Employability skills for knowledge intensive industries: Employers' perspectives

The inability of universities to keep pace with the skills demands of rapidly evolving industries has created a crisis in employability skills. Industry needs for systemic innovation for business sustainability seem obvious, yet the message has got lost in translation en route to the higher education sector. The lack of a shared language exacerbates the disconnect between graduates, industry, academia and government. Understanding how skills are described and applied in industry is an important step in deriving shared meanings that can then feed curriculum development to address industry demands. We surveyed CEOs and senior managers in the Australian innovation and commercialisation industry to assess skills requirements from a demand perspective as distinct from a curriculum (supply) viewpoint. To overcome the limitations of an assumed language, we populated the survey with an extended list of skills and then drew relationships around interpretation through iterative quantitative exploratory factor analysis (EFA). First order EFA derived ten skills constructs that represent cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies as applied in this industry. Contrary to some 21st Century skills frameworks, knowledge – discipline-specific and experiential – featured strongly. Leadership emerged as a key skill. Further, our analysis discriminated between teamwork as an activity internal to the firm and interprofessional collaboration directed externally towards clients. Second order EFA revealed that industry’s perception of skills centre on organisational fit and organisational success with an over-arching performance dimension. Emphases on fit, success and performance are not surprising as the demand perspective in a highly competitive service-oriented industry sector focused on bringing innovation into the marketplace. From a curriculum design perspective, elements that enhance leadership, collaboration across professions, systems thinking, information leverage and a service orientation in graduates are a necessity. To address the performance dimension, framing a curriculum that imparts the commercial imperative is perhaps the most important requirement