Student engagement carries power and despair for those involved in higher education (HE) teaching and training. Students should engage with their courses; how else do they learn? Also, students should definitely engage with employability support services; these services offer great advice on how to become employable, identify career pathways, and secure jobs, which is why students attend HE degrees, right?
From what I hear from other academics in UK HE and elsewhere, and experience through teaching technical modules as well as an employability-focused module in an engineering course, student engagement is low, especially when it comes to employability. Identifying the reasons for that is a very interesting conversation. In my opinion, student engagement is affected by several factors; the obvious ones (educators and students themselves), but also the abundance of distractions and the actual topic of employability, especially within the context of technical degrees.
