Employability: Is it Myth or Rhetoric?

There are suggestions that employers are dissatisfied with the levels of skills graduates have prior to entering employment. There also appears to be some conflict between what various stakeholders require of the Higher Education curriculum and how teaching and learning institutions prepare graduates for ‘employment’. The aim of this paper is to identify what employers, students and academic staff perceives employability to mean and the appropriate workplace skills commensurate with it. An empirical analysis was carried out with Business Management graduates, University tutors and local employers to determine which employability skills they believe were important. The results indicate that while employability skills might be identifiable, there was not complete reconciliation between what employers, graduates, and university academics believe they need to provide in order for graduates to gain meaningful employment. The findings suggest that while the stakeholders are concerned that graduates entering employment lack certain employment skills, they still base their decisions to take on graduates upon an historical perspectives of employment skills developed overtime, without perhaps taking into account the future requirements of ‘employment’, the possible challenges of an increasingly globalised economy and other possible societal changes which could be considerable and as yet, very much unknown. This study attempts to make a contribution to research on employability by identifying the gaps that may exist between employers, graduates and universities and any disparity in understanding of what ‘employability ’ means and which employability skills might take priority