Graduate Employability: A Critical Oversight

This chapter considers what is meant by employability, provides an overview of the main dimensions, and critically examines whether the attention given to graduate employability in particular has delivered its potential policy, educational, business and individual outcomes in the context of a complex economic situation. The term is used widely and loosely, and has been the focus of a rapidly expanding body of literature. Consequently, we begin by offering some definitions of employability then clarify this in four broad categories. Two of these are contextual: employment policy, principally at national level; and the notion of employability as a human resources management strategy. A further two are considered in much more detail first, employability in the higher education (HE) context both in terms of HE policy and the HE curriculum. As the last of the four categories we focus on the individual perspective: self-perceived employability, or how individual graduates can make an evaluation of their own career potential going forward. This is not the end of the story. While our work is somewhat Anglo-centric, and rooted in the post-industrial economies (Bell 1976), we also intend to demonstrate that these are increasingly global concerns. We suggest that employability has a ‘smoke and mirrors’ quality that has distracted attention from some fundamental issues in relation to graduate employment, including the offshore migration of graduate-level jobs, potential mis-selling of the extent of graduate-level opportunities (Scurry and Blenkinsop 2011), and as yet unknown threats to employment sustainability posed by predicted high levels of automation of many types of work (Oliver 2015).