Mapping graduate employability and career development in higher education research: a citation network analysis

ABSTRACT

Greater attention than ever is being placed on how universities enable their graduates to achieve their career goals as a key return on significant private and public investment. Scholars in two distinct fields of research have explored the characteristics and conditions that promote or constrain graduates’ career success: graduate employability and career development. In this article, we present visualisations of direct citation networks among 4068 journal articles focused on graduate employability and career development and consider the disciplinary landscapes that they reveal. Our findings show that despite a clear alignment of research concerns and educational goals, there has been limited theoretical or practical exchange between the two fields. We argue that purposeful exchange between the two fields will enrich both and, when applied to practice, could inform an evidence-based, integrative pedagogy of careers and employability learning in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduates
• employability
• career development
• higher education research
• citation analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).