Embedding Employability

What is the issue we are addressing? 

Understanding how to ‘embed’ employability within higher education (HE) learning environments is a key concern for teaching practitioners but also other stakeholders including learners and their families, careers and employability staff and employers. The School of Social Science and Professions covers wide ranging degree courses from relatively professional/ vocational courses (e.g., Social Work) through to traditional academic disciplinary courses (e.g., Criminology). Exploring how employability can be embedded across the curriculum regardless of course type is important to ensure that this aspect of degree study is addressed and emphasised for all students.  

There is a strong equalities rationale for this project in relation to the well-established ‘graduate outcome gap’ between White and different minority ethnic groups, particularly Black students. Part of the project focus was to make inroads into identifying and developing awareness of pedagogic initiatives that connected employability with a social justice agenda.  

What did we do? 

In a first phase we asked module and course leaders to complete a survey. We used this to understand the proportion of courses that, illustratively, had a dedicated liaison within the team for careers and employability related events and initiatives. We also sought information about how course and module leaders defined employability in learning materials and how employability was talked about in learning activities. With responses from 152 modules across 33 courses, our survey findings provided a wealth of information. We were able to draw on this to spot gaps in provision of employability across our Subject areas and courses, but we could also start to identify some of the strongest examples of how employability could be addressed in an engaging and inclusive way within learning sessions. 

With so much evidence our next step was to decide on how to communicate this information in a clear, concise way to our colleagues. Moreover, decisions were needed on how to develop our curriculums to foster embedded employability across Subject areas and courses. We first summarised findings into a 35-page report (Conroy et al. Oct 2022) but then condensed this into a user friendly three-page Employability Resource Guide (Conroy et al. May 2022). This Guide contained survey-derived ‘exemplars’ of, illustratively, how employability is currently included in course/module learning activities; models for how employability/careers progress can be recorded in online/offline environments and creative examples of how employability-related skills sessions could be delivered. 

The Guide has been disseminated School-wide and is being used to update and enhance existing curricula delivery. 

What has been the impact? 

The project has raised awareness of the possibilities around the scope of embedding employability, what elements could receive more focus (e.g., identifying a course liaison with the Careers and Employability service) and has spurred scholarly discussion around how employability could be more clearly embedded into assessment approaches (e.g., forming the basis of formative/summative components and feedback).  

Staff responses to different phases of project work have been very positive. Using the Employability Resource Guide to share vignettes of successful approaches to embedding employability has received positive feedback from staff.  

Current and alumni learner feedback on the embeddedness of employability is being explored in a separate study concerning ‘Stakeholder views on employability’ which also includes stakeholder viewpoints from careers and employability educators at London Met, educators in Further Education, and local community employers. 

That was presented at the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Annual Conference 2023 as part of a themed session on careers, employability and enterprise. One set of study analyses has been submitted as a report write up and is currently under consideration at an appropriate peer reviewed journal. In addition, to support capacity building among London Met students, a reflective write up concerning project work was published as a ‘Gaining Research Internship Skills’ piece in The Psychologist online. 

A key part of the dissemination has been to raise the focus on the employability gap. Proposals are being developed which would offer BAME students the opportunity to engage directly with, and seek guidance from, experts in their chosen field. 

How can this practice be introduced more widely?

The project has led to the production of materials, including examples of good practice, and evidence about the current cross-curriculum ‘embeddedness’ of employability, which could be readily adapted for use in other London Met Schools and subject areas. Such adaptations and initiatives could help develop a future cross-School initiative to explore embeddedness of employability at an institutional level with reference to clearly defined sector benchmarks (e.g. graduate outcomes data).