ABSTRACT

For many years, a key driver for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has been ensuring that students are prepared for employment post-graduation. This has often resulted in HEIs providing specific modules of study focussing on employability and soft skills. The existing research literature presents a variety of strategies for embedding employability within curricula, often focusing on frameworks to review the provision of employability opportunities within a degree programme. The authors have previously investigated an employability module within an Undergraduate Chemistry Programme at their UK HEI, particularly focusing on students’ perceptions – these coalesced around the themes of personal progression, relevance of the module and interactions. However, before using these findings to further develop the module, it was deemed necessary to investigate the module in a different context. This study investigates the employability module in an Australian HEI and its delivery to undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of different disciplines. Free text comments from questionnaires answered by 85 participants were subjected to thematic analysis in order to understand students’ perceptions of the module in this new context. The new thematic map was compared to that from the original study to reveal several key similarities and differences between students’ perceptions. However, the most important finding is thast employability modules should be tailored to a specific cohort to ensure they are aligned with their needs. This suggests that Central University employability module providers should work closely with individual departments to maximise the impact of these for students.

摘要

多年来，高等教育机构 (HEI) 的一个关键驱动力一直是确保学生为毕业后的就业做好准备。这通常导致高等教育机构提供专注于就业能力和软技能的特定学习模块。现有的研究文献提出了将就业能力嵌入课程的各种策略，通常侧重于审查学位课程中提供就业机会的框架。作者之前曾在英国高等教育机构的本科化学课程中研究过一个就业能力模块，特别关注学生的看法——这些都围绕着个人进步、模块的相关性和互动等主题。然而，在使用这些发现进一步开发模块之前，认为有必要在不同的背景下研究该模块。本研究调查了澳大利亚高等教育机构的就业能力模块及其对来自不同学科的本科生和研究生的提供。对 85 名参与者回答的问卷中的自由文本评论进行了主题分析，以了解学生在这种新环境中对该模块的看法。新的专题地图与原始研究的专题地图进行了比较，以揭示学生认知之间的几个关键异同。然而，最重要的发现是应为特定群体量身定制就业能力模块，以确保它们符合他们的需求。