Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such ability – professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews' were conducted with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current debates about the directions of higher education.

The myth of job readiness? Written communication, employability, and the ‘skills gap’ in higher education

The higher education landscape is shifting under neo-liberal forces that are increasingly aligning the goals of business, government and education. This shift is engendering debate around the world about the role of higher education institutions in producing employable graduates to feed national prosperity in the emerging knowledge economy. As this evolution continues, we need to consider how we enhance generic graduate capabilities as well as the disciplinary expertise of our undergraduate students. Our graduates should possess the knowledge, skills and values to enable them to cope with dynamic employment opportunities, but they must also understand, through the benefits and constraints of their disciplinary perspectives, who they are and how they might contribute positively to the heterogeneity they will encounter in their local, regional and global communities.

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Graduate attributes: implications for higher education practice and policy

This paper examines the current understanding of the development of graduate attributes in higher education. The current understanding is rooted in the system-based, behaviouristic approach that emphasises the identification of graduate attributes and curriculum mapping. This approach gives little consideration to more relational-holistic, person-based approaches that emphasise students' agency in determining which graduate attributes they develop, why they choose to develop them and through what means. Although the system-based approach is necessary, this paper suggests that the person-based approach supplements it by addressing the development of meaningful graduate attributes for students in their evolving life and career circumstances. The development of quality graduate attributes involves more than the alignment of what is intended, taught and learned; rather, it occurs through students developing personal graduate attributes in a self-directed and genuinely engaged manner. This person-based perspec...

Self-directed, genuine graduate attributes: the person-based approach

The authors of this viewpoint initially came together as  colleagues to debate whether occupational therapy curricula (the programmes that each author teaches into)  prepared students to not only survive but thrive within  the increasingly complex or supercomplex world of professional practice (Barnett, 2011). Through reﬂective  conversations on our collective experiences working  with students at capstone (transition-to-practice) level,  coupled with further exploration of literature surrounding graduate attributes, employability and professional  issues within occupational therapy practice our attention focussed on capacities of agency and political skill,  and speciﬁcally, the extent to which our graduates are  explicitly or implicitly prepared to be agentic and politically adept in practice. In the context of this viewpoint,  we refer to agency as an intentional motivation to work  toward strategic goals (both personal and organisational). As a construct, Ferris et al. (2007) propose that political skill is comprised of four critical dimensions: social  astuteness; interpersonal inﬂuence; networking ability and  apparent sincerity. Early professional success in most  contemporary workplaces we argue, as have others (e.g.  Pollard, Sakellariou & Kronenburg, 2008), relate to graduates’ political adeptness.

Transition to practice in supercomplex environments: Are occupational therapy graduates adequately prepared?

Graduating nurses' self-efficacy in palliative care practice: An exploratory study

Government, employers and professional societies want university graduates who are better prepared for employment. The UTS Work‐Ready Project is a curriculum renewal initiative that aims to improve graduates’ professional attributes and employability skills. The paper provides an overview of the project’s curriculum renewal strategy of ‘contextualised by the profession and integrated into the curriculum’. Representatives of professional societies were interviewed for their understandings of the professional attributes required of a contemporary graduate. Eleven key work‐ready graduate attributes were identified, with relevant sub‐attributes, understandings and skills. These formed a matrix for the development of potential learning activities. The project website gives access to matrices of generic and professionally contextualised work‐ready learning activities. Each work‐ready activity includes learning and teaching support resources that can be downloaded to enable easy integration into existing subject...

Skye Nettleton

Papers

Contextualising and integrating into the curriculum the learning and teaching of work-ready professional graduate attributes