No matter where you look in the world, the issue of employability – in particular graduate student employability – is high on the agenda for many. From students to regulators to universities, understanding and making effective progress on employability is crucial. We are also finding employability entering into student expectations about the courses they undertake. A recent survey of 2000 UK students by Campus Society1 found a high level of dissatisfaction, such that many (27

Ernst and Young drops degree classification threshold for graduate recruitment: ‘No evidence’ that success at university is linked to achievement in professional assessments, accountancy firm says. (Times Higher Education, August 3rd 2015) So said the headline in a THES back in 2015, but there is more to gaining a degree than either the subject or its classification. Let’s start with the employer perspective and the skills profile which maximises their #employability. There a

Part 1 of this short blog series discussed the nature of #competencies and asked the question: what combination of knowledge, skills, abilities and other attributes does a person need to be competent at doing a certain thing, at a certain level? In this post I’ll talk about a technique we’re developing at Blue Mirror Insights that matches competencies from different sources by looking for common underlying elements of skill, knowledge and ability. This is particularly importa

As competition and markets enter education, there is growing awareness of what a student gets out of education and a career it can lead towards. So students are hunting out what can make them employable both today and into a future where employability is much more valued than just gaining employment. Equal attention in employability is also being shown by educational establishments (schools to universities and colleges) as they seek to attract students. These demand pressures

The UK’s Universities Minister, Sam Gyimah, is taking on a very complex challenge in proposing a ratings scheme for courses. Using such measures as student satisfaction, drop out rates and destinations data are fraught with problems. It is very hard to separate the impact of the whole university versus that of a specific course on both drop rates (which can also feature as someone else’s entry rate) and destinations. Measuring satisfaction is very time specific and so can var

Increasingly, Education, Employers and Employees are thinking about the demands of occupations and the supply of talent in terms of competencies (#competencies) For Education, competencies are becoming a key measure of the employability (#employability) outcomes of course curricula. For Employers, many major organisations are incorporating competency frameworks into their performance measurement models and are using them to describe how they want their people to work. This sh