The Professional Ecology of Careers and Employability Support in Higher Education: Lessons from Australia

Michael Healy, Career Ahead, Australia

Email: Michael.healy@careerahead.com.au

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Abstract

Employability is the focus of a diverse range of professional roles in contemporary higher education, providing career counselling and information services, supporting work-integrated learning or career development learning in the curriculum, or facilitating co- and extra-curricular activities such as leadership development, volunteering, or orientation and transition services. The staff who perform these tasks come from diverse professional backgrounds, hold various qualifications, and work with distinct bodies of knowledge and models of professional practice.

In this presentation I will report the findings from an analysis of 377 Australian university job advertisements, from 2013 to 2019, for roles directly responsible for graduate employability programs and services. I characterise these roles collectively as a proto-jurisdiction: an ecology of distinct areas of expertise and responsibility with ambiguous and elastic boundaries between them. Among this professional ecology, the professional cohesion of qualified career development professionals affords several crucial strengths for the provision of quality careers and employability learning, such currency in leading career development theory and evidence and commitment to established standards of professional practice. However, career development professionals also often exhibit strong professional boundaries which can impede their ability to effectively contribute to collaborative, cross-institutional employability strategies. Employability-oriented staff in less bounded professional territories, such as student engagement or work-integrated learning, may be able to better traverse intra-institutional jurisdictions and enter collaborative relationships more effectively, but lack cohesive foundations of evidence and theory and models of professional practice.

Although the distribution of responsibility for supporting students’ employability is broadly positive, this lack of coherence in how employability is understood and resourced could undermine the quality of services provided.