As the access and participation agenda moves beyond broadening the range of young people getting into university, the focus falls on the institutional readiness to support an increasingly diverse student body: to fit the university offer around the work, family and personal commitments of learners and to create an equitable experience for international, commuter, mature, first-in-family and the myriad of other ‘non-traditional’ students.
Similarly, with an increasingly heterogenous student population, conventional notions of what it means to belong to a university are diverging: one size no longer fits all. The upsurge of digital methods of learning, sparked by COVID, has shown the potential for student-centred approaches and practices to work with learners as individuals, approaches that celebrate diversity, promote equality and inclusive learning.
It is not enough just to support graduates into a specific job, we know a job is no longer for life. Students now are having to think beyond linear careers and into parallel careers (a series of simultaneous, often fixed-term or zero-hours roles). Job hunting is no longer a period between employment but is likely, at some level, to be a continuous process with some form of unemployment permanently on the horizon. Remote working and the advance of AI will continue to challenge established notions of the workplace itself and how it operates. Graduate readiness, then, has become about preparing students to navigate a complex and shifting world, much more about the kind of people we are and will develop into, rather than simply ‘what we should know or can technically do.’
