Employability’s Favourite Hiding Place Is the Word “Priority”

Calling employability a priority has become one of Higher Education’s safest serious sentences. It sits comfortably in strategies, speeches, prospectuses and committee papers. Few people object to it, and almost everybody can point to activity that appears to support it. The word therefore travels easily across an institution, even when the connections required to turn that ambition into something students can use remain weak.

Maya’s experience makes the gap visible. She spends a semester working on a demanding group project that requires her to negotiate roles, deal with a difficult teammate, recover from a poor first attempt, adapt the plan and contribute to an outcome the group could not have produced through four isolated pieces of work. The final submission earns a strong grade, the module closes and the university moves on.

After graduation, Maya applies for a role. Daniel, the hiring manager reviewing her application, sees one word on her CV: Teamwork. That word gives him almost none of the information he would need to judge the capability behind it.

He cannot see what Maya’s university understood by teamwork, which behaviours she developed, what the assessment observed, how her individual contribution was distinguished from the group result or what the evidence can legitimately support. Daniel therefore creates his own assessment through an interview, simulation, work sample or probationary task.

Substantial work has taken place on both sides of the educational experience, yet very little of its meaning has survived the journey to the person expected to interpret it. That outcome can occur inside an institution with committed educators, sophisticated projects, active career services and extensive industry engagement.

The quantity of employability activity tells us little about whether those activities operate together.

A priority can carry more weight than the system beneath it

Universities increasingly position employability across teaching, learning, assessment and student support. Healy (2023), however, identifies continuing weaknesses in the theoretical and pedagogical foundations needed to connect those contributions coherently. The field contains considerable activity and considerable conceptual variation, which makes institutional clarity especially important.

Eimer and Bohndick’s systematic review identified 21 Higher Education employability models and frameworks without finding a dominant or universal approach. Their analysis places responsibility back on institutions: each institution needs sufficient clarity about what it means by employability before it can make coherent decisions about the interventions intended to develop it (Eimer and Bohndick, 2023).

A strategic commitment can therefore coexist with unresolved questions about meaning, learning, evidence and professional interpretation.

An institution may fund strong projects, embed graduate attributes, involve employers in live briefs, expand career support and improve assessment practice while the relationships between those activities remain largely implicit.

This is where fragmentation raises concerns about efficiency. Educators may produce valuable learning experiences without knowing how later employability claims will be constructed from them. Career professionals may spend considerable time reconstructing capabilities from assignments designed for another purpose. Assessment teams may protect academic standards while employers receive signals stripped of the context that made the original judgement meaningful. Everyone can perform their own role well while the student receives the burden of connecting the pieces.

Four structural challenges inside the same operating problem

HELFFE approaches this contradiction through four interconnected structural challenges: Skills Definition, Skills Development, Skills Assessment and Skills Signalling. These categories describe different parts of the employability system, but decisions made in one area change what becomes possible elsewhere.

Consider a capability such as collaboration. If the institution leaves its meaning vague, educators are asked to develop something whose boundaries remain unclear. A group project can then expose students to other people without deliberately developing the behaviours that the programme later intends to claim. Assessment inherits the ambiguity because the evaluator must decide which performance deserves attention and what evidence can support a judgement. By the time the capability reaches an employer, the original complexity may have collapsed into a single word on a CV.

The movement also runs in the other direction. If hiring managers repeatedly disregard an institutional signal and conduct their own assessment from the beginning, their behaviour contains information about the system that produced the signal. The context may have disappeared during communication, the original assessment may have generated evidence with limited external usefulness, the learning experience may never have made the relevant capability observable, or different actors may simply have been using the same skill label for different expectations.

A functioning employability system has to absorb those consequences and use them to improve earlier decisions. Recording that a workshop happened, a project was completed or an employer attended an event says very little about whether the system learned anything from the outcome.

What Maya’s group project actually reveals

The four challenges therefore operate through repeated interaction. Daniel’s response can expose weaknesses created much earlier in the chain, and those weaknesses may sit in several places at once. Treating the four areas as administrative workstreams misses the behaviour of the system itself.

The student absorbs the integration cost

When those institutional connections remain implicit, Maya inherits a reconstruction task that was never formally designed as part of her education. She searches old assignments for moments that might count as evidence, tries to separate her individual contribution from a collective grade, remembers decisions made months earlier and compresses a complex performance into a form that somebody outside the university can understand quickly.

Some students become very good at this work. Professional familiarity, strong networks, previous employment and effective career support can help them recognise which experiences matter and how to translate them. Other students may complete equally valuable learning and leave with a far weaker account of what they can do. Fragmentation therefore creates a distribution problem as well as an operating problem: the ability to reconstruct the institution’s employability system becomes an additional capability that some students already possess and others must somehow acquire.

Reflection and articulation still matter. Students should interpret their experiences, understand their development and learn to communicate credible claims about their capabilities. The institutional burden begins earlier. Learning experiences, assessment evidence and later communication need enough connection for student reflection to work with something that already has structure.

Leila, a careers adviser supporting students like Maya, can add substantial value by helping students recognise evidence, understand employer expectations and communicate capability accurately. Her expertise is most powerful when she can build on evidence that the educational system has deliberately produced.

When she spends much of her time excavating employability value retrospectively from modules that were never designed to preserve it, career support becomes partly responsible for repairing connections elsewhere in the institution.

Local excellence does not automatically create institutional coherence

A systematic review of 69 studies found substantial institutional attention to graduate employability and competence development while also identifying continuing difficulty in implementing sustainable, integrative approaches. Competence development frequently remained dependent on individual academic decisions instead of being embedded coherently across the institution (Abelha et al., 2020).

Advance HE’s Framework for Embedding Employability in Higher Education approaches related territory through student, educator and institutional perspectives (Advance HE, 2024). Its structure reflects a sector in which responsibility for employability increasingly extends across the institution rather than sitting exclusively within a careers office or a final-year intervention.

Neither source provides a universal operating design for Higher Education, and the diversity of institutions would make such a prescription difficult to defend. They do, however, reinforce the importance of connections across responsibilities that are often distributed among different actors.

An excellent educator cannot resolve an ambiguous institutional capability framework through classroom design alone. Career services cannot recover evidence that the curriculum never generated. Employer involvement produces limited systemic value when the resulting student performance disappears into an isolated event with no connection to assessment or later signalling.

Institutional coherence therefore depends on designed relationships between contributions that already exist. The practical challenge lies in deciding what should connect, what information must move between actors, where judgement occurs, how feedback travels and who owns the quality of those connections over time.

Coherence strengthens the institution’s contribution without controlling the labour market

A coherent employability system can improve the quality of the contribution a university makes to a student’s professional future. The institution still operates inside conditions it does not control. Labour demand, geography, professional field, discrimination, immigration status, networks, economic conditions, employer behaviour and individual circumstances can materially influence employment outcomes.

This boundary matters because graduate employment statistics can encourage institutions to compress employability into an outcome over which they possess only partial influence. A student may develop strong capabilities, possess credible evidence and communicate those capabilities effectively while still encountering structural barriers or an unfavourable labour market. Institutional responsibility is better located in the quality, coherence and credibility of the contribution the university can actually design.

For Maya, that contribution should make the educational journey legible. The programme should know which capabilities it intends to develop, create experiences in which those capabilities can form, generate evidence capable of supporting defensible claims and preserve enough context for those claims to travel. The employer remains responsible for the final hiring judgement. The university is responsible for ensuring that its own work does not become invisible before that judgement begins.

When the word “priority” reaches practice

A strategy can describe employability as a priority for years without revealing whether the underlying system works. Maya’s journey creates a much less forgiving test because every connection eventually faces a practical consequence. A capability has to mean something specific enough to guide design, the learning experience has to give that capability somewhere to develop, assessment has to produce evidence proportionate to the claim, and signalling has to preserve enough meaning for somebody outside the university to interpret what happened.

Daniel’s response then becomes useful information. If he repeatedly has to reconstruct the evidence from the beginning, the institution has learned something about the portability and credibility of its employability work. That information belongs inside the system rather than at its edge.

The word “priority” earns substance when these relationships survive contact with students, educators, assessment and professional judgement. An institution may already be doing considerable work in each area.

The demanding part is making that work accumulate instead of dissipate between them.