Towards a pedagogy for employability

1. Towards a pedagogy for employability Implications for learning design

2. Employability – what do we mean? • “A set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy.” • Yorke, 2004, p7.

3. And at Sheffield Hallam University • 'enabling students to acquire the knowledge, personal and professional skills and encouraging the attitudes that will support their future developmentand employment’ (Sheffield Hallam, 2002).

4. Reflecting on personal experience • To what extent did your undergraduate degree or previous qualification embrace employability aspects? • Do you consider this a strength or weakness? • In what ways did your degree/qualification route enable you to be successful in your chosen career? • Looking back, if you could have changed anything in this context, what would it have been?

5. 2004 Employability Framework • Essential Framework features • Progressive development of autonomy. • Skills development (intellectual; subject; professional; Key Skills). • Personal Development Planning (PDP). • Inclusion of activities reflecting external environments. • Reflection on the use of knowledge and skills between contexts. • The development of career management skills. • Engagement with learning from work (LfW). • Additional features for appropriate courses • Preparation for professions. • Engagement with enterprise.

6. Questions • Is employability pedagogy distinctive in some way? Is it different in any way to “good” pedagogy? • If so what is the nature of the challenge when encouraging colleagues to integrate and embed employability within their LTA approaches?

7. Employability and the learning (and assessment) task • Learning design as the vehicle for delivering the curriculum • Learning tasks as multi-dimensional phenomena: • propositional knowledge; • specific skills; • attitudes and dispositions (including ethics) • The metaphor of "fusion" – "The union or blending together of different things (whether material or immaterial) as if by melting, so as to form one whole; the result or state of being so blended."

8. Example • Learning outcome: • "At the end of the module you will be able to...."Construct an international market development plan for a company wishing to internationalise its operations." • How could students evidence achievement of this learning outcome? • Exam – emphasises propositional and theoretical knowledge

9. Example • Case study – skills (problem solving, identifying relevant data) and linking theory to practice • Scenario/group work – inter-personal skills, group dynamics • (Group) consultancy project with local company – work related skills and attributes, type 1 and type 2 knowledge • (Group) consultancy project with reflective/reflexive evaluation of process and personal contribution – metacognition • Placement project – WBL – holistic performance • Self- employed placement – WBL, enterprise, opportunity awareness, risk taking etc.

10. Implications • Employability teaching and learning need not: • reduce the emphasis on propositional or theoretical knowledge • be in addition to other aspects of curriculum engagement (resources) • It does bring into focus the importance of the design of the learning task, and • The position of this within the broader curriculum, • As well as the life and organisational experience of tutors (personal/staff development) • And the benefits of joint and collaborative approaches to learning design

11. A pedagogy for employability • Will draw upon aspects of: • Problem based learning • Inquiry based learning • WBL • Co-operative/collaborative learning • Experiential learning • Using real world or simulated tasks • Incorporating aspects of reflective and reflexive practice