The Employability Agenda is a core driving force for tertiary education and will remain so for as long as higher and vocational education are seen to be avenues for shaping the transition of post-secondary and mature learners to work and further learning. There are several key points to consider here. First, the term tertiary education means post-secondary and includes both university or higher education and vocational education conducted through private and technical post-secondary educational institutions. Second, the split between university (higher) education and vocational education has blurred considerably over recent decades with the latter offering more degree programs and the former marketing much of their education to students (school leavers and mature age) seeking employment. With the massification of higher education students today are pursuing university studies for the sake of learning and a very high percentage are enrolling in tertiary studies for the sake of employment whether this is initial or future employment or whether the studies relate to an occupation or the acquisition and development of collections of skills and knowledge development in the form of co-curricular and self-advancement or employability-enhancement learning.
So, we all need to take this little word work seriously. It includes: doing the work of a professional practitioner, a researcher, a skilled tradesperson, a disciplinary scholar/professional (e.g. historian), an entrepreneur or other type of businessperson, a person inventing a new job in the rapidly evolving gig economy and people who are inventing jobs to create the life occupations that people need to fill their time since more of our work is being done by computers and jobs have disappeared. More and more we find that work is about making work or making entertainment or streamlining work. Work deals a lot with making and re-making work.
So – another so – tertiary education (and for that matter secondary and primary education plus education for the third age and re-employment training) all need to have a different mindset about education in relation to the purpose of education. It needs to help people to change their mindset and understand more about the seismic changes occurring in work so that learning – how we learn as well as what we learn about and what we learn to do – including learning new ways of learning – all need to change. And, very certainly it is not just the remit of the education sector to take responsibility for the Employability Agenda or to charge ahead with it like another shiny and gimmicky new bandwagon. Industry and the professions can’t sit back and bemoan the lack of appropriate preparation of graduates for their new work arena. We must ask, are industry partners constructively contributing to curricular and university strategic agendas and workplace learning? Are they working with tertiary education to blend pre-entry education and workplace development or just resisting and rejecting the former? Are the educational institutions moving past their traditions of work integrated learning to collaborate with industry on new avenues? What about the workers – their biggest recognition needs to be that they are the only ones who are with them throughout their whole working career – it is they alone who can take the ultimate responsibility for their employability in each new job situation, in creating a multi-occupation career that is rewarding to self and beneficial to their employers and other stakeholders (e.g. clients, colleagues, mentees). Employability is a work–lifelong endeavour pursuing understandings, capabilities, dispositions, new visions, understanding of context and stakeholders’ needs and interests – and recognising that all of this is occurring in a rapidly changing world. Such shifts in context include many scenarios created by four overwhelmingly rapid changes: first, escalating globalisation (with increasing consequences of changing political and economic impact agendas); second, barely understandable or imaginable consequences of the rate of change of digital technology on how people live, work and interact; third, the massively – and generally not for the better – changes occurring to our world (particularly climate change); and finally, how people are responding to the first three – the crusaders, exploiters, ignorant disregarders and disempowered. These four mega changes are the context for employability’s enactment and they influence many other things that employability as an agenda and way forward need to deal with, such as: the impact on work, workforce capacities and consequences of work (e.g. national budgets) of such things as aging populations, gross changes to the professions and their role in serving society, rapid automation of many occupations and loss of work in these arenas, invention of new occupations (particularly in the digital arena and sharing/gig economies) and constant invention of jobs we did not even imagine “yesterday”. Employability is not a simple thing – does this worker have the checklist abilities and qualifications (maybe not even these any more) for this job? Rather it is a re-imagining and reformulating of work from its biggest picture to its everyday successful and rewarding practices to its future imaginings and contributions to the improvement of our lives.
Joy Higgs Will Letts Geoffrey Crisp