Preparing students for employment

Most students intend to enter employment after the completion of their studies in higher education. Their courses and resultant qualifications may or may not assist them in this. However, there is a strong policy imperative that they should do so and most institutions, particularly in the public sector of higher education, would wish to support this view. There is less consensus about whether and how employment-related aims are achieved. Familiar divisions of the curriculum map into vocational/non-vocational, professional/academic are neither empirically grounded (do the graduates get jobs and if so what sorts? Are they adequately prepared for them?) nor systematically related to an adequate conceptualisation of higher education-employment relationships. This paper attempts to make a start on the latter task by constructing a typology of the vocational intent of degree courses in higher education. By vocational intent is meant the stated objectives of courses and the methods by which these are intended to be achieved in relation to a specific occupational field or fields. The paper makes a number of conceptual distinctions in terms of vocational specificity, selection for employment and training for employment. A typology of course-employment relationships is proposed. The paper then sets out an eight-fold classification of degree courses using the dimensions of specificity, selection and training. The paper concludes with a discussion of the uses and implications of the classification

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