Marketing graduate employability: understanding the tensions between institutional practice and external messaging

ABSTRACT

Do the narratives of employability constructed by higher education institutions for marketing purposes differ from the conceptualisation and/or the realisation of employability within those institutions? The study reported here drew on interviews with 16 senior academic and student support staff who were tasked with developing student employability at one of nine institutions in Australia, Canada and the UK. We employed Holmes’ conceptions of employability as possessional, positional or processual to analyse how the interviewees conceptualised employability and the presentation of employability on the institutional websites. We found that most institutions’ employability marketing narratives were inconsistent with the institutional practice reported by staff. We explain this tension in the context of two competing characterisations of higher education: a university-student transaction view; and a learning view. We emphasise the need for internal and external narratives to align and advocate the need for engagement in a constructive and critical dialogue involving all stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate outcomes
• graduate employment
• marketing
• higher education
• student experience

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Graduate Careers Australia, whose support made possible the Smith et al. (2018) study titled Employability in a global context: Evolving policy and practice in employability, work integrated learning, and career development learning. We would also like to thank the senior leaders who gave generously of their time and expertise. Finally, we would like to thank Joy Higgs, Will Letts and Geoff Crisp for permission to reproduce early findings from our work, which will appear in their 2019 edited volume titled Education for employability (vol II): Learning for future possibilities. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Brill-Sense Publishers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.