proposes that work readiness skills be routinely mapped onto graduate attributes and course learning outcomes to be readily available by students so as to increase students’ potential to articulate their learnt work readiness skills once in the workplace.
Highlights
Background and ContextIn 2021, university funding within Australia will likely be focused on areas deemed to have critical skill shortages, such as those requiring specialist knowledge (Department of Jobs and Small Business, 2018; Australian Government, 2020b)
The skills of graduates are important in the mental health field where pre-existing shortfalls, gaps, and discrepancies between skills acquired during study, and skills required at employment are widening, whilst the need for mental health professionals is growing (Gardner and Liu, 1997; Casner-Lotto and Barrington, 2006; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2019; Black Dog Institute, 2020)
Adopting the definition that work readiness is both discipline specific and generic, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the disciplinary specific attributes of psychology, which are recognised by registration bodies such as the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (APHRA) and the Australian Psychological Society (APS)
Summary
In 2021, university funding within Australia will likely be focused on areas deemed to have critical skill shortages, such as those requiring specialist knowledge (Department of Jobs and Small Business, 2018; Australian Government, 2020b). The ability to understand and describe skills that students learn during their tertiary education is growing in importance in Australia with the adoption of the Bologna Process, which is intended to enable Australian award graduates greater international portability between European and Oceania nations (Jackson, 2019; Department of Education Skills and Employment, 2021). The concept of graduate work readiness has emerged in the literature base in the last 2 decades with journals, such as Education + Training sponsoring special editions to focus exclusively on the topic (Turner and Winterton, 2019) Such focused attention is revealing a need to identify generic skills, which contribute to graduates’ employability, and discipline-specific skills, which are unique to each industry steam. This paper aims to articulate the gap in the literature base within the pedagogy of Australian psychology
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