Employability: the next phase

Mantz YorkeLancaster University

mantzyorke@mantzyorke.plus.com

SHEEN Conference, Dundee30 November 2007

Employability and stakeholders’ interests

A personal issue

• which varies according to the person’s background

An institutional issue

A political issue

• Governments’ human capital perspectives

• Employers’ needs for a highly skilled workforce

• HESA-published performance indicators: retention, completion, employment

• Widening participation agenda

Employability and stakeholders’ interests

• Are not perfectly aligned

• And hence there can be tension regarding emphases

There is often a misapprehension that

Employability = Employment Rate

(If the terms are equivalent, then employability wouldvary according to the state of the labour market)

A quotation worth remembering

… learning and skills are not just about work or economic goals. They are also about the pleasure of learning for its own sake, the dignity of self-improvement, the achievement of personal potential and fulfilment, and the creation of a better society.

DfES (2003) Realising our Potential: Individuals, Employers, Nation [Cm 5810], para 4.1

Skills

• Personal Skills• Graduate Skills• Transferable Skills• Enterprise Skills• Business Skills• Core Skills• Key Skills• Soft Skills• Common Skills • Work-related Skills• Employability Skills• Sector Skills

Skills

Ad hoc

Generally lack a theoretical base

Risk over-specification (as NVQs) and ‘box ticking’

‘Generic’ skills may be presented, in more coarsely grained form, as:

- ‘Graduate attributes’ (see Simon Barrie’s recent work in Australia), or

- as components of ‘Graduateness’ (HEQC, 1997)

‘Graduateness’

HEQC (1997)

Subject mastery Intellectual/cognitive Practical Self / individual Social / peopleDevelopment of Development of Development of Development of Development of knowledge and the following the following the following the followingunderstanding of: attributes: attributes: attributes: attributes:

Content & range Critical reasoning Investigative skills Independence Teamwork/ methods of inquiry / autonomy

Paradigms Analysis Laboratory skills Emotional Client focus/ fieldcraft resilience

Methodology /ies Conceptualisation Data / information Time management Communicationprocessing

Conceptual basis Reflection / Context / textual Ethical principles Negotiation /evaluation analysis & value base micropolitics

Limitations & Flexibility Performance skills Enterprise Empathyboundaries

Relation to other Imagination Creating products Self-presentation Social/environmentalframeworks impact

Context of use Originality Professional skills Self-criticism Networking

Synthesis Spatial awareness Ethical practice

Lifelong learning

Employability

Workforce development

Employer engagement

EnterpriseEntrepreneurship

Work-based learningWork-related learning

Skills

[A] set of achievements - skills, understandingsand personal attributes - that make graduatesmore likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations …

It owes a lot to the idea of ‘Capability’ that wasfloated in the 1990s

ESECT’s definition of employability

Capable people have confidence in their ability to

~ take effective and appropriate action

~ explain what they are seeking to achieve

~ live and work effectively with others

~ continue to learn from their experience ...

Capable people not only know about their specialisms, they also have the confidence to apply their knowledge and skills within varied and changing situations and to continue to develop their specialist knowledge and skill ...

Based on Stephenson (1992)

Capability

USEM attempts to capture the dynamic interactionimplicit in both ESECT’s definition of employabilityand Stephenson’s description of a capable person

The USEM account

Developed in the context of employability, but relevant to capability and to learning in general

Understanding

Skilful practices (subject-specific and generic)

Efficacy beliefs (and self-theories generally)

Metacognition (including reflection)

Effectiveness in the world

Subjectunder-standing

Meta-cognition

Skilfulpracticesin context

Personalqualities, includingself-theoriesand efficacybeliefs

E

S

U M

Is supported by both theory and empirical evidence• Hence there is an academic justification for it

Correlates with ‘good learning’• Much that goes on in HE is tacitly consistent with USEM• One task is to make the tacit more overt (PDP etc)• There already exists a substantial base on which to build

Is permissive rather than prescriptive, i.e. is flexible • It can accommodate disciplinary differences• It can accommodate differing kinds of student

Is not a knee-jerk response to ‘employer demand’

USEM

Draws attention to E and M to a greater extent than do

~ QAA subject benchmarks

~ Programme specifications

Implicitly raises challenging questions about

~ The relation between module and programme

~ Assessment

USEM

[The] mastery of requirements for effective functioning, in the varied circumstances of the real world, and in a range of contexts and organizations. It involves not only observable behaviour which can be measured, but also unobservable attributes including attitudes, values, judgemental ability and personal dispositions: that is, not only performance, but capability.

Worth Butler et al (1994, pp.226-7)

Professional competence is complex

Skills are not enough

Graduates are expected to be able to deal with

~ routine problems – and, more importantly,

~ with the ‘messy’ problems that the world throws up.

‘The best result possible, not the best possible result’

The implication is that they must be able to integrate and apply understandings

often collaboratively, and

often with incomplete information

Highereducation

SubjectDisciplines

A

B

C

D

E

‘The outside world’ A

B

C

D

E

Mode 1 Mode 2

etc.etc.

After Gibbons et al (1994)

Some characteristics of a professional

• Operates autonomously (albeit within limits)

• Often works collaboratively

• Demonstrates trustworthiness

• Applies both academic and practical understandings …

• … but may not articulate all of how this is done

• Works integratively, sometimes on non-routine problems

• Applies metacognition (reflection; self-regulation; etc)

• Is committed to new learning, often via CPD

• Maintains standing as a professional

One medical study showed experts as performing less well than relative novices on a checklist for diagnosis

Stages in professional developmentDreyfus & Dreyfus (2005)

1. Novice Rule-following (one-by-one)

2. Advanced beginner

3. Competence

4. Proficiency

5. Expertise Professional judgement (integrative)

Rule A………

Rule B………

Rule C…………

Novice

?

Expert

Rule A………Rule B……

Rule C……… Integrated….

?

Some issues in the (summative) assessment of performance in

a. Academic contexts

b. Workplace contexts

Educational objectives and their assessment

Type of objective Problem Solution Assessment

Instructional Specified Specified Prescriptive

Problem-solving Specified Open

‘Expressive’ Open Open Responsive

NB: Some alleged problem-solving is essentially puzzle-solving, where there is a right answer. This should be located in Row 1.

Problems set in academe

are quite often characterised by

• being deliberately formulated• being well-defined• the availability of most if not all relevant information• having a ‘right’ answer…• … and one method of reaching it• being of limited intrinsic interest• their detachment from ordinary experience

Based on Hedlund and Sternberg (2000, p.137)

Disciplines vary, of course, in the extent to whichthese apply

The taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessment (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, as viewed by Knight, 2007)

The cognitive dimension

1 Remember

2 Understand

3 Apply

4 Analyze

5 Evaluate

6 Create

The knowledge dimension

Academic emphases?

Factual (U)

Conceptual (U)

Procedural (U,S)

Metacognitive (U,S,M)

Problems in the world of work

are often characterised by

• ‘happenstance’

• ‘messiness’

• incompleteness of information

• multidisciplinarity

• engagement of others

and possibly

• the pragmatic necessity to ‘satisfice’ (i.e. to obtain a ‘good enough’ rather than a perfect outcome)

Success in some aspects of performance is mandatory(e.g. public health, safety)

The cognitive dimension

1 Remember

2 Understand

3 Apply

4 Analyze

5 Evaluate

6 Create

The knowledge dimension

The taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessment (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, as viewed by Knight, 2007)

Employment emphases?

Factual (U)

Conceptual (U)

Procedural (U,S)

Metacognitive (U,S,M)

‘Wicked competences’

[A]chievements that cannot be neatly pre-specified, take time to develop and resist measurement-based approaches to assessment Knight (2007: 2)

ESECT’s definition implicitly acknowledges complex achievement

Many employability achievements are complex, and are best demonstrated in authentic or quasi-authentic settings

Complexity

(T)reating (required competences) as separate bundles of knowledge and skills for assessment purposes fails to recognize that complex professional actions require more than several different areas of knowledge and skills. They all have to be integrated together in larger, more complex chunks of behaviour.

Eraut 2004: 804

Ensuring coverage of all employability aims, particularly in a modular scheme

• Some issues

~ Students’ selection of academic routes

~ Over-assessment of some aims (e.g. presentations)

~ Non-assessment (or student avoidance) of others

Challenges - 1

Assessing employability achievements

• As separate skills

~ Standardisation?

~ Likely to run into the gravel-trap of excess detail (e.g. NVQ)

• Holistically

~ Context-related, individualised

• Judgement, rather than measurement

Challenges - 2

USEM and assessment

Effectiveness in the world

Subjectunder-standing

Meta-cognition

Skilfulpracticesin context

Personalqualities, includingself-theoriesand efficacybeliefs

E

S

U M

Assessable,variablyinferential

Highly inferential

Awkwardness of fit

• With programme structures

~ Some employability achievements are slow-growing crops

~ They may take a programme’s length (and more) to be developed, and it is inappropriate to assess them within individual modules

~ So how can they be assessed across the whole programme?

• With institutional assessment schemes and the honours degree classification

Challenges - 3