Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Australia have responded to their environment – driven by government and industry - and cultivated a skills focus when it comes to employability of its graduates. However, this has led to criticisms of a ‘job factory’ with minimal thought given to longer-term lifelong learning orientations and at the core, the students themselves and their values. With a quasi-field experiment design, using both phenomenology and surveys, 15 undergraduate and postgraduate students were exposed to a range of experiences exploring the role of values in career choice and career development. Findings reveal that students appreciate the focus on values as a currency of the employability equation. Five core themes arose out of the research: amplified career awareness; entrepreneurial thinking; anxiety; educational purpose; and understanding personal values. These findings pose questions for HEIs: whether to incorporate a discussion on values as part of employability; how to achieve this in a manner which reaches all students; and when is best to do so. Participants unanimously felt that the penultimate year of study is the ideal time to have a conversation with students not based on skills transferability into the workplace, but values transferability. © (c) 2026 Jeffrey Naqvi. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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