Employing computerised graduate attribute mapping to bridge the divide from education to employment

How do employers know what knowledge university graduates possess at the point of hiring? This question drove a collaboration to develop a computerised prototype system (APMap) for eliciting and mapping any graduate’s ‘knowledge inputs’ throughout their university degree pathway. This research distilled the ‘knowledge requirements’ of relevant professional and industry accreditation and academic bodies into categories relevant to the educational and institutional stakeholders for graduates. These ‘knowledge requirements’ are termed ‘graduate attributes’. In the pilot study, university subject coordinators were then asked nominate the extent to which graduate attributes were present in their subject’s curriculum. Using Visual Basic for Applications, a data base was developed to display the graduate attributes in a graphical form for each subject, and degree course. The research was extended to encompass assessments within subjects, revealing a gap between the graduate attributes expected by staff from subject mapping, and the mapped requirements for assessment of those attributes.Susan J. Shannon, John Paul Swif