Do university students, alumni, educators and employers link assessment and graduate employability?

Abstract

Within higher education literature, assessment and graduate employability are linked and copresented, in that quality student assessment is purported to enhance employability. This research was designed to query the extent to which these same conceptual links are perceived by those actively involved in higher education. Four stakeholder groups from multiple disciplines and eight Australian states and territories (students, alumni, educators and employers) were interviewed about graduate employability (n=127). Interviewers intentionally omitted any mention of assessment to determine whether the various stakeholders would bring-it-up themselves when asked questions such as what is and is not effective for nurturing employability. The results indicated that among the educators, assessment emerged as a dominant theme. While the three other stakeholder groups infrequently used the term assessment, they did discuss related educational concepts and practices in the context of enhanced employability. All stakeholder groups identified a missing link between theory and practice, with educators specifying that link as assessment. Recommendations to improve employability through assessment are the key takeaways from this research.

Supporting Employability by a Skills Assessment Innovative Tool—Sustainable Transnational Insights from Employers

“…In Europe, several positive and effective initiatives have been developed, in particular to the "Not in Education, Employment or Training" customer groups, the European Union has long been trying to predict changes of necessary knowledge and skills of the future population and harmonize existing competencies of graduates with the competencies demanded by the labour market [8]. Despite the introduction of innovative training approaches and specific toolsto increase quality, the evaluation stage still needs to be improved [20].…”

“…The heterogeneous sample of the study (employers from five different sectors and different qualities of the respondents in the companies: managers/owners/associates/employees/human resources managers) because we consider that employers as relevant subjects that are in a position to give realistic assessment of the level of quality of required competencies [4]. They also have a different perception than the educators [26] and they usually identified a missing link between theory and practice [20]; the employers consider the formation of a job candidate an added value, but this is not one of the key issues regarding employability [19].…”

Assessment for distinctiveness: recognising diversity of accomplishments

“…The importance of transferable skills is widely recognised and these are now commonly articulated as graduate attributes or graduate learning outcomes (Clarke 2018; Freeman and Ewan 2014). However, the relevance of these or other learning outcomes to future work still tends to be poorly communicated to students or emphasised through assessment (Jorre de St Jorre and Oliver 2018; Kinash, McGillivray, and Crane 2018). Research investigating student perceptions of curriculum designed to develop graduate attributes, suggests that where capabilities are embedded but not explicitly communicated or assessed, students often fail to acknowledge evidence of their own achievement (Hill et al 2018; Jorre de St Jorre de St Jorre and Oliver 2018).…”

The Effectiveness of Educational Services: an Approach to the Assessment of the Quality

“…Certain aspects of the economic direction, prospects and social role of the sphere of educational services, as well as their quality in the development of modern society were considered by [2,3,4,5,6]. The issues of assessing the quality of higher education are the subject of close attention of a number of contemporary foreign authors [7, 8, 9, 10, 11 et al] In the Russian regulatory and legal framework, the quality of the activities of educational institutions is assessed [12,13].…”