The Rhetoric of Employability

Bridging the University - Employer Divide

UTF Project Report & Recommendations

Dr Raphael Hallettr.hallett@leeds.ac.uk

University of LeedsSeptember 2012

Faculty of Arts

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Contents

Acknowledgements 4

Introduction 5

Chapter 1: Languages of Employability 9

Chapter 2: Employer Case-studies 18

Chapter 3: From Employability ‘Skills’ to ‘Behaviours’? 28

Chapter 4: Project Recommendations 32

Appendices 34

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Acknowledgements

The Project was funded by a University of Leeds Teaching Fellowship awarded in January 2010, and I’d like to thank Chris Butcher for his guidance as the project outline took shape and evolved.Over the last few years, a University of Leeds community of academic and professional staff has energised my interests in employability, and I’d like to thank Tess Hornsby Smith, Matthew Treherne, Abi Rowson, Kevin Linch, David Platten, Bob Gilworth, Antonio Martinez-Arboleda and Sue Holdsworth in particular for their reflections on the way employability is re-shaping both the curriculum and student expectations of it.

I’d also like to thank the History Student Career interns Fay Rajaratnam, Katherine Roscoe, Jenny Lloyd and Francesca Kinsella for their essential input. Their research and insights provided the core evidence for the project conclusions relating to employer expectations and perceptions. By investigating the academic curriculum and the world of professional recruitment, they proved particularly dextrous in bridging the very gulfs the project investigates.

Dr Raphael HallettSeptember 2012

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Introduction

Project Aims

The UTF project set out to analyse the ‘rhetoric’ of employability as it has manifested itself in different contexts in recent years, in an effort to shed some light (at local levels) on the language used within an increasingly dominant discourse in Higher Education.

The project was inspired by two main considerations. The first was the increasing visibility and use of a language of ‘employability’ to define the ethos of Higher Education, a language which now inhabits the assumed priorities of students, the stated objectives of university curricula and the definitions of ideal graduate attributes. The second was a more personal consideration, emerging from my dual role as lecturer in Early Modern History, concerned with discipline-specific research and tuition, and the School of History’s ‘student development officer’, concerned with issues related to the personal and career development of our students.

As the rhetoric of employability grew in volume within the HE sector, the University of Leeds and my own role, it seemed necessary to turn the critical light of textual analysis on to a discourse that is now crucial to the way we define student progress and graduate identity. Indeed, one that has become central – in an even more contentious sense – to the way we define the function of the University itself.

The problem which helped structure the project was an evident gulf in the way the University described student excellence and the way in which employers described excellence in terms of their ‘ideal graduates’. The divide is quickly apparent if one switches, for example, between the assessment criteria for a first class English essay and the patter of a graduate recruitment case-study on a corporate website. One asks for ‘subtle critical nuance’ whereas the other demands ‘pro-activity to build cross-functional effectiveness’ (Danone recruitment website).

This fault-line, which used to separate ‘academic’ criteria and values from their ‘professional’ equivalents, has certainly shifted in recent years. The language of ‘employability’ has been used explicitly to connect the two worlds of academic and professional achievement, and the values and ‘skills’ of employability are now being woven into the fabric of mission statements and learning objectives at module, programme and curricular levels within the university.

However, certain divides persist. This is partly because the debate continues about whether ‘employability’ should be a key constituent of a University education, but largely because the language of ‘employability’ is not (and has never been) a settled language, but one shaped differently in each context of its usage.

This UTF project set out to look at how employability was being defined and discussed at different levels. It looked at University strategies and projects (e.g. in the Leeds Employability Strategy and within the LeedsforLife resource); at module learning objectives and assessment criteria (the question here is often whether employability is visible); at Graduate recruitment literature and employer websites; at the language that students themselves use to define their progress and expectations. It also touches on the rhetoric of educational, governmental and business policy advisors who shape the future of Higher Education.

The Project findings, discussed in Chapters 1-3 below, are a set of provisional commentaries on the way ‘employability’ is defined through a different ‘rhetoric’ in each context, and to what extent a dialogue exists between those contexts.

The Project recommendations, set out in Chapter 4 are a concluding set of proposals on the way we can enhance that dialogue so that academics, students, careers professionals and employers

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have a better ‘common ground’ on which to found expectations of student achievement, progress and graduate transition.

i. Identifying ‘rhetorics’ of employability

Given the limited time-span of the project, we needed to demarcate the particular areas where the rhetoric of employability might usefully be examined. At one end of the spectrum, we see the language and values of employability bleeding into the specialist terminology of university programme and module descriptors, to jostle with the quality assurance language and subject specific terms that define ‘learning objectives’, ‘skills outcomes’ and ‘assessment criteria’. This is employability, in other words, being written into the scholarly development of students at university, and into the proposed function of the University as a provider of education and graduate skills.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the more familiar ‘home’ of employability language; the corporate and professional literature of graduate recruitment brochures, business websites and ethos statements, where ideal employee attributes and characteristics are outlined and where the ideal graduate entrant into that world is sketched, often as part of a value or mission statement about the company in question. These sites of ‘employability’ discourse and debate are still very different worlds, despite being connected by a scaffold of supportive links and platforms.

In between these two quite different worlds, there is an increasingly crowded territory inhabited by those thinkers, writers and advisors who attempt to mediate between ‘academic’ or ‘university’ definitions of student employability and the equally specialised (and opaque) terminology of graduate employers. Included in this community are those involved in careers and personal development guidance, the creators and managers of university employability strategies and web resources, and those who look at the university – employer relationship from a more panoramic position: the policy makers, think-tank spokespeople and HE / Business analysts who comment on the current and future relationship between education, skills and the workplace.

Judging from the growth of this burgeoning community - and of the networks, fora and conferences it hosts - it is not an exaggeration to suggest that it is developing into a professional sector or ‘industry’ itself: ‘employability’ is employing lots of people. This community explicitly addresses the idea and practice of graduate employability but is perhaps (like all relatively new disciplines or communities) only starting to self-consciously reflect on the language and conceptual parameters within which it defines its core idea.

Whilst this project concentrates more on the extreme ends of the spectrum as outlined above (the university and the employer), some of the most useful future work on employability will no doubt look at the identity, assumptions and language employed by those ‘translating’ employability from university to professional contexts, and vice versa.

In an era where the ‘value’ of a higher education is being hastily converted via unstable academic and business currencies, a heavy responsibility rests on this new army of ‘employability’ messengers who flit between academic and professional worlds. We hope that their Chinese whispers of skills, attributes, competencies and behaviours translate somehow, and make equal sense at the respective courts of scholarship and work. We know what happens to the messenger who brings bad news... and a confused, blotchy letter can make difficult reading.

The project report feeds from, but does not engage directly with the pedagogic discourse on employability. My detailed engagement with the scholarship on employability (another rapidly growing sphere) and the terms and concepts it uses, will be left to my USEF (University Student Education Fellowship) research project on employability and assessment, which will follow the

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completion of this project. For now, we are concerned with case-studies of the employability rhetoric that is actively read and digested by the student and the graduate within university and professional contexts.

ii. An ‘Arts’ education and the Professional Sector: Divides & Crossovers

My research comments broadly on the relationship negotiated by the University of Leeds in relation to ‘employability’, but it emerges primarily from my experience within the Faculty of Arts. The findings are fuelled by student research interns whose experience of academic progress and ‘employability’ provision centres on the Schools of History and neighbouring disciplines and activities within the Faculty.

The findings therefore raise particular points of interest about the perceived relationship between an ‘Arts’ education and professional success or ‘readiness’; about the commonality or disjunction of skills and values nurtured by the Arts curriculum at Leeds and those in demand by employers. It raises the question of whether a Faculty of Arts education can be regarded as ‘vocational’ in a way that is meaningful to academics, students and employers. In this way, the project complements and extends the work done by Abi Rowson and Dr Matthew Treherne in their investigation of whether (or more accurately, how) academic research skills contribute to the employability and professional development of our graduates. Their report, Students, Research and Employability in the Faculty of Arts, sets out some positive findings about crossovers in between student scholarship and professional competence that this project consolidates.1

What is also pointed out repeatedly by their report, however, is that while we can trace the professional benefits of a research-led education from a retrospective position (often provided by arts graduates late on in their career) it is much more difficult to get current students (and indeed their tutors) to recognise and articulate the ‘employability’ skills that an Arts degree is furnishing them with. The issue, then, is one of finding the ‘right’ language and rhetoric of employability, and asking whether we can breach and connect the respective rhetorical silos of academic strategy and corporate-speak so that both languages are understood (via translation) by students, tutors and employers.

In this light, perhaps the most valuable analysis and commentary has been gathered by Fay Rajaratnam, the Level 3 History intern who acted as research intern on the project for a year, and by a series of briefer reports and commentaries undertaken by a group of History Student Interns, a team who run career groups in the School. Their work – disseminating information and staging career talks on the professions of Business, Teaching, Law, Media and Politics - put them in a particularly engaged and mediatory position as Arts students building routes to professional destinations.

Both receiving and in part creating employability provision, they have been in the most effective place to comment on whether the provision of the Faculty and University is in fact familiarising them with the concept of ‘employability’ and actually providing them with recognisable employability skills. They have also been in the best place to judge whether the university ‘message’ about employability is coherent or confused, and (perhaps with particular reference to the Employability Strategy message of ‘Decide, Plan, Compete’) whether it is getting through at the right levels, at the right times.

1 Rowson, A. and Treherne, M., Student Employability and Research in the Arts (University of Leeds UTF Project Output 2011)

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iii. Employability: Student Positions and Expectations

This report is directed firstly at a university staff audience, to those involved in thinking through and providing university-based employability advice, teaching, assessment and co-curricular activities. It also hopes to be useful for employers (in particular those already communicating with universities, such as the members sitting on the new Employer Advisory Groups connected to the Faculty Employability Committees) as they contemplate the transition of their future employees from university to work. However, the core aim of this report is that its suggestions percolate to the students themselves, through changes to student education influenced by the recommendations set out at the conclusion.

It is increasingly apparent that students, on entering university, occupy a very challenging position in relation to a set of new ‘discourses’ that they have to acclimatise to. Faced, as has always been the case, with a new set of terms and concepts associated with their core discipline, they use a transition period to get to grips with this novel, specialist academic language and gradually develop towards mastering it. Now, it seems, they face another challenge. By foregrounding the ‘employability’ agenda in more detail and more intensely, from our marketing and induction material onwards, we introduce a fresh set of terms, ideas and expectations that run in parallel with the academic terminology and concepts we have always laid in the students’ path. A double-baptism awaits them.

From the first week onwards, departments ask students to delve into the often abstract and self-sufficient language of academic scholarship on the one-hand, whilst appealing to them to make that academic study relevant, adaptable and (to use a most well-worn and suspect word) transferable to ‘employability’ on the other. Tensions in these two sets of expectations are bound to develop, as the student prioritises one over the other, and turns in one favoured direction rather than looking both ways.

If we do not help the student manage these two discourses (which are connected, but in sometimes tangential ways) then we risk facing a student backlash against or resentment of the new emphasis on ‘employability’, which can seem a distraction or burden as they face the academic challenges of university study. This is a particular risk if we fail to choose our language carefully (our students are very good at spotting empty rhetoric – we train them to be), and if we construct ‘employability’ as an alien or supplementary set of demands and ideas. Instead, we need to locate ‘employability’ within the processes of academic research and inquiry that engage and fascinate the student.

This project report discusses the consequences of doing this, for the university curriculum itself, and for the language we use to design, describe and assess it.

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Chapter 1: Languages of Employability

i. A Dominant Discourse?

It is testimony to the new centrality of ‘employability’ to higher education that the page “Choosing Leeds” on the University of Leeds website begins with these words:

Choose Leeds and you will leave us as a highly skilled, well-developed individual able to make the transition into the workplace easily. You'll stand out by your ability to talk confidently about your attributes and skills, and the way in which these have been shaped by not only your academic experience but everything you have done throughout your time here.2

Striking by their absence, indeed, are references to the words learning, knowledge, research or education, which you might expect to make an appearance in the first paragraph of a research-intensive Russell Group University’s marketing page. We do hear in passing about something called ‘academic experience’, and there are parallel pages (such as ‘Learning at Leeds’3) that concern the curriculum and quality of teaching. This introductory rhetorical flourish, nonetheless, is one fully dedicated (a little paradoxically) to the act of exiting the University, and to the ‘skills’, ‘attributes’, and ‘confidence’ the prospective student will take to the workplace.

The University is therefore both unveiled and eclipsed at the point of introduction, the reader is ushered into the University and then, after the narrow foyer of one paragraph, seemingly chaperoned to an exit beyond which it is the hubbub of the open-plan office, rather than the whispering Library, that you hear. The University is sketched primarily an effective pathway to the workplace, the student’s identity already morphing into that of the employee before it is even born.

2 Choosing Leeds, University of Leeds webpage, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/info/20026/choosing_leeds (accessed September 2012)3 Learning at Leeds, University of Leeds website, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/info/30311/learning_at_leeds (accessed September 2012)

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In the left hand index of the ‘Choosing Leeds’ page, the prospective student glimpses ‘exciting opportunities’ which turn out to be those beyond the curriculum. “The opportunities available to you mean that you can develop a range of skills which will make you sought after by employers” it reiterates, before adding jauntily that “it could be a life-changing experience!”4 Sub-headings then unfurl to deal with the Leeds for Life project (more on this below), volunteering, study abroad, work experience and ‘SPARK’ business start-up opportunities. This is what is exciting about Leeds, the marketing appears to suggest: we can take the excellent academic curriculum for granted as a foundational, but mundane, feature of the institution the student is applying to.

A couple of rungs beneath ‘exciting opportunities’ we have a link to a section headed ‘Improve your employability’, which contains information about the types of employers who target Leeds graduates, and showcases the University’s freshly phrased employability statement and strategy (analysed below). This gives potential applicants a triple-dose of employability ‘wooing’ as they ponder their options on the ‘Choose Leeds’ site. The colourful curriculum is left to shyer spaces of the online domain: the wallflower to the seductive flirtations of employability, perhaps, or simply the more assured courtier who doesn’t have to try so hard?

It is easy, certainly, to focus on the marketing speak of a particular section of the University’s online presence and to argue the (excessive?) dominance of employability as an idea. There’s no question about its growing prominence, however, and our University websites are, day-by-day, heightening the visibility of this idea or phenomenon as one that shapes the purpose and ethos of a higher education. Departmental homepages once rather statically designed as monuments to research profiles and projects tend now to bubble with news stories about students’ co-curricular achievements, to be incised with updates about career opportunities and alumni speakers, as the discourse of employability encroaches on the domains of scholarship. The language defining the ‘student experience’ is up for grabs, and employability is stretching out its tendrils.

This is neither a surprising nor a necessarily bad thing, as Universities evolve to cater for new times, new audiences and newly expectant students. But it does present us with a potential clash of discourse, as the language of academic scholarship is forced to compete - or merge - with an emergent language of employability and ‘graduate competence’. Indeed, this clashing couple will regularly be recognised and negotiated by students as they progress through their academic career, so it is instructive to look at how the University itself is balancing a commitment to each within its communication strategy.

ii. The Employability Strategy & the ‘Leeds for Life’ project

The University’s public-facing statement about employability has the expected dash of hubris about it. The University of Leeds, it promises, “provides all of its students with the opportunity to develop high level skills and attributes that enable them to become exceptional graduates, well prepared to make an impact on global society”.5 Here employability stretches beyond the narrow domain of

4 Choosing Leeds, University of Leeds website, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/info/20026/choosing_leeds/413/exciting_opportunities (accessed September 2012)5 University of Leeds Employability statement, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/info/20026/choosing_leeds/1520/employability_statement (accessed September 2012)

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employer expectations to take on the world, and to suggest, usefully, that ‘employability’ can take on broader meanings linked to graduate readiness and responsibility.

As the employability statement unfolds, it champions the regular engagement of the University with graduate employers and high-ranking companies, the opportunities for work placements and international work experience, and a personal tutoring system that signposts careers guidance at every level. Such a layering of extra-academic opportunities would have been a relatively conventional offering in universities over the past couple of decades, and one that largely preserves the separate spaces of curricular and extra-curricular development.

What the statement proceeds to focus on, however, is the way in which ‘employability’ is now being linked and threaded through the academic curriculum at the University of Leeds, through the Leeds for Life project. It is this attempt (in language and in modular practice) that is of most interest to this project, dealing as it does with the perceived ‘connections’ and ‘gaps’ that exist between student scholarship and employability.

A fusion between academic and professional development is promised; “students are... supported in learning to articulate clearly and confidently what is distinctive about them and their University of Leeds education” and encouraged “to recognise the skills they are getting from their course”.6 Although extra-curricular activities are advertised and encouraged, the statement makes clear that “employability is embedded in the curriculum”7 so that students encounter opportunities and activities at the level of their discipline, and within their scholarly activity.

Behind the scenes, in the more cloistered world of University policy, the Employability Strategy backs up these claims with some more detail. It’s definition of ‘employability’, whilst certainly not the snappiest, assumes that it grows within the student’s academic development:

...the achievements and capability, formed through the integration of knowledge, skills, experiences and attributes from the academic curriculum and co-curricular activities, needed to gain graduate employment and successful career options (my emphasis). 8

It also insists “that employability is the responsibility of the University as a whole”, no doubt mindful that the question of careers and professional development can seem ghettoised within particular domains of ‘careers centre’ provision and ‘work experience’ opportunities, separate from the main body of curricular development. The strategy stresses that, ideally, the academic community will be fully drawn into this collective responsibility, and that employability will be written through the curriculum at all levels, an ambition currently taking form as the University’s Curriculum Enhancement Project designates a ‘thread’ of employability as part of its weft.9

The Employability Strategy therefore insists that each student will progress through carefully defined stages, “Decide – Plan – Compete” by finding employability opportunities within the curriculum as well as in extra-curricular activities. The Leeds for Life project, perhaps the University’s most high-profile development in student support in recent years, is the machine that promises to energise and deliver the promised outcome, comprising a student-facing site that showcases ‘employability opportunities’ within each department, acts as a hub for personal tutoring and (most significantly for

6 Ibid.7 Ibid.8 University of Leeds Employability Strategy, http://www.lts.leeds.ac.uk/Employability/EmployabilityStrategy.php?PAGE=124 (accessed August 2012)9 University of Leeds Curriculum Enhancement Project, Programme Threads Group, http://curriculum.leeds.ac.uk/programme-threads/whats-happening (accessed September 2012)

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this research) helps students identify and articulate the employability skills they are developing as they study and learn:

It’s about inspiring them to get the most out of their academic and co-curricular experiences and build on their time studying at the University of Leeds. We want our students to be able to recognise the value of everything they have done at university and be at ease articulating this clearly and confidently.10

The site encourages students to develop a ‘Living CV’, where they can note the graduate skills they are developing within their modules as well as in activities outside the curriculum, and it positions “academic excellence” at the heart of the “University values”11 that a Leeds graduate takes with them into a professional world:

As we shall see in the Employer case-studies (Chapter 2), the corner concepts, above, of community, integrity, inclusiveness and professionalism are ones that also dominate corporate self-definitions, and this sharing of ‘founding values’ is of especial interest at a time when British Higher Education is under scrutiny for its commercial and corporate experiments. It is also very significant that the very language by which ‘academic excellence’ is described (when one clicks on the central jigsaw shape) deliberately straddles academic and professional nuances within 5 of its 7 bullet points:

The ability to work autonomously, take the initiative and to be self-directed in undertaking tasks. The ability to identify and define problems and evaluate the merits of particular solutions. To be critically aware of, and informed by, current knowledge, and its possible applications , in a

discipline or professional specialism. To analyse information, synthesise views, make connections and, where appropriate, propose

creative solutions. The ability to think flexibly and independently.

Strategically and precisely, the power of ‘academic excellence’ is being described in the language of ‘tasks’, ‘solutions’ and ‘flexible thinking’ that are equally (or indeed more) common within corporate discourse. ‘Disciplinary knowledge’ is made interchangeable with ‘professional specialism’, as if the transition between the two is frictionless, and the reader (the audience is potentially student, academic and employer) is invited to interpret academic development through a mesh of professional terms. This quite deliberate merger of two languages is understandable, and from a certain viewpoint, helpful: it acclimatises the reader to the act of translating between two potentially valuable, but distinct, rhetorics.

More questionable, however, is whether the language of employability and professionalism is finding its way beyond Leeds for Life and into the core ‘academic’ language that students will encounter within the curriculum. Do we find it adequately or properly represented within programme 10 Leeds for Life, ‘Our Ethos’, https://leedsforlife.leeds.ac.uk/About.aspx (accessed August 2012)11 Leeds for Life, ‘Our Values’, https://leedsforlife.leeds.ac.uk/Values.aspx (accessed August 2012)

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specifications, module descriptions, and learning objectives? Does it emerge clearly in the midst of the ‘skills outcomes’ and assessment criteria that we draw up to explain - to students and to ourselves - what we mean by academic excellence?

Many academics, of course, will argue that the domains should be kept separate, that academic conventions, standards and achievement should be described in terms that are authentically ‘academic’. However, at this stage it seems that the merger of academic and professional rhetoric within the curriculum (partial and sporadic as it is) is well underway, and that our job must be a matter of making sure this merger is supervised carefully and effectively for staff and students, rather than of trying to hold back or staunch the confluence of terms.

Structurally, there are clear signs of block-like impositions within every stratum of curriculum design to meet the challenge of the employability agenda. The most obvious is the obligation for each module proposal to designate 3 - 5 (no more, no less) ‘Leeds for Life’ employability skills that the module develops:

This ubiquitous form represents an obligation, certainly, for module designers to think about the way their teaching provision nurtures professional and civic attributes. However, it is a rather crude demand that ends up being perfunctorily and haphazardly completed by module designers, whose actual module descriptions, learning objectives and activities often remaining entirely unaffected by the ripple of skills skimmed in the Leeds for Life form.

A neat tick-box is all very well, but is the language and content of module description and assessment actually saying anything new about employability to the student audience?

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Leeds for Life Development of skills

Please indicate which skills will be developed as part of this module. Please choose a minimum of 3 (Maximum of 5) from the list below.

Analytical SkillsCommercial Awareness Leadership

Communication Skills Planning and Organisation

Confidence ProfessionalismCreative Problem Solving Research Skills

Critical Thinking Self Awareness

Ethical Awareness Social and Cultural Sensitivity

Flexibility Team WorkingIndependent Working Time ManagementInitiative Use of Knowledge

iii. The Language of Module Design, Description and Assessment

Within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leeds, it is still very common to find a module description that expresses, true to a resilient logic, a description of the academic content and activities the module offers, and little more. The reader in these cases is treated to a specialist summary of the central topics, themes and debates that will engage the student. The summary is unapologetically set forth in the discipline-specific language that the module designer deems appropriate, and that the student is expected to pick up. In other words, the modular language starts as it means to go on, with statements such as: “the student will gain an acquaintance with anthropological theories relating to tribal peoples and be able to integrate their understanding of anthropology into their own historical discourse’ (HIST2004 Barbarians and Anglo Saxons).12 No concession to the language of ‘graduate competency’ here.

The module description for FREN3751 Gender, Sex and Cinema in France, to give another example, dives straight into the terminology and debate that the module will revel in, asking students a series of breathless questions:

How have stars (e.g. Bardot) helped to shape the sense of what masculinity and femininity are? - How has cinema reflected and contributed to changes in definitions of gender? - How central is the love story as a film-narrative? - Can the love-story genre accommodate homo- as well as hetero-sexuality? - Does women's cinema differ from men's cinema?13

The aim here is, quite rightly, to enthuse and inform the potential and enrolled students by delving into the key questions and controversies of the module. Such module descriptions will be packaged, necessarily, in a thin latticework of ‘Quality Assurance’ statements about learning objectives and skills outcomes. Even these are often inward looking, listing objectives and outcomes that are relevant only to the subject matter or scholarly conventions of the particular discipline. For the above module, the learning objectives are entirely self-contained:

It is within the ‘Skills Outcomes’, as one would expect, that the concession to more transferable rhetoric comes, but in fact only two bullet-points out of five refer to skills that are applicable beyond the disciplinary context and the subject material:

Although most Arts module documents now push the description of skills and outcomes a little further and in a more ‘outward’ direction towards non-university contexts of learning and application, 12 University of Leeds UG Module catalogue, http://webprod1.leeds.ac.uk/catalogue/dynmodules.asp?Y=201112&M=HIST-2004 (accessed August 2012)13 University of Leeds UG Module catalogue, http://webprod1.leeds.ac.uk/catalogue/dynmodules.asp?Y=201213&F=P&M=FREN-3751 (accessed August 2012)

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demonstrate knowledge of a variety of French films within their historical and cultural context

demonstrate familiarity with and understanding of theories of the relationship between film and gender

critically analyse a film or film extract demonstrating awareness of the contribution of formal components to meaning 

construct and present a clear, sustained argument on the themes central to the module, individually or through teamwork, in written and oral form

Research and clear presentation of findings Independent thinking & working and group / collaborative working

the cited module is by no means an extreme example. The language of employability and skills has merely been drip-fed into Arts module proposals and descriptions over the last decade. With the exception of modules that explicitly offer work experience opportunities, external collaborations or innovative learning activities, the language is usually so marginal or understated that the student will pay it little attention. Tutors, often entirely at ease with a self-sufficient academic discourse, similarly express little desire to ‘translate’ the scholarly activities they encourage into terms relevant to graduate attributes and competence.

The situation is, however, changing. Faculty of Arts modules that engage with professional and civic institutions such as museums, archives, charities, community groups and businesses are being designed.14 Such modules build in learning activities and assessment forms that oblige students to consider modes of research, presentation and liaison that anticipate the challenges and audiences faced by the graduate professional. The Faculty has also become increasingly accommodating to more explicitly vocational modules, with increasing numbers of its students taking the Careers Service inspired module, CSER8000 Work Placement Year,15 and extending their degree to 4 years and adding an “X with Industry” tagline that is immediately attractive to employers.

Increasingly in such modules, emphasis shifts away from traditional assessment formats and away from the conception of the ‘lone scholar’, privileging instead forms of collective scholarship and collaborative knowledge production and dissemination. Within these modules, a more recognisable language of employability emerges, since the scholarly activities resemble the activities of the workplace, at least in the forms of communication and interpersonal relationships they demand.

Caught in a pincer movement co-ordinated by University ‘employability’ strategy on the one front, and employer expectations on the other, even the rigid and inward-looking language of programme and module specifications is on the turn. Spectacular examples of this changing discourse are the new programme learning outcomes devised by The School of Modern Languages and Culture as it re-structured its programmes during 2010-11. There are still the discipline-specific learning outcomes that you would expect, such as being able to “communicate fluently and appropriately, maintaining a high degree of grammatical accuracy, in a target language with native or other competent speakers”. Significantly, however, many of the stated outcomes leap beyond the confines of the discipline to suggest global, cultural and professional awareness. Previously generic iterations of subject-specific benchmarks, the outcomes now positively crackle with professional and cultural kudos:

14 Examples of modules with links to professional and civic contexts include HIST2550 Research Collaboration, HIST2540 Students into Schools, ARTF2092 The Museum, ARTF2069 The Art Market, THEO3360 The Religious Mapping of Leeds, MUSS2620 Music Technology and Techniques15 This module represents a year-long placement with a local, national or international company, and need not be discipline-specific. Assessment, however, tests the way in which students reflect on their placement and relate it to their academic development. It is the flagship module of a Careers service committed to engaging with, rather than supplementing, the curriculum.

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Demonstrate global and cultural awareness and a particular understanding of one or more cultures and societies other than one’s own

Demonstrate cultural sensitivity and an awareness of and ability to engage with and respond to the ethical issues raised by the programme of study

Effectively communicate information, arguments and analysis in a variety of media... demonstrating independent research skills... and professional competencies

Work autonomously within a structured environment Conform to professional standards and norms of ethics, presentation and communication of

Information Effectively identify and articulate the skills and attributes developed during the degree which

will distinguish the student within the multilingual and multinational workplace, and compete for opportunities and be successful in the workplace

There is a powerful attempt, here, to justify the study of languages and related subjects in relation to cultural, moral and professional criteria. The outcomes express the value of University education in terms of contexts, situations and audiences that the successful graduate may encounter. It does this without compromising the language of subject-specific knowledge and understanding. There’s certainly a touch of hubris here (taking these outcomes seriously, the all conquering University of Leeds linguist may expect to head-up the UN by the age of 21) but the ambition is at least couched within the detail of scholarly development and has grounding within relevant disciplinary skills. Employability emerges from the scholarly rigour of the programme.

As a broader experiment, I have mapped a selection of Faculty of Arts module learning and skills outcomes against some of the most common graduate ‘competences’ stipulated by employers (see Appendix, pp.36-37). The results - as you may expect - are mixed, with some module outcomes mirroring a range of competencies whilst others make little gesture towards them. This is not to say, of course, that the modules with a lower ‘match’ fail to nurture ‘employability’ skills, it is just that they don’t promise or announce that they do so. We clearly need to heighten this academic expression of the broader skills that scholarship develops. Only then will the students get a clear and authentic message about the possible crossovers between the two spheres of academia and employability.

The next challenge, then, is to heighten student access to these richer sets of statements within module literature and within the active discourse of teaching: the tuition, feedback and reflection processes that occur as the module unfolds. At present the most ambitious, inventive statements about scholarship and employability often lie as hidden promises, neatly interred within bundles of Quality Assurance literature and Committee minutes. In such enclaves, they may in fact contribute little to the way the students (or indeed tutors) articulate the skills that are developed through university scholarship.

Assessment criteria

In terms of student-facing language, perhaps the most resistant discourse to change is that of assessment criteria. This, after all, is a language by its nature wedded to fixity, since assessment is an activity cherished for its stability, its carefully defined standards, and the loyalty of its language to the subject it assesses. There is often an almost mimetic relationship between assessment language and the subject in which that assessment takes place, since one supports and validates the other.

Assessment criteria tends to vary from discipline to discipline as a result, but also to be consistently impermeable to the influence of competing discourses, including that of employability and graduate competence. The anxiety is that external discourses (and their associated values) might dilute the integrity of an internally logical and robustly conventional assessment system. The examples below show a few extracts from Faculty of Arts assessment criteria, adjacent to a law company’s comment on desirable skills:

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The divide is one between ‘nuance’ and ‘nous’; between the refined terms of subject-specific excellence and the corporate definitions of employer excellence which can be deliberately and pointedly anti-academic in the criteria they use. The student is asked to strike a pose of elegant exposition, whereas the flexible graduate dances to a more pragmatic “think on your feet” tune.

Another evident gulf is the imagined participant in each case. Arts assessment criteria by and large presume and measure individual productivity, the ‘lone scholar’ whose research, analysis and exposition is judged as a product of one mind, at its best ‘original’ and singular. Professional evaluations, on the other hand, tend to be expressed in a language which gestures towards individual excellence (innovation, creativity and leadership, for example) but is equally if not more concerned with interpersonal skills, teamwork and collaboration. The employee’s excellence is described as part of a collective, networked identity. In this sense, our lone-scholar language of academic assessment fails almost entirely (within conventional modules at least) to prepare students for the rhetoric of professional evaluation, which has a social and behavioural emphasis absent from the way we judge most academic outputs.16

There are many good reasons for suggesting that assessment criteria should be wary of erosion or compromise by professional and corporate idioms. Academic standards, qualities and continuities are enshrined by this discourse as a means of protecting a tradition of academic judgement which would lose respect if it became mutable to the latest whim of corporate-speak. However, as assessment activities evolve, to take in scholarly practices that have a more obvious professional relevance, the question of assessment criteria and language becomes a pressing one. If academic assessment is guided, in part, by the exhibition of scholarly and professional skills, and by the student’s reflection on that doubled excellence, then shouldn’t the language of assessment and feedback reflect that translatability? Can subject specific criteria jostle happily with terms borrowed from professional definitions of graduate excellence?

There’s such a difference of discourse at present that any merger seems a long way off, so we may, for the moment, supplement existing criteria with those that evaluate the professional skills, outputs and behaviours that are threaded through many learning and assessment activities. But given that we constantly pester students to read, digest and understand the assessment criteria that lie behind the feedback we offer, it must be an area of language we pay particular attention to as ‘employability’ beds itself into academic development. After all, if we are asking our students to reflect on and articulate their own employability as well as their scholarly excellence, we must adapt and clarify the language we use – at the heart of academic assessment - to judge the skills that our students demonstrate.

16 I discuss this further in Chapter 3, below, pp28-33.

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Chapter 2: Employer Case-studies

In this section, we move beyond the university to look at the ways employers perceive graduate excellence, and how they profile their ideal employee in terms of skills, behaviours and values. The case-studies below emerge from the research undertaken by a team of History student interns as they ran designated career groups for the School of History and investigated their relevant professions. The choice of professions follows the interns’ interests, but also gives a reasonable sample of the destinations of Arts students within the University.

Working in these roles as they studied for Arts degrees, the interns were each in a particularly good position to judge the gulfs and links that existed between their academic skills and the graduate attributes that employers were demanding.

In each section, the analysis is prefaced by a table showing the ten skills most commonly demanded by employers in that profession.

i. Legal Professions

Teamwork Communication skills

Problem solving& analysis

Motivation Planning & organisation

Academic performance

Individuality Commitment Commercial awareness

Responsibility & trust

‘We are looking for individuals who can demonstrate a strong academic performance... but beyond this we want to see evidence of teamwork’17

Fay Rajaratnam researched the corporate literature and website of Allen & Overy to get a sense of how Law companies (a popular destination for arts graduates, usually after taking a conversion course) define their ideal graduate. She noted that the company explicitly asks for evidence of strong academic performance (many professions are only implicit about this), but on a broader basis than degree result, looking “beyond degree level, at A-levels and UCAS points. This shows an eye for graduates with long term consistency in performance and commitment to academic excellence”. The importance of team-working and communication skills are stressed, and the company looks for evidence of highly disciplined, structured and creative modes of thinking, emphasising motivation, planning, organisation and problem-solving as desired attributes and behaviours. Other key skills that resonate through their literature, Rajaratnam suggests, is an analytical mind and a willingness to take responsibility, with the company promising to place new recruits into positions of decision-making and negotiation early in their training and careers.

Speculating on the connections between Faculty of Arts education and the desired attributes listed in Law company literature, Rajaratnam draws out the important ways in which an Arts degree nurtures ability within the legal profession. “The ability to analyse, a pivotal aspect of the Arts degree, is undoubtedly useful here. Students learn to research many sides of an argument, looking at strong points and flaws in order to come up with a reasoned conclusion: processes of thought that suit the legal profession”.

The training received in written and spoken communication over the length of the degree is also highlighted as an obvious ‘employability’ skill in this instance, particularly if the student is trained in close textual and case-study analysis and argumentation, activities central to the lawyer’s daily

17 Allen & Overy Recruitment http://www.aograduate.com/en/Work-For-Us/What-We-Look-For

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work. But there seem to be gaps and jolts, too. Rarely does the Arts student recognise their academic activity and assessment as a form of ‘problem-solving’ (a term used across the law company websites and the professional spectrum generally). The strong emphasis on teamwork and interpersonal communication “is not clearly emphasised within arts modules, although group projects and presentations are assessed parts of some optional modules”.

Equivalent mental processes are described in very different ways in each context. Of course a History essay, for example, is nearly always a ‘problem-solving’ exercise (an argument in response to a problematic issue or controversy), but rarely does the tutor’s advice or student reflection put it that way. Arts students, as we saw in the section on ‘assessment criteria’, are still largely judged on a ‘lone scholar’ model of research and writing, which sidelines the interpersonal and collaborative skills that employers seek, even if these are in fact involved at many stages of the student’s research experience.

Law and ‘commercial awareness’

Fay Rajaratnam dedicates a whole page of her law employer report to the issue of ‘commercial awareness’, a skill that epitomises one of the conundrums of the employability agenda at University. How can a student show and develop ‘commercial awareness’ in a largely non-commercial, university context? Feedback each year from the University of Leeds Careers Service isolates this as the graduate’s prime weakness, reporting that whilst Arts students have a very good grasp of their subject-specific skills, they have little understanding of the way these need to be adapted, to be made commercially meaningful to employers.

Knowledge of the professional world students are about to enter - with its culture, traditions, etiquette, its distinct modes of interaction and collaboration, the diverse company histories, values and social connections - is clearly lacking as students prepare for applications, interviews and training. University will always act as a buffer to commercial awareness, not any more in the clichéd sense of ‘ivory tower’ aloofness, but simply because the university is designed, essentially, to be a very different place, with competing academic, personal and developmental opportunities that sometimes enhance, but often marginalise and distort perceptions of the working world. Tackling the issue of ‘commercial awareness’ in relation to the expectations of law firms, Rajaratnam writes:

Commercial awareness, as defined by law companies, is an awareness of business world and current affairs. Not only this, it also includes knowledge of certain business concepts such as how organisations work and why situations arise. For such law firms, this knowledge is imperative because lawyers need to understand their clients businesses, build long-lasting relationships and provide solutions to any problems that may arise. Commercial awareness allows them to do this effectively.

Demonstrating this knowledge is more than simply reading the Financial Times before an interview and memorising jargon. Candidates will need to show that they understand what it all means and have evidence to back up their ideas. For a student to develop their knowledge in this area, they must be genuinely interested in business news. Allen and Overy recommends that students research their deals, look at their clients’ websites and attend employer-led business games and workshops whilst at university. Students need to read widely in the legal, business and general press in order for them to be up to date in trends and issues in the economy and industries.

A tall order, it would seem, for arts students to immerse themselves in the culture of law, business and commerce as they progress through the space of their discipline and their university. However permeable that space is becoming to an ‘awareness’ raised by corporate workshops, careers guidance and employability talks, the university will, we must hope, remain a university rather than some kind of company assessment centre. A student’s ‘commercial awareness’ will (and perhaps

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should) always be compromised or refracted by the experiential distance and difference afforded by a university education.

There is a clear opening, however, expressed by the very terms in which students are encouraged to reach commercial awareness. The emphasis is pointedly on researching the commercial world, gathering evidence about clients, surveying and distilling website information, analysing and commenting on current debates in the industry / sector. All the activities demanded are in fact intrinsic to the research-led teaching and learning that an arts student experiences at Leeds, and to the skills they gather: research rigour (‘research company deals’, ‘read widely’), surveying and epitomising information (‘look at client websites’), critical analysis, debate and argument (discuss thoughts and opinions on controversies’). What is needed, it turns out, is not the development of a distinct or parallel set of skills, but the utilisation of those skills in relation to a different area of enquiry, a different body of text.

In this sense, whilst the routes to ‘academic excellence’ and ‘commercial awareness’ are very different, the navigation skills are very similar. In many cases for the developing arts student, it is not the graduate skill or potential that is lacking but their recognition and articulation of it, and their creative and flexible application of these skills in new contexts.

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ii. Media & Journalism

Creativity Writing Skills Flexibility Ability to work under pressure

Quality

Collaboration Understanding Audience

Trust and Respect Genuine Interest in the Industry

Teamwork

‘We are more concerned with your talent, potential and passion to achieve great things with us, than with your academic background.’18

Our survey of the media sector benefits from a focussed study of the BBC’s graduate recruitment rhetoric (Fay Rajaratnam) and a broader analysis of 15 media job descriptions (and companies) by Katherine Roscoe, who worked as a History Media Intern (2010-11) and editor of the History Student Times (2011-12) whilst studying for a History degree.

In many ways regarded as a ‘natural’ pathway for arts students, given the training in writing, debate and communication that an arts degree offers, the employer literature nonetheless offers up some quite surprising and sobering guidelines to potential graduates. Again, within the BBC’s recruitment material, the emphasis within the key ‘employability skills’ shifts our attention towards collective processes such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘teamwork’, whilst still prizing individual impulses towards creativity and individuality. Roscoe notes a disjunction between what is promised in the Leeds for Life summary of ‘History’ skills and the actual programme content she has encountered:

There is no mention of group work in the History programme description or in most History modules’ list of learning and skills outcomes. Leeds for Life emphasises the importance of group work, including ‘the ability to take responsibility for a team’ and ‘the ability to work in a collegial way towards a common goal’ but whilst claims are made for the transferable ‘group work’ skills that will be gained from history degree, there is little evidence of this throughout the history programme, beyond a select group of Level 2 modules.

Clearly an example, here, of a student spotting the ‘rhetoric’ of Leeds for Life going further than the core content and language of the programme it refers to. The marketing of our student experience and education must be held back from raising expectations and promising ‘employability’ activities and opportunities that are, in fact, only sporadically available within the curriculum. The marketing of our curriculum, as it highlights ‘employability’ as a key outcome, should also spend some time checking what incoming students understand by this term, and whether they actually foreground it as a reason for coming to university. From my own experience working on transition, and surveying A-level and first year student responses for the Curriculum Enhancement Project, students will certainly tick the box of ‘employability’ as a reason for coming to university, but show a strong resistance to their core scholarship being defined by the criteria of employability.

Both Rajaratnam and Roscoe notice the call for ‘commercial awareness’ once again within media recruitment literature: a need for applicants to demonstrate a ‘genuine interest in the media industry’ and in the BBC’s case ’to regularly read the BBC’s local and national news and sports websites, watch TV news and keep up to speed with news on the radio’19 These requirements suggest that university careers and employability advisors need to encourage student research into and engagement with professional sectors, well before the application process starts: a double life of academic and employability research is almost assumed by the ‘person specifications’.

More reassuringly for arts students, ‘clear and creative communication’ is the key attribute written through media recruitment material. But as Roscoe speculates, the structure of learning within 18 BBC Recruitment http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/jts/index.shtml (accessed July 2012)19 BBC Recruitment http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/jts/about-you.shtml (accessed July 2012)

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existing arts programmes and modules does not always nurture the kinds of communication the employers are looking for:

An aptitude for writing is described as an essential skill for nearly all media jobs, but the ability to write an ‘inventive and engaging manner’ is emphasised by job adverts. A key learning outcome for the History programme is ‘the ability to effectively communicate information, arguments and analysis in a variety of forms, including in an extended piece of written work.’ Unlike in a professional environment, however, there is no emphasis on appealing to and interpreting your audience, specifying only that it should ‘conform to academic norms’. Whilst inventive content and an engaging style of writing are emphasised as necessary skills to obtain a first in coursework or exams, only ‘clarity of ideas’ is necessary to achieve an upper second class mark (the most commonly achieved grade).

Oral communication ability is just as highly regarded and requested by media companies as written communication. It aids teamwork, networking and client-relationships and, perhaps more importantly for the graduate, is necessary to interview well. The majority of History courses use presentation as part of their assessment, and seminars implicitly encourage students to communicate effectively to their peers. However, presentations are given in intimate, relatively relaxed environments, and students often do not uphold professional presentation norms, choosing either to sit down or to read extensively from notes. Despite PowerPoint and other communication software being a standard part of professional presentation, it is not required in academic contexts.

Roscoe’s analysis gets to the heart of the ‘employability’ issue as it affects Faculty of Arts students. We know our students develop quickly in areas of academic communication, but do these conventions, as expressed in the language of learning objectives and assessment criteria, really match those of the workplace? The point about ‘audience’ seems especially valuable, since much of our academic guidance trains students to write within strict, subject specific formats and conventions, with a relatively narrow, specialist audience in mind: a closed feedback loop where the academic tutor is both muse and audience to the student’s creativity.

It might be said that, quite properly, we train students to ‘reproduce’ the register and conventions of the research ‘academy’, but the comments above suggest that this can lead to styles of communication that are not flexible enough, not sufficiently aware of different audiences, to meet the fresh demands of the graduate workplace. Also apparent is the primacy academics give to written, rather than oral, communication, and to individual rather than collaborative, expression. The scarcity within the curriculum of opportunities to present in ‘professional’ and technologically creative formats is forcefully identified by Roscoe:

In the programme description it states that ‘We are committed to innovative teaching practices and make use of electronic teaching such as Virtual Learning Environment and online discussion groups.’ However there is little opportunity for the student to engage in creating or shaping the online environment in which they work – it is a passive experience. Perhaps integrating website-creation into certain ‘research skills’ modules would benefit History students?

Things are changing: online discussion fora, blogs, wikis and public-facing outputs are designed as formative and summative assessment types within a growing number of modules within the Faculty of Arts’ provision, including one (HIST2535 Historical Research Project)20 where the primary output is a research webpage or wiki, and where online historical sources are evaluated These activities nurture a heightened consciousness of the importance of medium and audience in communicating scholarship. For each of these assessments, criteria are drawn up, if often hastily, to widen the spectrum of skills and abilities we are judging, and to provide consistent frameworks for evaluation.

20 HIST2535, University of Leeds UG module catalogue, http://webprod1.leeds.ac.uk/catalogue/dynmodules.asp?Y=201213&F=P&M=HIST-2535 (accessed September 2012)

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Before we congratulate ourselves on the increase such learning activities and assessment forms, however, a set of difficult questions remain. Are the right people designing these activities and writing the assessment criteria? Are subject tutors, however innovative, in the best place to be moulding the activities that synthesise academic and ‘employability’ skills, given that their own careers - with a few exceptions - have barely tested their toes in professional or commercial waters outside of higher education? Of course, the answer to this is ‘yes’ as far as retaining academic conventions and research rigour goes, but if we are to create a curriculum with ‘employability’ stitched into programmes (as the Curriculum Enhancement Project21 ambitions through its meticulous ‘threads’ and ‘strands’) its structure and assessment need to be informed, at least, by who know what graduate ‘employability’ means in practice: the employers themselves.

Having grappled for a while with the idea of beckoning ‘employability’ into the core of the university strategy, the next question is how far we invite employers into the sanctum of the University, and its respective Faculties. We already see employers working as guest speakers, as visiting experts, as collaborators for student researchers, sometimes even as designers of learning activities. Do we open our curriculum wider, even within conventionally non-vocational’ disciplines, and allow employers to act more frequently as co-designers of modules, as second-markers and external examiners, perhaps even as joint authors of assessment criteria?

Such questions are likely to test the extent to which we see ‘employability’ at the core of the student-facing curriculum and not just at the core of the rhetoric we use to describe it.

21 University of Leeds Curriculum Enhancement Project, http://curriculum.leeds.ac.uk/ (accessed August 2012)

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iii. Business & Finance

High performance Energy & Enthusiasm

Teamwork Integrity Respect

Communication skills

Leadership Sense of Community

Commercial awareness

Problem-solving

‘We look for people who demonstrate drive, vision and determination, who are passionate about helping our clients to achieve their potential’22

Jenny Lloyd (Leeds for Life Intern, 2010-11) and Fay Rajaratnam, the intern researchers who looked at ‘employability’ literature within the business and finance sector, presumed that the gap between ‘arts’ and ‘professional’ skills in this area would be widest. However, recent literature, for example by David Nicholls,23 suggests that the gulf here is less serious than they feared, finding that a path of transition is well worn, with nearly 20% of History graduates from British HEIs ending up in managerial or professional positions within the business, finance and commercial sectors.

As they traced the most common ‘characteristics’ and ‘attributes’ of ideal graduates in these professions, the interns encountered a rhetorical flurry of ‘dynamic’ skills relating to performance, energy, ‘drive’ and problem-solving. These emerge from the atmosphere of high pressure, unpredictable challenges and intensity that such companies see themselves as working within. Both interns commented that the academic environment produced by an Arts modular structure is clearly different, with intensity apparent at essay deadline and exam times, but less defined within the periods of self-motivated, independent study and research. They felt that to best prepare for such environments it was necessary to reach outside of the academic programme to extra-curricular activities such as work experience, internships and volunteering.

Realistically, it is probably wrong to expect an Arts curriculum to provide explicit ‘training’ or preparation for professional situations and activities that have a very different process, pace and outcome. Our current assessment criteria judge activities of independent study, research, revision, drafting and presentation that are centred largely on the specific (and traditional) outcomes of essay submission, class presentation and exam performance that structure most modules. Certainly, presentations and exams come with pressures and demand high performance and flexibility in ways that are not divorced from the workplace, but audience and expectation in these cases are of course very different. Looking at the desired attributes in relation our curriculum’s provision, Lloyd is anxious to point out that:

...team work and leadership are mentioned by every single company I looked at as important skills. I feel that the Faculty of Arts courses at Leeds do not help students work towards these. I suggest that in first year students should be given group projects to help them develop team work skills and have an example to give on applications. Leeds for Life emphasises ‘Community’, including teamwork, as one of its key values, but this is not reflected in the History modules or within the programme objectives. It would be beneficial to begin the development of these skills during our course.

22 Ernst & Young http://www.ey.com/UK/en/Careers/Students/Joining-EY#fragment-2-na 23 Nicholls, D; The Employment of History Graduates: An Update (2011) p.3-4 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/resources/br_nicholls_employmentupdate_20110320.pdf accessed 21/08/2012

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The interns are right to suggest that the current Arts curriculum does not have the diversity of activities and assessment types to prepare them for the professional workplace. Conversely, there is no suggestion at present that we should, as designers of Arts modules, ‘model’ learning activities merely to suit future professional processes and projects, given that this might dilute the necessary criteria and conventions of academic performance.

However, alternative and innovative assessment types may offer something that help bridge the gap. More formalised online and face-to-face debates would test another form of mental and interpersonal agility. Public-facing exhibitions, talks and outputs would demand a ‘translation’ of academic scholarship to diverse audiences. Collaborative project outlines and outputs would build some of the interpersonal skills cherished by employers. Reflective writing, tracing the students’ developing expectations, perceptions, performance and skills, is employed in an increasing number of modules, to raise awareness of the academic activities that also translate as ‘employability’ skills.

The question of employer engagement and input again arises: must we do more to invite guidance from those within the sectors concerned, and can they successfully shape learning activities to bridge the academic-employer divide? Or can we rely on the employability professionals - the mediators between academia and employment within the university careers and employability networks - to ‘translate’ the meaning of scholarly activities across the divide? In the Faculty of Arts, Antonio Martinez-Arboleda’s SCORE and JISC-funded projects24 on employer engagement in curriculum design and delivery are beginning to answer these questions.

Threaded through these questions is the debate around ‘embedding’ employability, which has been intense over the last 5 years, spawning many conferences and networks. It raises the question of how much capacity the academic curriculum has - even in redesigned forms - to hold and nurture employability activities before it becoming confusingly or distractingly ‘full’ for the students following it.

The debate also raises the question of whether academic training and professional development can share a culture, a language, even a set of values that we can bridge with the idea of ‘employability’. It is to this question that we now turn.

24 For more details, see Martinez-Arboleda’s University of Leeds profile page at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/people/20059/spanish_portuguese_and_latin_american_studies/person/1009/antonio_martinez_arboleda (accessed September 2012)

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Connecting Academic and Corporate ‘Values’

When it comes to corporate and university websites, the rhetoric of ‘values’ and ‘principles’ is equally prominent as each community defines and markets itself. The below examples from the University’s Leeds for Life website, and from those of Ernst & Young and Unilever, show how a common language links the ways a scholarly and corporate community are imagined and founded.

This shared discourse anticipates a broader debate about the consequences of this common value-set, good and bad, for the idea of the University, and bleeds into discussions about the corporatisation of Higher Education more generally. As the examples reveal, the language of integrity, partnerships, community, confidence and aspiration are common to both spheres, as is the apparent need for Universities and companies to advertise these core values prominently to those on the cusp of joining them.

In the light of this common ground, we need to think about the way students digest these statements of value and principle. Given that they are effectively moving from one community to

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another as they make their transition into graduate employment, it makes sense to see whether these sets of values really mirror each other, and, more specifically, whether students can find a way of identifying common ‘professional’ principles and values within the academic community and practice that define their current identity.

There is of course another way of approaching this: shouldn’t academic communities act precisely according to a different set of values that allow the student to shelter from and critique the ‘principles’ of the working world? It might rightly be considered a virtue that universities provide a space of freedom from professional principles and obligations, a necessary buffer from the sharper ethics of employment and corporate practice, despite the recent calls for HEIs to define themselves precisely in relation to ‘engagement’, ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘impact’ in relation to that world.

However, this idea of separation might be as flawed and unhelpful as the one that suggests a happy conversation or seamless progression between two very different communities. Students are asked to presume a connection between the university and the employer as they prepare for the transition, forever being prompted to come up with ‘relevant’ and ‘transferable’ skills, experiences and case-studies. So perhaps we have a duty, hesitant as it may be, to investigate the strength of the bridge, in terms of the weighting of principles, values, even ‘moralities’ that are espoused and practiced in each community.

There are struts of commonality, as there are ruptures and misalignments, which I investigate in the paper below.

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Chapter 3: Employability: From Skills to ‘Values’ and ‘Behaviours’?

It seems uncertain at present whether students, as they progress through their degree, learn to identify the types of desirable ‘character-traits’ or ‘behaviours’ that employers list systematically in their recruitment material and employee profiles. Good lawyers, for example, are idealised by Allen & Overy as highly ‘motivated’, ‘committed’ and ‘responsible’ in their work, but academic guidelines tend to avoid this kind of language. They might touch on the importance of sustained scholarship and occasionally mention the ethical considerations of research, but the emotive language of ‘motivation’ and ‘character-strength’ is something largely absent from academic criteria, learning objectives and feedback terms.

Students are rarely invited to reflect on how a curriculum may be shaping their behaviour and personality, whereas corporate literature often uses personality-type a starting point as they describe their working community and those that make it up.

As we have seen in our examination of particular fields of employment, above, it is possible to play a matching-game between the scholarly skills and professional competencies a student is gaining. Locally (as in Treherne and Rowson’s outputs, see page 33) and at a sector level (for example Vitae’s ‘Employability lens’ p.32) we are beginning to develop useful models and taxonomies which chart the relationship between academic excellence and graduate competence in terms of a dialogue of skills and attributes.

However, one of the most striking insights to come out of this project has been that employers actually define their ideal employees as much in terms of character and behaviour as generic employability skills. The language of employability on the ‘professional’ side of the spectrum is more emotive, intimate and personalised, whilst (and for good reasons) our academic objectives and criteria are written in a more neutral, de-personalised tone, rarely giving explicit weight to the ‘character’, personality or behaviour of the student scholar.

This is one of the divides in employability language that seems most resistant to bridging, and is one borne out of ‘cultures’ which describe excellence differently, one (the employer) which revels in the language of character and personality, one (academic assessment) which is precisely wary of the distorting effects of these factors in judging the assessed product. Indeed, in most forms of Arts assessment, the product - as text / document - is isolated at the point of evaluation from the ‘person’ who produced it. More often than not, we speak about the attributes and weaknesses of the ‘work’, the ‘essay, the ‘answer’ rather than the person who wrote it, who is often also officially protected from scrutiny by the anonymity of marking. The employee, on the other hand, is usually expected to parade (or at least showcase) their personality and characteristics as part of their initial and continuing evaluation. The identity of the student, therefore, is defined by ‘our’ language of assessment in very different (sometimes oppositional) terms, to the way the identity of the ‘ideal graduate’ is defined by corporate literature.

i. Professional ‘Behaviours’

Just as the language of academic assessment and feedback can be specialised and opaque to the student, so the rhetoric of graduate abilities has its own particular idiom and haziness. In imagining the character and behaviour of their ideal graduate, companies tend to slip into a specialised language which defines excellence in particular ways, often strongly related to criteria of activity, emotion and ethics. The extracts below are sourced either from the recruitment pages of the companies mentioned, or from their entries within the online guide to graduate recruitment, www.prospects.ac.uk .

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The emphasis on dynamic activity in these descriptions takes the form of allusions to innovative thinking, ‘pro-activity’ and flexibility, and these actions are given an emotive nuance with reference to the ‘enthusiasm’, ‘passion’, ‘motivation’ and ‘resilience’ of the graduate’s character. There is certainly a connection that can be made between the flexibility and innovation employers demand and the ‘originality’ or ‘creativity’ that Arts assessment criteria seek. It is much less likely, however, that tutors define excellence in terms of enthusiasm, passion and resilience, though we might witness it clearly in the progress of a student over time. The language of academic feedback tends to shy away from precisely the emotive terms that recruiters favour, although we almost certainly recognise and reward forms of intellectual ‘passion’ and ‘resilience’ in the more oblique language we use.25

As if to balance the simmering energy of the graduate profiles listed in corporate websites, we find a consistent rhetorical emphasis on the ideal employee’s ethics or morality, with pointed appeals for ‘respect’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘trust’ in their professional behaviour. Often these moral appeals to correct forms of behaviour extend to a discourse of recognition, diversity and community that we might usually locate within a University’s self-portrait. Under the key principle of ‘respect’, Ernst and Young ask employees to “recognise and understand the value of different backgrounds and points of view, because those differences are key to our success”26 whilst Text100, a global public relations company, prizes “the ability to listen to and respond to others’ ideas, accept criticism and work as a team”, explaining that “an employee is representing the company as a whole and therefore it is crucial that they are genuine and respectful.”27

25 This language, interestingly, is much more likely to come out in the accepted hubris of reference-writing, since it is often directed at the professional audience who write the recruitment literature. However, the student rarely sees the reference, and so is not usually exposed to this way of defining their identity, their excellence.26 Ernst & Young http://www.ey.com/UK/en/Careers/Students/Joining-EY#fragment-2-na (accessed September 2012)27 Text100 http://www.text100.com/index.php/careers (accessed August 2012)

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Graduates who’ll do better, go further and

achieve more...BAE systems

You will possess the capacity to learn quickly with the ability to use

your initiative...

Bank of England

Graduates with passion, great interpersonal skills, a pro-activity to

build effectiveness at all levels

Danone

With your freshness, insight and innovative thinking, you help us to be the most trusted services firm in

the worldDeloitte

Graduate Excellence!

What’s most important is your enthusiasm and

motivation...KPMG

Inspired by the values that lie at the heart of our culture – respect,

professionalism and perseverance –you’ll soon join forces with other

bright creative peopleEricsson

M&S is made up of thousands of people, but they all have one thing in common – they believe in

winning as a teamM&S

You’ll need to earn respect, so you’ll also need to be confident,

tough, resilient and flexible. Ready to and stretch the objectives of a

projectCo-op

Indeed, Jenny Lloyd, looking at the relationship between ‘Leeds for Life’ and a set of ‘our values’ corporate websites, spots some very clear crossovers, proving that the University is already thinking carefully (or strategically at least) about the values that ostensibly connect a student’s community and the professional sphere they are soon to enter:

Integrity, which was of high importance to all the companies, particularly those in the finance industry, matches Leeds for Life exactly, with the section headed ‘Integrity’ including ‘openness, transparency and honesty’. The Leeds for Life banner heading of ‘Community’ also covers several of these areas, including teamwork, communication and public service which many companies, such as Goldman Sachs, heavily promote. Most companies also acknowledge that they have a duty to ensure their employees are diverse, and that there are equal opportunities for all, which matches the ‘Inclusiveness’ banner heading on Leeds for Life.

There are signs, then, that students are already able to set up a clear dialogue between the values of living and learning in a university context, and those of working effectively within a professional context. This is potentially exciting, since it suggests a new way of thinking about ‘employability’ as a readiness to interact and behave in ways which are useful, effective and (perhaps most interestingly) ethical in multiple contexts.

It is refreshing to think that ‘employability’ might grow into something broader than a particular set of skills and competencies, into a richer idea of graduate readiness involving a moral capacity to work with other people with an integrity that fits not only the workplace but also other contexts of engagement and dialogue. Of course, this positivity presumes that we take the principled statements issued forth by universities and companies as reliable guides to their objectives and priorities, and that these statements translate to the actual behaviour of students and employees respectively (but perhaps this is a debate to be pursued elsewhere).

When we return to the different ‘languages’ that students face, there is clearly a lot of work being done (by mediating guides and sites such as Leeds for Life) to connect the language of academic excellence and professional competence. However, the corporate rhetoric of graduate ability is still profoundly disconnected from the terms we regularly use in academic objectives and feedback. As they progress through university, students gradually learn to recognise this ‘academic’ language in order to define their scholarly ability and identity. This language is highly context-specific, and when it comes to graduation, their identity as a university learner has largely been defined in terms that grate against the more emotive expressions of character, behaviour and value that employers use to define their ideal employee.

Is there justification, we might ask, for the terminology of learning objectives and assessment and feedback to take on the expressions of ‘character’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘ethos’ so valued by employers? We could certainly design more learning and assessment activities which allow students to exhibit the qualities that employers seek, rather than sticking to more conventional assessment formats. Might this, though, undermine the conventions of academic training and assessment that reward subject-specific skills that can be kept separate from the dubious instabilities of ‘personality’ and ‘behaviour’?

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ii. Scholarly ‘Behaviours’

Any kind of dialogue or compromise here would seem to based on the ability of disciplines, departments, faculties and universities to define what kinds of values, habits, behaviours or ‘traits’ are constituent of the good ‘scholar’, and to express these in useful terms for the student and the employer.

This would vary a lot, even across Arts subjects, but it may be possible to draw up certain taxonomies of ‘excellent’ scholarly behaviour that would at least anticipate the ‘professional’ attributes we have seen to be so loudly championed in recruitment literature. For example:

Innovative and flexible thinking as students respond to scholarship and plan their assignments

Motivation and resilience as demonstrable qualities of sustained project and dissertation research

Enthusiasm and passion as controlled elements of writing, peer collaboration, class presentations and public-facing outputs

Elements of respect, integrity and trust as students work in groups, deal with sensitive or controversial subjects and material and engage with different audiences and collaborators

An evolving ‘ethics’ of research, for example in relation to interviews, surveys and referencing scholarship

Writing such qualities more prominently into our learning objectives, skills outcomes and assessment criteria, it may not seem so odd to link the ‘employability’ profiles and behaviours we see so emblazoned on corporate websites to the academic journey that students undertake.

Vitae, an organisation supporting doctoral and research staff, have recently come up with a rather elaborate taxonomy that links research skills to professional abilities and behaviours (see Appendix, p.34).28 Whilst we would need to simplify such a model, and make it more palatable and accessible to an undergraduate audience, some ‘mapping’ of professional competences to scholarly processes and skills is needed if we are make sense of employability in relation to the curriculum.

Below the Vitae taxonomy is a more localised table that can be used by Faculty of Arts students to relate employer skills and behaviours to their academic development, charting ‘case-studies’ of academic behaviour that link to the most common professional ‘competencies’ (Appendix, p.35, adapted from Rowson and Treherne’s University Teaching Fellow project outputs).29

Using this kind of model, undergraduates can prepare job applications, interview and presentation material by identifying scholarly activity that links to the desired professional ‘behaviours’ we have discussed. It may be the case that, as they become more refined and usable, we need such stand-alone ‘maps’ (or better, mapping techniques) to occupy more prominent positions within student-facing literature, module documents and ‘employability’ websites such as Leeds for Life.

In this way, students may be prompted to place discourses of academic and professional excellence in a running dialogue as they progress through university.

28 Vitae Researcher Development Framework, ‘Employability Lens’, http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae_Employability_Lens_on_the_RDF_DRAFT_March_2012.pdf (accessed August 2012)29 Rowson, A. and Treherne, M., Employability and Research in the Arts (University of Leeds UTF Project Output 2011), 29-30

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Chapter 4: Project Recommendations

The research undertaken, whilst focused on the University of Leeds, has opened up issues relating to employability and student education across the Higher Education sector. In particular, I have raised the question of how ‘employability’ is described and defined in different contexts within and beyond the sector, and how the modern student faces a number of challenges in negotiating the different language used in each. University strategies and projects, module literature and assessment, and corporate recruitment messages seek to define the ideas and attributes associated with employability in different ways.

This language, in its varied forms, is here to stay, and is likely to grow in dominance within higher education even as it is critiqued and as it becomes more self-conscious and reflective as a discourse. We will have a better chance of using and shaping the rhetoric of employability (for ourselves and our students’ advantage), and of relating it to sound scholarly development, if we investigate the following issues:

1. Marketing Employability and ScholarshipChapter 1 looked at some of the ‘employability’ rhetoric that pulses from the University of Leeds’ website and employability strategies. The prominence of sections of marketing dealing with graduate skills, work placement opportunities and professional preparation is justified, but there are signs that this sometimes eclipses information about the rich curriculum and subject-specific opportunities that the University offers.

The balance needs to be carefully monitored, since incoming students are still (we should hope) excited primarily about what they are going to study, and they need to sense a passion about and commitment to scholarship from the University they are applying to. An obvious marketing solution would be to showcase those parts of the curriculum – the modules and learning activities - that combine academic rigour with elements of professional training, and to talk with a clearer emphasis about the benefits of academic training and research skills to the professional sector.

2. Delivering on Employability ‘promises’There needs to be a clear and even structure of opportunity to match the powerful (and increasingly pervasive) promises made about employability, a structure visible within as well as adjacent to the curriculum. At the University of Leeds, there are excellent developments in this respect, with Leeds for Life acting as the mechanism to draw together co-curricular opportunities at School, Faculty and University levels, and the Curriculum Enhancement Project carefully nurturing ‘programme threads’ and ‘module pathways’ that deliver employability opportunities. The Careers Service, too, is increasingly visible as the designer or co-organiser of modules, and as an agency of guidance within Faculties and Schools.

However, from a student perspective, as we learnt in Chapter 2, there is still often a mis-match between the statements made in Leeds for Life ‘ethos’ statements and programme descriptions and their experience of the curriculum. Often, the deficiency is seen not in the relevance of the subject to employment (although this is a problem reported by the Careers service), but in the types of learning activity, communication and outputs that the modules offer. The most common call from Arts students, for example, is for opportunities to work in collective, collaborative and networked formats which better prepare them for the dynamics of the modern workplace. A close scrutiny of the learning and assessment types we habitually provide has to form a central part of our curriculum review.

3. Embedding the Language of Employability Chapter 1 investigated the visibility of the language of employability within the literature of academic quality assurance, programme descriptions, module outlines and assessment criteria. This is clearly

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a fraught issue, given that there are very strong arguments for protecting the continuity and integrity of language used to define academic standards and assessment practices. It is interesting to note, however, that recent changes to programme outcomes in the Faculty of Arts can act as examples of the way conventional QA language can be supplemented by a language that relates to employability and graduate readiness. Such experiments will continue, and modules that define learning with a clear nod to its professional applicability are on the increase. The issue here is sharing these innovative structures and descriptions across the academic community, and encouraging that community to consider a new way of expressing the benefits of scholarship in broader terms. It is also a question of getting employers to contribute to this change by explaining to the university community how scholarship actually benefits graduate employability.

A related question is the visibility of this crossover-language to the student audience. Innovative connections between scholarship and graduate success are being argued and outlined in programme and module proposals and committee papers (and indeed in research projects), but are they in fact being carried to students within module literature and teaching practice? We need to look at whether the structure of all modules could be enriched by an element of reflective writing or discussion that obliges students (along with tutors) to reflect on the value of the module beyond discipline-specific development.

4. Connecting University and Professional ‘Values’

Chapter 3 explores the ways in which, despite their obvious differences, the University and Professional community actually describe themselves using a remarkably common set of terms and values. This may, of course, suggest the parallel obfuscation of university marketing speak and corporate mission statements, but there is a more positive way of looking at this mirroring of language. It suggests that there is a bridge connecting the identities that students and graduates foster as they develop in the respective worlds of academia and employment, and between the communities they inhabit.

There are particularly promising ways in which a mutual language of integrity, responsibility and cultural awareness can be used to connect the conventions of scholarship with the ethics (where they exist) of the workplace: there is a certain morality, for example, implied in responsible research techniques and collaborative scholarship that can easily be translated to productive professional relationships. Training students how to recognise the qualities of working and living in a University community will offer a refreshing way to untangle the question of employability.

5. Employability ‘Behaviours’ rather than Employability ‘Skills’

Such has been the dominance of the ‘skills’ agenda in relation to employability, that even the most elaborate discussions and mappings of university curricula and programmes tends to revolve around an imagined ‘transferable’ skills-set. The nature of these skills and of ‘transferability’ itself is now a matter of fierce pedagogic debate. As I argue in Chapter 3, a more productive way of thinking about employability is to consider ‘behaviours’ as well as competencies. Analysis of recruitment literature reveals that employers are interested not in generic skills but in the behaviours, personalities and characters of those that wield them. The challenge, then, for those interested in graduate transition, is to investigate the ways we can make students aware that, as they engage in scholarship, they are learning habits and behaviours regarded as invaluable by the professional community.

Though we rarely express it in this way, academic progress certainly involves aspects of ‘resilience’, ‘innovation’, ‘flexibility’, ‘passion’ and ‘motivation’, the favoured terms and criteria of graduate recruitment. If we train students to recognise this as they move through the curriculum, then the

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dialogue between the rhetoric (and the communities) of academic and professional success will be much more profitable.

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Appendices

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