This study explored how Australian music technology courses teach employability skills. A curriculum mapping of 63 undergraduate courses was conducted with course learning outcomes aligned against two benchmarks. The first benchmark was the Ten Skills for the Future Workforce which identifies key employability skills graduates will require in the coming decade. The second benchmark was the Australian Qualifications Framework Specification for the Bachelor Degree which defines the generic skills graduates must obtain through Australian Bachelor Degrees. This curriculum mapping reveals that Australian music technology courses teach Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Computational Thinking, New Media Literacy, and Design Mindsets universally. However, this curriculum mapping also reveals a deficit in employability skills related to Cross-Cultural Competency, Transdisciplinarity, Virtual Collaboration, and Collaboration more generally. The implications of this mapping is that Australian music technology educators seem to be prioritizing specific technical and creative skills over higher-order applications of skills and knowledge which are contextualized in their broader social and cultural contexts. Finally, this article shows how curriculum mapping can be implemented to embed employability skills progressively across a program sequence using a case study from the School of Music, University of Queensland.

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Australian MCs, like other hip hop artists around the world, often quote lyrics from others in their own works. Australian MCs quote from a wide range of texts to help situate their music as being distinctly hip hop. The positioning of these quotes allows MCs to place themselves into a lineage of hip hop music, and this lineage identifies their influences. By quoting from previous works, Australian hip hop artists are constructing a hip hop identity that is constructed through an interaction with other works. Drawing on ethnographic research with hip hop practitioners in Australia, I will argue that lyrical borrowing and quotation is an essential aspect of hip hop culture. This interaction with other, global, hip hop texts not only forms a crucial structure to the genre, but has also drawn many of the artists into the genre. The intertextual nature of the genre is something that the MCs seek to explore, with many wishing to insert themselves into the narrative of the genre.