Much research into how universities seek to support their students’ graduate employability has focused on academic strategies such as graduate attributes and work-integrated learning, or the employability benefits of part-time work, volunteering, and extracurricular activities. However, the work of the professional staff who support these strategies is seldom addressed. In this article, we report findings from our documentary analysis of 376 Australian university job advertisements for professional roles directly responsible for graduate employability programs and services. We characterise employability as a proto-jurisdiction: an ecology of distinct forms of professional expertise and responsibility with ambiguous, elastic, and porous boundaries. We argue that despite the importance of graduate employability to institutions’ strategic and students’ individual goals, it is as yet an inchoate field of professional practice, consisting of a diverse range of work tasks, functions, and projects. We discuss implications in relation to quality, coherence, and the strategic resourcing of employability support in higher education.

关于大学如何寻求支持学生毕业生就业能力的许多研究都集中在学术策略上，例如毕业生属性和工作整合学习，或兼职工作、志愿服务和课外活动的就业能力优势。然而，支持这些战略的专业人员的工作很少被提及。在本文中，我们报告了我们对 376 份澳大利亚大学招聘广告的文献分析结果，这些招聘广告直接负责毕业生就业能力计划和服务的专业职位。我们将就业能力描述为原始管辖权：具有模糊、弹性和多孔边界的不同形式的专业知识和责任的生态系统。我们认为，尽管毕业生就业能力对机构的战略目标和学生的个人目标很重要，但它仍然是一个早期的专业实践领域，由各种各样的工作任务、职能和项目组成。我们讨论了与高等教育中就业支持的质量、连贯性和战略资源相关的影响。