The continuously evolving labor market increases the need to develop students’ employability competencies in higher education. Engaging in reflection is crucial for developing these competencies, as reflection supports students in learning from their experiences and identifying their skills gaps. Ne…
With the higher education reform putting forward the professionalization of doctoral students, doctoral education has been strongly focused on generic transferable skills to ensure employability. However, doctoral training should not forget core skills of research and especially the ability to formu…
In response to the lack of field experience perceived by employers and recent STEM graduates, Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) arrangements have become more common. However, not all WIL experiences are valuable. Indeed, having students in companies without establishing protocols to protect their parti…
There is a need to examine how doctoral students in Arts and Humanities (A&H) can bolster their psychological capital in seeking employment that can potentially impact future career trajectories. This article reports a study on soft skills and self-perceived employability of A& H doctoral students f…
While innovative teaching behavior is a promising type of competency that can equip faculty members with the necessary capability to adapt their teaching to fit their specific teaching context, how to achieve it remains underexplored. This study explored ten faculty members’ perceptions of the kind …
This study reviews and equates the historical upgrade of Ghana’s polytechnics to technical universities compared to the United Kingdom and South Africa, including its processes as a borrowed educational policy. Furthermore, it critically reviews the policy’s incubation process, the borrowing process…
In this study, we examined articles related to academic quality assurance research in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) higher education context to identify internal and external mechanisms put in place to improve the quality of education. To achieve the objective, the study reviewed published studies t…
To be competitive, universities across the world are embedding an international perspective into every layer of an institution’s operational structure. For higher education (HE) providers that offer sandwich degrees (4-year undergraduate courses with a compulsory placement after the second year), th…
This article explores the rationalities advanced by 18 higher education institutions, located across eight countries, for developing and delivering employability provision. The article uses Sultana’s Habermasian-derived framework to categorise rationalities as either technocratic, humanistic or eman…
In Germany, dual learning programmes are increasingly offered by higher education institutions. These programmes’ main characteristic and greatest challenge is their integration of academic and vocational learning. So far, this challenge has frequently been stated without specifying its exact nature…
Complex and rapidly evolving work contexts augment industry calls for future-capable graduates that can demonstrate enterprise capabilities such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and value creation. Gaps between employers’ expectations and evaluations of higher education (HE) gra…
Educational authenticity occupies a strong position in higher education research and reform, building on the assumption that correspondence between higher education learning environments and professional settings is a driver of student engagement and transfer of knowledge beyond academia. In this pa…
The increased use of student internships and other forms of work placements in higher education programmes brings recognised benefits to students but also changes the risks for higher education institutions (HEIs) globally. This paper responds to the under-addressed problem for HEI managers of under…
This paper argues that micro-credentials are gig credentials for the gig economy. Micro-credentials are short competency-based industry-aligned units of learning, while the gig economy comprises contingent work by individual ‘suppliers’. Both can be facilitated by (often the same) digital platforms,…
Education is considered to be the most effective tool that people can use to lift themselves out of poor socioeconomic backgrounds and lead to professional success, which in turn improves society. Since an education system often supports individuals with a higher socioeconomic status (SES), it may n…
Given that tertiary education (TE) is a sector often associated with exclusion, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where only a small proportion of the population gain access, how well placed is this sector to support the implementation of the SDGs? This article extends our re…
This paper addresses the limited empirical analysis of higher education students’ perceptions of contemporary labour market demands. It explores their perspectives on the health of the graduate labour market, what factors determine these and how their perceptions relate to self-perceived employabili…
This study explores how industry-university partnerships contribute to the expertise development of highly experienced professionals, and what kind of challenges such development entails. We used an integrative approach to review literature and acquire a deeper understanding of how previous research…
This paper reports the results of preliminary research into how Portuguese academics and employers perceive the responsibility of different higher education stakeholders—students, teaching staff, higher education institutions, employers, and policy-makers—for developing graduate employability. The s…
Pre-professional identity is a complex phenomenon spanning awareness of and connection with the skills, qualities, behaviours, values and standards of a student’s chosen profession, as well as one’s understanding of professional self in relation to the broader general self. It is an important, yet u…
