Towards an integrative pedagogy of careers and employability learning in higher education

Towards an integrative pedagogy of careers and employability learning in higher education

Graduate employability has become a core strategic concern for universities, representing an important outcome of and the return on public and private investment in higher education. In response, universities have adopted a variety of pedagogical and strategic approaches, in and alongside the curriculum, to support their students in developing employability capital, career management skills, and professional identity. Two fields of research have explored how university graduates achieve career success: graduate employability and career development. Graduate employability research has investigated the individual, institutional, and socio-economic factors that influence graduates' career success, with particular attention paid to pedagogical strategies that contextualise employability within the curriculum of particular disciplines. Career development, as a subdiscipline of applied psychology, has focused on how people form career interests, make career decisions, pursue career goals, and cope with career challenges. However, despite a clear alignment of educational goals, there remains limited conceptual or practical integration of the two disciplines. In this thesis, I set out to bridge this gap between career development and graduate employability in higher education. This thesis is composed of three journal articles, two published and one submitted for review. The first is a systematic bibliometric review of the graduate employability and career development literature. This article demonstrates the gulf between the two bodies of literature, identifies research themes within them, and argues for more purposeful exchange of ideas between scholars in each field. The second is a document analysis of 376 job advertisements for careers and employability professional roles in Australian universities. This article describes employability as a professional proto-jurisdiction made up of several distinct specialty areas of expertise. It warns that, collectively, the professional field lacks a cohesive foundation of shared theoretical and professional principles. Together, these first two articles illustrate the gap between graduate employability and career development in research and in practice, respectively. The third article, a conceptual paper, describes the key pedagogical principles that underpin an approach to careers and employability learning which bridges that gap in current research and practice. This paper concludes this thesis by articulating a vision of an integrative pedagogy of careers and employability earning, which honours the shared concern of both career development and graduate employability for student agency and success, draws on the conceptual and practical strengths of each, and integrates key pedagogical theories and methods from each.

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