Six Pedagogical Principles for Careers and Employability Learning in Higher Education

Michael Healy, Career Ahead, Australia

Emails: Michael.healy@careerahead.com.au              

Click to download Six Pedagogical Principles for Careers and Employability Learning in Higher Education (.pptx)

Abstract

Despite its emergence as a central concern in higher education, graduate employability lacks coherent theoretical or pedagogical foundations. In particular, conceptualisations of career development learning applied in most graduate employability scholarship do not reflect the depth or breadth of relevant theory and evidence from the field of career development. Rather than continuing to approach graduate employability and career development as distinct concepts, the higher education community should recognise them as expressions of the same goal: student professional and personal success.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate the gap between the scholarly fields of graduate employability and career development, as illustrated in citation networks among more than 4,000 scholarly articles. I will then offer a curricular vision of a more integrative pedagogy of careers and employability learning, which draws on the strengths of each field, in an effort to help close the gap between them. In doing so I will outline six pedagogical principles that can inform efforts to deliver high quality, equitable, and empowering careers and employability learning for students.