Building and embedding employability skills, values, behaviours and attributes requires that higher education courses offer opportunities to acquire and practice the skills through placement and extracurricular activities. This creates pressures for education providers, requiring a re-thinking of how the courses are designed and delivered and how to ensure students have the required skills at exit. This can be perceived as onerous and difficult to achieve, however, in the past few years, there have been a wide range of examples of embedding employability in the curriculum from assessment in modules to programme level that have provided a pathway for providers to increase the practice of employability, as highlighted through compendiums such as this series.
The best interventions require a re-thinking of the pedagogies used in and out of the classroom framed with a future look on how the knowledge and skills will be used in employment. This is often referred to as authenticity; and the most effective way to provide that experience in education is through equal active participation of all the members of the learning community.
