While higher education (HE) is often framed as a vehicle for social mobility, there has emerged a paradoxical situation of graduates ending up in roles that do not match their educational achievements (ONS, 2019). To ensure that new graduates have the skill sets beyond disciplinary knowledge, there have been calls to embed employer engagement as part of HE delivery. Most notably, Leitch’s 2006 skills review frames employer engagement as crucial to ensuring innovation and workforce development (HM Treasury, 2006). The few reports published on employer engagement point towards workforce development and economic regeneration (QAA, 2014; HEFCE, 2015), and there are indications that educational collaboration between employers and HE can address issues in graduate pipelines (Thayaparan et al., 2014).
That said, it is less clear how beneficial the collaboration is for businesses. While 61 per cent of surveyed academics assumed that knowledge exchange provided businesses with improved skills for innovation, only 21 per cent of surveyed businesses hold the same assumption (HEFCE, 2015). Hence, the question of what motivates employers to engage in diverse activities from curriculum planning to consultancy is left somewhat unanswered.
