Knowing how well higher education providers prepare learners for the working world is becoming increasingly important at all programme levels, and this is nowhere more apparent than with vocational education training. Ensuring our learners can hit the ground running and become immediately productive is essential for the relevance, and probably the survival, of New Zealand’s Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs). Yet while there is much commentary about the challenges of transitions from tertiary study into employment and the ‘employability skills gap’, there is all too little given to how this is being addressed in teaching. This paper describes the work of an inter-institutional research collaboration into current approaches being used to embed skills that enhance employability. Drawing on a number of frameworks and models, the research team selected ten core attributes: positive attitude, communication, teamwork, self-management, willingness to learn, thinking skills, resilience, innovation, entrepreneurship and cultural competence. The team then identified a range of strategies being used by highly commended teachers to enhance the ten employability skills: firstly, by observing classroom and online practices of 23 selected teachers from participating organisations; and secondly through follow-up interviews with the same teachers. The key takeaway of this research is raised awareness and intentionality of the overt and covert approaches vocational educators are using to enhance the employability of their students.

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Social media has been a growing phenomenon since the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous in everyday life, for personal communication (such as photo-sharing, managing events, requesting and offering feedback/review) and for business and government organisations (direct marketing and communication) (Skold & Feldman, 2014). In academia, such affordances allow researchers access to potential participants, as well as audiences, at a level previously unthought of. However, just because we can use social media, should this always be our first option? This article argues that we are academics first, and must be scrupulous in our critique of both the efficacies and the pitfalls of over-reliance on online communities. Social media certainly offers tremendous advantages. As an example of user reach, Facebook -the world's largest 'active' social media platform -had 2.910 billion monthly active users in October 2021, and increased by roughly 15 million (+0.5 percent) in the three months leading up to October 2021. These latest figures indicate that roughly 36.8 percent of all the people on Earth use Facebook today (Datareportal, February 2022). While the Social Media Research Group (2016) notes that there are many definitions of what social media is and is not, it offers the simple definition of social media as "web-based platforms that enable and facilitate users to generate and share content, allowing subsequent online interactions with other users."Social media applications can be grouped into distinct categories such as blogs (which includes Twitter), content communities (such as YouTube and Flickr), social networking sites (for example Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat and LinkedIn), collaborative projects (wikis and social bookmarking, like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok) and virtual game and social worlds (Skold & Feldman, 2014).The use of social media as a communication tool by higher education providers is therefore no anomaly, but rather a logical extension of such digital affordances. Faculties and cohort groups may have Facebook pages, as do many alumni associations. Lecturers and administrators use messaging, tweets and posts to communicate with students, marketing and event coordinators create stories to build an Instagram following -and so it goes (Fraser et al., 2017).Interestingly, and directly applicable to the subject matter of this article, is a growing body of scholarship which questions and critiques the assumption that the affordances of social media improve faculty-student relationships. Forbes and Gedera (2019), for example, discuss the "potential divide between teachers' intentions and students' experiences, and between teachers' and students' expectations of learning and support" (p. 2). The same authors also observed an additional issue in online communication regarding 'voice,' where students said that they preferred free-flowing, spontaneous vernacular language, but teaching staff and learning facilitators often preferred to model academic discourse, with specialist terminology, and crafted composition...

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