Higher Education Research and Development

Degree apprenticeships are an innovative workforce strategy that originated in the United Kingdom and have been piloted in Australia to address critical skills shortages. Degree apprenticeships involve apprentices working while undertaking a university degree, integrating on-the-job learning and the…

PhD graduate employability is crucial for candidates, employers, and governments. Having PhD graduates in appropriate post-study employment enhances career satisfaction, benefits organisations, and fosters national prosperity. Over the past decade, debate has arisen regarding the effectiveness of do…

Supervisor support is essential to the success of work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences, yet previous research suggests supervisors need more practical guidance on supporting students. This paper aims to identify the areas of supervisor support that need the most improvement through a concurren…

The scope of work-integrated learning (WIL) has expanded and evolved globally and is a recognised pedagogy that enhances graduate employability, strengthens students’ personal attributes, and affords a personalised learning experience. Despite abundant research and discourse on WIL, misconceptions a…

Higher education students in Finland and all over the world are often engaged in a paid job alongside their studies. The purpose of the present study is to explore how humanities students’ work experience is related to their career engagement and metacognitive awareness. More precisely, the aim is t…

Hiring new graduates is a cost-effective method of recruiting high-potential talent into organizations. Despite recent focus on graduate employability in the Australian higher education (HE) sector, a discrepancy remains between employer expectations of graduate work readiness (WR), and graduate per…

This study examines how work placement learning (WPL) might influence student engagement in practical skills acquisition (SEPSA). The study draws on key elements of three theories: the social cognitive career theory (self-efficacy), self-determination theory (intrinsic motivation) and expectancy-val…

Declining graduate labour markets, perceived devaluing of degree qualifications, and intense focus on graduate employment metrics have increased pressure on universities to enhance their students’ employability. Formal curricula developments have been accompanied by co-curricular and extra-curricula…

This study shows how HE teachers (particularly, business management and vocational studies) experience the teaching of critical thinking to foster student development of critical thinking skills (CTS) while working across diverse international contexts. Using a qualitative online survey and intervie…

The conceptual complexity of employability remains a barrier for its integration into discipline-based curricula. In the health professions, a particular challenge lies in integrating employability with the dominant paradigms of competency and professionalism. In this study, we explore these context…

Assisting students to develop employability attributes is considered a core responsibility of higher education institutions. While there are some common employability attributes across disciplines, there are also differences. Empirical research into employability from less-well represented disciplin…

Employability has become a key concept that has attracted the attention of scholars and industries in many countries. At the same time, this concept is highly fluid and vague because its nature is not evidenced by real employment and differences in the nature of labour markets from country to countr…

By implementing student-centred learning environments, higher education institutions aim to foster student self-efficacy and self-regulation. Previous research that focuses on how students perceive these learning environments usually does not take the differential impact of students’ study motivatio…

This paper presents findings from a 2010 evaluation of Victoria University's Student Rover program, an on-campus work-based learning program in which mobile student mentors are employed and deployed within the university's Learning Commons to provide 'just-in-time' and 'just-in-place' learning suppo…

There are many different forms that work-integrated learning (WIL) takes and variants go by a range of different names. Based on current literature, key dimensions, shared by the various and disparate forms of WIL curricula, were identified and operationalised in a measurement model. The key dimensi…

Academic curriculum and curricular units that are responsive to work necessarily involve the interaction of knowledge from two different communities. In this paper a number of cases of responsive curriculum are analysed in order to answer the following questions: Can general differences between work…

The opportunity to experience work placements that complement taught and practical courses in higher education has become a central strand of many undergraduate degree programmes. While there is tacit agreement that such placements are a good thing, in recent years the numbers of students opting for…

This paper explores the implications for assessment of embedding qualifications from the vocational education and training (VET) sector within university qualifications. As VET qualifications are now all competency based, assessment in the two sectors is quite different, since universities have gene…

This paper discusses issues arising from three case studies of the ways people have become tertiary teachers in a polytechnic, a wananga (Maori tertiary institution) and a university in New Zealand. Despite institutional differences, the teachers gained most of their teaching knowledge and skills on…