ENHANCING STUDENT EMPLOYABILITY:

Higher Education and Workforce Development

Ninth Quality in Higher Education International Seminar in collaboration with ESECT and The Independent. Birmingham27th-28th January 2005

Graduate Employability: a need for realism?

Geoffrey Hinchliffe

Centre for Continuing Education/Careers Centre, University of East Anglia

Abstract

The current dominant concept of employability has arisen from the pressures of globalisation, economic change and the needs of the ‘knowledge economy’. Its importance is not disputed in this paper. However, its proponents often advocate it in a form which places unrealistic demands on the individual without at the same time addressing their learning and employment needs. The paper suggests that much of employability in fact amounts to a ‘pedagogy of the self’ whereby individuals are supposed to learn and imbibe certain pedagogic prescriptions so that they adopt a particular identity of the ‘employee’. The article suggests that the focus on the discrete individual allied to a a pedagogy of the self needs to be revised in line with the realities of employment in the knowledge economy. In particular, the concept of employability needs to include the need for situational awareness and situational understanding, but this, it is suggested, will lead to a revised concept of the self that is employable: a situated self, dependent on others in situations which are fluid, often provisional and never fully transparent. One or two tactics for the pedagogy of higher education are suggested by way of a method of introducing students to a more socialised conception of employability, drawing on the work of Stenhouse.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

(Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero)

The nature of employability

Conferences and seminars on graduate employability are coming thick and fast these days, though not many are attended by students themselves. This is just as well since only the most self-confident would be profoundly disheartened by what they are likely to hear at these events. For example, at a recent seminar in London (attended by graduate recruiters, practitioners, academics, NGO officials, employers and careers advisors) a prominent graduate recruiter gave a lengthy presentation on what attributes the modern graduate needs to have if they are to be regarded as employable. These include analytical skills, the ability to work in teams and fluent communication skills, both written and oral. In addition, our graduate must possess a sound awareness of relevant commercial drivers and demonstrate an ability to think in business terms. He or she must demonstrate an ability to take difficult decisions and show leadership potential, whilst at the same time also show that they can listen sensitively, showing due consideration to colleagues. They must also show that they are not only comfortable with change but can also initiate and ‘champion’ change (presumably in a sensitive way). In all, the presenter listed over twenty key abilities and attributes and each of these were fully described and broken down in separate paragraphs. The attributes of employability nowadays include intellectual abilities, performance skills, social skills and a range of personal qualities. How many employers themselves possess such a dazzling array of attributes, I wonder ? Can we realistically expect young men and women in their early twenties to already possess (or have the potential to possess very quickly) all those skills and attributes which it takes years for any normal intelligent person to develop (and even then most of us have a few gaps[1]) ? How on earth have we got ourselves in such a position where expectations of new graduates are so absurdly inflated and so unrealistic ?

I want to suggest, fairly briefly, one or two answers to this question before I go on to consider what a realistic approach to graduate employability could involve – and by ‘realistic’ I do not mean by this term deflationary expectations of what graduates can achieve but rather a more adequate concept of what ‘employability’ entails,particularly in the light of the demands of a knowledge economy. Talk of graduate employability marks an advance, of course, on the key skills discourse that dominated much of the 1990’s: we no longer believe (if we ever seriously did) that a degree, supplemented by a few key skills, could characterise graduate employment requirements.[2] Rather, the emphasis is on a range of abilities and skills, including cognitive abilities, knowledge and understanding which got somewhat neglected by the key skills discourse – this was rather unfortunate since it was just those cognitive and intellectual abilities that were supposed to distinguish the graduate from non-graduates. And by distinguishing employability (the potential for employment in its fullest sense) from employment skills (roughly those skills that are best learnt in context) universities are less likely to be seen as poor substitutes for on the job training. However, the emergence of the term ‘employability’ has come at a cost: we seem to want graduates with all the attributes of the expert without investing in the years it takes to develop them.

In a long-awaited but still important book, Philip Brown and Anthony Hesketh (2004) have analysed the recruitment policies of a number of larger companies that employ graduates in large numbers. It seems that some companies have to try harder each year to recruit (and attract) the kind of graduates they want, despite the fact that the number of graduates is increasing exponentially each year. The reason ? Brown and Hesketh offer an explanation which draws on a particular concept of individuality that:

“privileges a Darwinian model of charismatic leadership where performance rather than knowledge or expertise is used to legitimate existing authority relations and the huge wage inequalities found in many American and British companies.” (P190)

The authors are able to show, in convincing and entertaining detail, just how graduate recruitment policies – individual profiling, group activities, interviews and psychometric assessments - are used to pick out these potentially charismatic individuals and how these policies help to re-inforce the view that real ‘stars’ are thin on the ground but that only stars can drive companies forward – only ‘stars’ can really be the agents in the knowledge economy.[3] The authors also demonstrate that this view of the ‘talented individual’ is not only to be found in the private sector but also the public sector as well.

In order to convince recruiters that they are stars, graduates need to construct a narrative of employability which takes the form of a “reflective project of the self” (Brown and Hesketh, P 220). This requires a sustained personal narrative in which particular experiences – both academic and non-academic – are shown to have both helped form broader life-based aims and to have been in part formed by these broader aims. The aim is to present one’s life as pretty much a seamless whole in which all setbacks become experiences which either re-inforce one’s aims or appropriately modify them. The strategic-minded graduate had better leave one or two minor loose ends – to be convincing it’s a good idea not present ones life as an entirely seamless pattern. But the overall idea is clear: one must ‘own’ one’s whole life as something which exists for the agent in a more or less transparent state: what’s not transparent can’t be owned and so best left out altogether. This ideal of personal development has led Richard Smith (2004, P38) to speak of a “a culture of knowingness, a one-dimensional self-awareness that posits transparency as a ready ideal” and links this to a naïve Cartesianism and a non-problematic concept of agency. This concept of the self knows nothing of luck, of the ancient Greek tuche andknows nothing of Machiavelli’s fortuna: this self makes its own luck, of course. And there is nothing in this self to discover since it’s an empty vessel, waiting to be filled.

In some ways it is surprising that the transparent self still survives at all given the amount of criticism it has received throughout the twentieth century. But it has outlived a whole number of art movements (surrealism, abstract expressionism) as well as psychoanalysis. Its continuing existence has persisted not only in the face of numerous philosophical critiques (this is only to be expected): it has even survived being called into question in popular culture (for example in films such as John Ford’s The Searchers, or Last Tango in Paris). The same company executives who extoll the contemporary employability narrative of a transparent, non-problematic self most likely also think that American Beauty is a cracking good film.

Ideas of graduate employability are, then, fuelled by a concept of selfhood which places increasing demands on graduates to construct a narrative of employability before they have even got a proper job!

This concept of selfhood is further reinforced by a certain pedagogy of learning, a pedagogy which marks a shift from the educator to the learner. This is sometimes interpreted as a form of empowerment: the agent becomes the director of his or her learning which is managed (the business vocabulary is not accidental) according to the learner’s needs (Fryer (1998), P7 provides a typical statement of this sentiment). But I want to suggest that something more subtle is happening as well, with the shift from educator to learner. We normally think of a pedagogy as a form of instruction with certain aims and methods directed by those with the appropriate authority. Furthermore, we assume a pedagogy implies some kind of curriculum which is delivered within an institutional setting. In this sense, a pedagogy may be libertarian, authoritarian or somewhere in between but in all these cases it is a set of methods and procedures which have their source in the teacher. These methods are the means through which the educational aims are achieved, that is the means through which, it is hoped, the learners absorb new knowledge, understanding, skills, character formation or whatever it is that is prescribed in the aims of the pedagogy. The methods and procedures remain the preserve of the teacher: they are the means, the vehicle by which the teaching/learning takes place.

But in pedagogies of higher eduaction and lifelong learning it is the learner who takes on the mantle of pedagogy: the learner must become his or her own teacher. This can happen through personal development, self-reflection or through ‘managing your own learning’. This does not mean that, in assuming a whole pedagogy, a learner always teaches herself: learning may or may not be self-directed but in either case it should always be self-managed. Above all, our learner must assume a learner identity: a person has to live out a pedagogy so that one is able to “acquire the self-image of a lifelong learner” (Knapper and Cropley, P 49). It is through the construction of this identity that one is able to become the bearer of a pedagogy – without a teacher, without an institutional setting and without a curriculum: the pedagogy consists precisely in those unwritten, ghostly prescriptions which are always self-prescriptions and because they have this self-prescribed nature are emblematic of ones own self-empowerment and, indeed, of one’s own emancipation.[4]

Thus it is that employability prescriptions on the one hand and pedagogic prescriptions on the other pleasantly fuse: in order to maintain that ‘narrative of employability’ our bright young graduate has also to acquire the identity of a lifelong learner as well. (Life means life, by the way: one maintains one’s learner identity to the grave. There is no experience that is not, at the same time, a learning experience and there is no time that one can shed the image of the ‘learner’). The affiliation between learner identity and employability on the one hand and Foucault’s conception of self-formation through training and discipline on the other, are too obvious to be spelt out at length. Lifelong learning has become, unwittingly perhaps for some – especially those who still cling to lifelong learning and employability as a form of self-empowerment and self-emancipation – a weapon of market discipline and all the more effective for becoming a weapon of self-discipline.

Now, I want to suggest that this version of employability and lifelong learning, a kind of pedagogy of the self or auto-pedagogy, is unrealistic for two reasons. First of all, it places onerous burdens on individuals which, over a whole life, are only realistic if you have only yourself to worry about. As soon as one has domestic responsibilities, children, aged parents etc, etc. then there will be times – and these times may last months and years, not days and weeks – when one’s own concerns become of lesser importance and when self-reflection and self-development become distant memories simply because one is too busy reflecting on, caring about and developing the lives of others. So much is (or ought to be) obvious and I shall spend no more time on this reason.

The second reason is less obvious and needs a certain amount of explanation. I shall first of all briefly examine the requirements of a knowledge economy and then spend a bit more time elaborating the context in which these requirements are played out. I shall then be in a position to suggest revisions to the pedagogy of employability and lifelong learning and, as a consequence, suggest a more realistic approach to graduate employability.

Knowledge, skills and understanding

I want to emphasise something which may at first sight seem paradoxical : namely that we all carry, as individuals, a knowledge deficit – known unknowns as has been famously said. The more emphasis there is on knowledge as both an asset and commodity the less likely it is that an individual will be able to carry all the relevant knowledge inside his or her own head. In part, this is due to the sheer quantity of information and its complexity, both of which grow yearly.[5] It is also due to the context and the form in which knowledge operates. The point has been well put by Geoffrey Hodgson (1999):

“Action always takes place in a material and natural integument but it deals more and more with intersubjective discourses concerning the interpretations, meanings and uses of information” (P185)

Knowledge is embedded in different kinds of situations and only if one masters a discourse is one able to use such knowledge in new situations. It is more than likely to be only partially codified and remains in peoples heads (by the time it has been documented it is probably already out of date). Hodgson therefore emphasises the way in which knowledge involves “socially transmitted cognitive frames and a shared social language” (P200). Thus, as an individual, I carry a knowledge deficit partly because I can’t possibly know everything that needs to be known but also, and crucially, because of the socially embedded nature of that knowledge. I can be a knowledge bearer as a participant in a discourse (or at the intersection of more than one discourse) but my participant status attests to my dependence on others.

It is not only in respect of knowledge and understanding that we are situation-dependent. Skilful behaviour depends crucially on the ability to ‘read’ situations so as to modify the performance accordingly. Of course, I can learn a skill in the sense that I can learn a series of techniques. For example, I may learn how to give presentations – all the way from their preparation right through to handling feed back at the end. I may learn how to present information in an attractive way and I may also learn (and remember) the art of ‘eye-skimming’ the whole audience at regular intervals. But none of these techniques will tell me how to judge a particular audience’s expectations at a particular time. Nor will these techniques tell me how they should be modified in the light of those expectations.[6] What is needed is therefore a situational understanding[7] which allows the techniques (in this case of communication) to be modified accordingly. Moreover, it is only through situational understanding that any kind of skill transfer can take place: although some IT skills automatically transfer (Windows is the same in Singapore as it is in Yorkshire) the majority of skills that form part of employability need the agent’s situational awareness for transfer to happen. This does not mean that situational awareness can take the place of skilful technique: but techniques consist of a repertoire which can be played and improvised – without the repertoire there can be no performance at all.[8]

These thoughts may become clearer if we consider a so-called generic skill, problem solving. Now if there were such a definable skill as problem-solving (applicable to all problems) then whoever could market it would be a millionaire many times over. The closest one could ever get to such a skill would be a methodology which might be applied to a closely defined and related range of problems (for example, there are methodologies on the market which give a procedure for locating change factors in a malfunctioning process). On top of this there are also stages in problem solving that one can follow – roughly investigation/scoping the problem/proposing solutions/selecting a solution/testing, etc. But neither the closely defined methodology nor the project life cycle approach amount the skill of problem solving. The one gives a technique, applicable over a small range of situations and the other simply identifies the stages that one needs to undergo if one is going to successfully address a problem.