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Curtin University of Technology
Curtin Office of Assessment, Teaching and Learning

Graduate Employability

Project overview

The aim of the project is to build the capacity of university teaching staff to enhance the employability of their graduates through

  1. tools to identify collective strengths and gaps in the capacity of course teaching teams (full-time, part-time and sessional staff) to identify, model and assess skills and attributes which lead to graduate employability;
  2. resources including reflective questions to enhance identified strengths and address gaps; and
  3. a piloted process of mentoring course leaders to participate in benchmarking partnerships focussed on graduate employability with like teams in diverse universities.

The key premise of this project is that if national priorities and community expectations around graduate employability are to be met, academic staff—the principal source of knowledge creation, curriculum development and career advice for students must be properly prepared to identify and assess key attributes and skills in the curriculum, and engage students to achieve those modelled skills by drawing on industry experience and on discipline-based research. This is usually central to course review, a key quality improvement process requiring change, and management of change—in this case, by course leaders. A recent study of academic leadership found that formulating and implementing desired change is not an event but a complex learning and unlearning process: if something new has to be implemented, those who are to deliver it have to do something new which requires them to learn a gap. Academic development in teaching and assessing attributes and skills is best situated in the context of a course, and managed by the course leader who works closely with the course team, including sessional staff whose voice is often silent in course review since sessionals are not typically paid to engage in professional development and other activities.

Aims of the project

University teaching staff must be capable of teaching and assessing key attributes and employability skills and engaging students to achieve those skills by drawing on industry experience and research. The focus of this project is on building the capacity of course teams—appropriately supported by academic development and careers service centres in universities. Just as effective teams of employees in the workplace need the ‘required mix’ of employability skills, so too do the staff who teach a course. The emerging literature in graduate employability suggests that key capabilities in employability-focused course teams include the capacity to:

Professional Development