Business students’ thinking about their studies and future careers

ABSTRACT

The enduring employability of twenty-first-century workers demands explicit and career-long attention. As a result, higher education finds itself tasked with enabling students to negotiate their career-long cognitive and social development as professionals and social citizens. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the study reported here seeks to understand students’ career-related development. The participants reported in this article are 6,004 undergraduate business students enrolled with one of 32 Australian universities. The students created personalised employability profiles using an online tool. Drawing from the tool’s data, the article reports students’ text-based responses to the question of what they would change about their degree programmes. Students express concerns about the potential to establish a career as early as the first year of study. The findings suggest the value of adopting a research-informed, metacognitive approach to employability development to establish the relevance between the learning assigned to students and their future lives and work.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate employability
• higher education
• social cognitive theory
• metacognitive approach
• career development
• business

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Australian Business Deans Council for funding research with the employABILITY Initiative. Our thanks go also to our project colleagues and the many institutional leaders, educators and students who helped us to create the dataset and support students in their employability development and career preparedness.

Disclosure statement

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

Access to survey instrument

The employABILITY tool and resources can be accessed via the educator site located at https://developingemployability.edu.au/. The tool and resources are available without cost and shared via a Creative Commons (BY) license.

Notes on contributors

Dawn Bennett is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education with Curtin University, where she directs the EmployABILITY thinking and creative workforce initiatives. Dawn's research focusses on the development of employability. Dawn has contributed to over AUD$6m in research grants, 240 academic articles and 10 books. Her free metacognitive model for employability is used by faculty and students at over 50 institutions worldwide. Publications appear at researchgate.net/profile/dawn_bennett.

Elizabeth Knight is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University, Melbourne. A key area of interest is equity of access to and in tertiary education, the provision of institutional information and support for transition into post-school education. She has worked in tertiary education in professional and academic roles and was a member of the AUA at the University of London. Her publications are available at researchgate.net/profile/elizabeth_knight8.

Colin Jevons is Course Director, Bachelor of Business programs, Monash Business School and Associate Professor, Department of Marketing, Monash University. The courses he manages have over 6000 students. His research priorities are graduate employability, student retention and attrition, teaching critical thinking and scepticism in accounting education, and discipline-based research in 21st century brand communication.

Subramaniam Ananthram is an Associate Professor of International Business at Curtin University, Perth, Australia and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK. In addition to his discipline based teaching and research, he is interested in student employability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Business Deans Council [grant number 12516_Bennett].