1. Employability in the UK

How Government and Universities Operationalise Graduate ‘Employability’

Let us begin with a definition, proposed by Mantz York in a 2004 ESECT report (7), and oft repeated thereafter, such as in the 2009 Universities UK and Confederation of British Industry report (8). Employability is: “A set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider economy”.  

Employability has become one of the keywords in higher education. With employment prospects increasingly uncertain but graduate debt guaranteed, the need for students at all stages of university life to enhance their employability is an area of growing policy and public interest. The HE landscape is changing to meet the challenges of the 21st century, often condensed as VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Universities are thus reorienting towards employment, vocation and employability.

So, what do government bodies, think-tanks and employers mean by employability? Universities state regularly that employability is not just about getting a job but about a broader, lifelong career: employability thinking is long-term, not short-term. Developing employability also needs to be distinguished from Personal Development Planning (PDP) – whereby a student actively assesses their own academic progress and potential. When university education is exponentially expensive, employability is about getting ‘value for money’ (on this see the HEPI/HEA report of 2016: 13-7), but, again, thinking long-term, also achieving a ‘return on investment’. The desire to enhance career prospects is considered a key factor in university attendance, explaining why graduate intake has been broadly increasing year on year, as HESA data shows. So, the British government's May 2016 white paper, on which more below, declares, “Higher education leads to a better chance of being employed, and an average net lifetime earnings premium comfortably over £100,000, compared to holding 2 or more A-Levels” (42). However positive this may be, in tandem, “employers report a growing mismatch between the skills they need and the skills that graduates offer” (42). Consequently, the government has commissioned research to improve their “understanding of the value added by a higher education degree” (58).

Employability is now at the heart of governmental higher education policy. In November 2015, the Government published a 'green paper' (a consultative document), Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, stating its core aims as: “to raise teaching standards, provide greater focus on graduate employability, widen participation in higher education, and open up the sectors to new high quality entrants” (emphasis added). This resulted in the  white paper, Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Knowledge Economy and Student Choice, mentioned above (a 'white paper' is a government policy document signaling future legislation), which was presented to Parliament in May 2016. This paper declares, “more must be done to address the variability in employment outcomes for some graduates and to ensure all students and employers get the best returns on their investment” (42). As this legislation passes through parliament in 2017, employability is thus a major aspect of HE that the government’s new Teaching Excellence Framework will assess (alongside student satisfaction and retention), thereby linking universities’ funding to employment ‘results’, amongst other factors (13). Just as research has been funded according to quality since 1986 (RAE) and 2008 (REF), now so will teaching, via the new Office for Students (OfS) and a new “research and innovation” funding body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

One key factor in employability is: which university and which subject a student chooses. An April 2016 Institute for Fiscal Studies report found substantial variance in graduates in this area, which highlights the necessity for addressing employability well before university. Amongst British HE institutions, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds and Edinburgh lead the QS Intelligence Unit’s Graduate Employability rankings. Oxford offered highly specific information on its graduate destinations in 2012, but while only more limited information is available from the Oxford website, some of the detail can still be found in a Times Higher Education article. Leeds won The Guardian Entrepreneurship award in 2016; while Edinburgh claims that six months after graduating, 94% of its students are in employment or further study. A British-specific TopUniversities.com article has the same UK institutions at the top as QS does, but adds UCL, Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham and King’s College London. UCL has a keystone Innovation and Enterprise initiative, which involves projects like an intensive three-day Enterprise Boot Camp: “UCL Innovation and Enterprise brings together academics, the business community and other potential beneficiaries of our research in order to maximize its potential for commercialisation and ‘real world’ use”. Entrepreneurial guest lectures encompass such subjects as “Show me the money”, focusing on raising funds for an entrepreneurial venture. Bristol’s Bristol Futures initiative is built around three pathways: Innovation and Enterprise, Global Citizenship, and Sustainable Futures, and courses aligned to these will be introduced in the 2017-18 academic year. King’s College London offers the King's Leadership & Professional Skills Award (KLPSA), a programme designed to enhance students’ employability skills, with the award featuring on students’ Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR), and focuses on: leadership, project management, communication, presentation, innovation & problem solving, networking and interview techniques. The 2015 Times Good University Guide notably not only adds Birmingham to the top British universities for employability, but puts it first: indeed, the university claims to have invested £5 million in student employability services. A 2016 Business Insider’s list adds the London School of Economics. More research is underway so that “prospective students have a better picture of the labour market returns likely to result from different institution and course choices” (white paper 58). As this level of thinking ahead is not familiar to teenagers, the onus is on parents and schools to focus on and address choices of subject and institution, so these groups also have a key role to play in employability.

The white paper declares that “insufficient competition and a lack of informed choice” (8) are the main weaknesses of the higher education system in England. There is currently no information on English Literature graduate employability per specific institutions, and the subject rarely has its own category in extant studies. However, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies April 2016 report the good news for entrepreneurial literary scholars is that while not faring as highly as Medicine, ‘European Languages and Literature’ offers reasonably good employment prospects: anticipated salaries of £23, 800-£26, 000, which is higher than ‘Maths and Computer Science’ (46, Table 9). The HESA 2014-15 Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey  shows that 67% of ‘Language’ graduates were in full-time work alongside a 6.10% level of unemployment, compared to Medicine and Dentistry with 89.8% in work and 1.3% unemployed, or Computer Sciences with 74% in employment and unemployment at 10%. This rose to 78.2% of Language graduates in professional employment within 3 1/2 years after graduation.

The white paper notes that the Small Business and Enterprise Act 2015, “enables the Government, for the first time, to link higher education and tax data together to chart the transition of graduates from higher education into the workplace better” (58). With the white paper criticising the lack of information, alongside “insufficient competition”, pressure is added by the government’s encouragement of exponential expansion in new providers (9). Consequently Universities will be making their employability prospects much clearer and more specific in the future, and considering making employability a more fundamental facet of their degrees, as explored in the next posting.