A1 Business and Technical College What Is the Annotation of Given Article? Consider the following questions while you read the article:What is the author’s

A1 Business and Technical College What Is the Annotation of Given Article? Consider the following questions while you read the article:What is the author’s (or authors’) research question?What is the author’s (or authors’) thesis, or answer to their research question?What are the author’s (or authors’) data and methodology? What if any key concepts (terms, theories, etc.) does the author create and employ? What is the most compelling, useful, or powerful piece of evidence employed to support the author’s (or authors’) thesis?What is the central claim of each section? How does each section’s claim (or focus) support the author’s (or authors’) thesis? What key points does the author (or authors) make to support or develop the central claim of each section?In two or three well developed paragraphs, discuss these questions in terms of the article. Studies in Higher Education, 2017
Vol. 42, No. 3, 591–609, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1067602
The myth of job readiness? Written communication,
employability, and the ‘skills gap’ in higher education
Tim Moorea* and Janne Mortonb
a
Of?ce of Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Advancement, Swinburne University of Technology,
Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia; bSchool of Languages and Linguistics, University of
Melbourne, Room 611, Babel Building, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on
making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this
agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and
industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This
Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such
ability – professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews’ were conducted
with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their
responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge
some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current debates about the
directions of higher education.
Keywords: employability; job readiness; written communication; professional
practice; generic skills; higher education policy
1. Introduction
The last two decades have seen signi?cant change in the university sector, characterised
by some as a period involving signi?cant ‘interpenetration of economic capital into university education’ (Marginson and Considine 2000, 3). This new phase, dating back to
the early 1980s, stands in contrast to an earlier period when institutions enjoyed a
greater degree of autonomy in their activities, and when their relations with industry
were more remote (Etzkowitz et al. 2000). One outcome of this closer engagement
has been the emergence of the generic skills agenda, described by early advocates
for the idea as the effort to develop in students ‘those qualities, skills and understandings … that will shape the contribution they are able to make to their profession and as a
citizen’ (Bowden et al. 2000, 1). Such skills, also referred to as soft skills, or twenty?rst-century skills, include such abilities as communication, critical thinking, teamwork, creativity, and the like.
Accompanying these shifts has been an increasing monitoring of the outcomes of
higher education, especially to determine how effectively these putative generic and
employability skills are being acquired on programmes. On this score, the last
decade has seen a stream of surveys and studies conducted by industry and government
aimed at gauging satisfaction levels among employers regarding the abilities and dispositions of the graduates they employ. In such research, universities are often found
*Corresponding author. Email: tjmoore@swin.edu.au
© 2015 Society for Research into Higher Education
592
T. Moore and J. Morton
wanting. Many such studies typically record levels of skills acquisition thought to be
below the required industry standard. This situation, it is argued, not only holds graduates back from gaining satisfactory employment, but also has an inhibiting effect on the
performance of employing organisations, and ultimately the broader economy. The
response to such ?ndings are calls for even greater renovations of higher education curricula, especially to ensure greater levels of ‘job readiness’ among graduates (Harvey
2000).
The present paper is concerned with investigating a skill type that features perennially in these debates about generic skills and employability – this is the area of
written communication. In the types of surveys referred to above, written communication is typically identi?ed as a highly requisite skill area in the professional workplace, but one that graduates are often thought to be lacking in. Arguably, though,
the ?ndings of such surveys (usually simple percentages about the relative importance
of the skill and the perceived level graduates present with) provide only a limited basis
by which to go forward on such matters. Behind rudimentary data of this kind lie a
number of questions: What are the speci?c concerns employers have about their graduates’ writing abilities? What expectations do they have of these abilities? How are perceived problems dealt with in the workplace? Do graduates in fact improve their writing
over time, or do these abilities remain a permanent impediment both to their own
careers and to the performance of the employing organisation? And ?nally, what do
employers think can be done to best prepare graduates for the writing demands of
their professional work? The Australian-based study reported in this paper sought
answers to these questions through the conducting of interviews with a sample of
employers and supervisors working in a range of professional areas. Participants’
responses to these matters were found to be most interesting, serving, among other
things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current
debates about the directions of higher education.
2. Background: the employability agenda and the idea of job readiness
The origins of the employability agenda in Australian higher education can be traced to
two major studies published in the early 1990s: the Mayer (1992) report, which ushered
in the ‘competency’ movement within technical education; and the Achieving Quality
report (Australian Higher Education Council 1992) which ?rst introduced universities
to the idea of generic skills and attributes. Clancy and Ballard (1995, 156) at the time
characterised the new paradigm as a shift in post-secondary education policy away from
a focus on ‘inputs and ef?ciency’ to one of ‘outcomes and quality’. Over time, the
measures that have come to be mainly relied upon to gauge these ‘outcomes and
quality’ are those relating to the experiences of graduates in the workforce (e.g.
ACNielsen Research Services 2000; Mourshed, Farrell, and Barton 2012).
It is from the numerous surveys and questionnaires conducted with employers to
this end that the less-than-sanguine views of graduates’ abilities and job preparedness
have emerged. The scene was ?rst set about a decade and half ago with the Australian
Government sponsored ‘Employer satisfaction with graduate skills’ (ACNielsen
Research Services 2000, viii) which found only medium levels of satisfaction among
employers regarding newly recruited graduates, with particular concerns expressed
about the skill areas of creativity, problem-solving, and communication. Since that
time, the perceptions seem to have become progressively gloomier. A survey by the
Australian Industry Group (2006, 87), for example, reported many businesses facing
Studies in Higher Education
593
both skill shortages and skill gaps in both technical areas, and ‘soft’ skills such as communication and problem-solving. The annual Consult Australia (2011) survey in the
engineering sector regularly reports ‘concerns about graduates’ skill levels’ as one of
the main obstacles to effective recruitment. A recent international survey sponsored
by McKinsey & Co. found that less than half of employers believed that new graduates
‘are adequately prepared for entry-level positions’ (Mourshed, Farrell, and Barton
2012, 18). The report’s authors note the contrasting perceptions held by educational
providers (72% imagined graduates to be work-ready), leading the authors to suggest
that the two sectors increasingly ‘live in parallel universes’ (18).
It is interesting to note that such concerns about the abilities and qualities of the
young are not new. ‘Literacy crises’, as Green, Hodgens, and Luke (1997, 15)
explain, are almost as ancient as the idea of education itself, and are inevitably ‘tied
up’, they suggest, ‘with larger political and moral debates about the directions of communities and cultures, nation-states and economies’. What is interesting in the current
environment is the extent to which external, non-educational agencies such as business
and industry – who bring their own speci?c concerns and interests to such debates –
have come to in?uence the shaping of agendas in this area. Such interventions were
strongly evident, for example, in submissions made to the Bradley et al. Review of Australian Higher Education (2008). The report’s summary of recommendations noted the
desire of business and industry to see a greater alignment between university curricula
and the needs of industry, and a ‘greater emphasis’ placed on the development of
speci?c employability skills such as communication skills in university programmes
(209). The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, for example, in its submission, called for ‘further investigation of course design processes’ in universities
and the instituting of ‘more formal structures … to ensure that students are able to
build industry-relevant skills’ (ACCI 2008, 2).
These kinds of extramural urgings have had a gathering effect on universities. As
Oliver (2011, 10) reports, ‘learning outcomes in Australian higher education courses
have become [increasingly] attuned to industry needs and graduate employability’.
Jackson (2013, 776) suggests that such have been the pressures emanating from
outside the academy that universities are now ‘consumed’ by the need to gear programmes towards enhancing employability. Among other things, this new paradigm
has seen the emergence of a strongly articulated higher education pedagogy aimed at
realising the type of learning outcomes suggested by Oliver (2011). Known as the
‘skills gap’, the approach is founded on the notion that university curriculum needs
to be conceived largely in terms of a bridging of ‘the disparity between industry
needs and higher education provision’ (Jackson 2013, 778). Thus, it is suggested
that there should be as much similarity as possible between tasks and content in the
‘learning setting’ (universities) and in the ‘application setting’ (workplace), and that
the ‘closer’ these two domains are aligned, the more effective will be the development
and transfer of relevant skills (Analoui 1993).
This principle has been a spur for a good deal of recent research to establish the
nature of such gaps, and to identify how the disparities identi?ed might inform the
design of programmes. Signi?cantly for the present study, ‘effective communication’
is often identi?ed as one of the most important skills area, and also one that graduates
are thought to lack. Litch?eld, Frawley, and Nettleton, for example, in a study involving representatives of professional societies, identi?ed ‘communication capacity’ as
a ‘major problem’ for university graduates:
594
T. Moore and J. Morton
Being able to write clear, concise emails and formal letters in order to avoid misunderstanding, ambiguities and mistakes is seen to be a necessity in almost every professional
position – and an attribute that graduates often lack. (2010, 522)
Grebennikov and Shah (2008), in a study of major employers, found similar perceptions of students communication abilities, suggesting that forms of ‘experiential learning’ (Boud and Solomon 2001, 7) are the most effective way to bridge such gaps and ‘to
meet employer demands for job ready graduates’.
The need to address these gaps has seen a major effort to bring writing and assessment practices in disciplines more into line with those required in the professions. A
major initiative has been the Australian universities’ Learning and Teaching Academic
Standards Project (Of?ce of Learning and Teaching 2010), which has sought, inter
alia, to specify threshold learning outcomes for the skill area of communication in a
range of disciplines. It is interesting to note how prescriptive are some of the writing
skills outlined in these documents. Thus, for example, in Accounting, it is suggested
that a graduate needs to be able to ‘effectively communicate’ in writing: ‘decisions
about asset impairment for clients operating a single entity; expensing versus capitalising a signi?cant expenditure on maintenance; reasons for variances from budgets’ (15);
and in Engineering, graduates need to develop pro?ciency in a range of speci?c workplace document types, including ‘progress and project reports, reports of investigations,
feasibility studies, proposals, speci?cations, design records, drawings, and technical
descriptions’ (20).
In these efforts to orient students’ writing practices to the demands of the workplace,
there is often an eschewing of the traditional genres of academic study – essays, reviews,
and research projects. On an Australian government-funded project, for example, that
investigated the embedding of relevant non-technical skills in accounting programmes,
a best practice approach identi?ed was one that required all prescribed assignments to be
‘written in the format of business documents’ (Hancock et al. 2009, 66).
As we have seen, the employability agenda has been one of the more signi?cant
developments in higher education over the last decade. It would be remiss, however,
in this brief survey not to draw attention to a number of dissenting voices. Some of
these concerns centre around the view that the worlds of study and work constitute distinctive domains of activity, and that it is essential as a result to insist on their distinctive
purposes and practices. Yorke and Knight (2006, 567), for example, note that many
within the university sector increasingly see the ‘skills agenda’ as ‘narrowly conceived,
relatively mechanical, and inimical to the purposes of higher education’. Yorke (2004,
11) argues further that dissatisfaction will continue in relation to the transition between
the two different cultures, ‘however much higher education is prevailed upon to address
the “employability agenda”’. Such concerns are sometimes acknowledged in of?cial
university processes. One major Australian university, for example, in its framing of
its graduate attributes policy, recognises signi?cant ‘tensions evident … between a
focus on purely vocational outcomes and the values inherent in a general education’
(RMIT 2008, 4). For some critics, though, the recent trends are nothing short of disastrous. One active commentator, Richard Hil (2012, 127) sees the new ‘career-focused’
agenda having its roots in the productivist demands of global capital, one that typically
precludes ‘anything approaching intelligent civic engagement’.
Clearly, these are contentious issues. Up until now, the main information feeding
into debates and policy has been of two kinds: either the ?ndings of mass surveys or
the perceptions and views of certain key agencies – especially the representatives of
Studies in Higher Education
595
various industry peak bodies. While such research makes it clear that problems around
skill areas such as written communication do appear to exist, this work – we argue – provides only limited information on the nature of these problems, and how they might be
responded to by the sector. The intention of the present study was to gather an additional
type of data to bring to debates. This was the views of those who work in close proximity
to graduates in the professional workplace – that is their immediate supervisors and managers. The focus of the research was on this group’s perceptions of the abilities and
experiences of their graduates in the area of written communication. Speci?cally, we
wanted to explore their sense of the types of writing issues faced by graduates as they
make the transition from university study to professional practice, and what might be
needed to make them ‘ready’ for the workplace demands expected of them.
3. The study
The study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from a range of professional areas (Table 1). Recruitment was via a larger online survey used in a separate
study to gauge employer attitudes towards a widely used test of written communication
(Moore et al. 2015). Initial selection, as mentioned, was based on informants having a
close supervisory relationship with newly employed graduates within their organisation.
Further selection was then made to cover a range of professional areas, and a range of
organisation types (including large companies; public institutions; and small- and
medium-sized businesses). The reason for this diversity – both in professional areas and
in organisation types – was to get a broad picture of issues around written communication,
one that could be applied to higher education policy and practice on a general basis.
Interviews were for approximately an hour and covered the following issues:
.
.
.
.
.
The writing abilities of graduates
The nature of written communication in these particular workplace settings
Issues concerning academic and professional written communication
Methods to deal with the writing issues of graduates
Ways to better prepare graduates for communications in the professional
workplace.
The interview protocol sought to take into account the in?uence of interviewing
processes on the resulting discourse (e.g. Talmy and Richards 2011). Interviews, for
Table 1.
List of professional areas.
Professional area
Accounting/?nance
Information technology
Education
Engineering
Law
Journalism
Management/administration
Health
Science
Total
No. of participants
3
2
2
3
1
1
2
3
3
20
596
T. Moore and J. Morton
example, were conducted in a location chosen by the interviewee, and draft questions
were sent prior to the interview. In the interviews, an effort was also made to focus the
discussion as much as possible on the actual texts graduates needed to produce in their
work, following the procedure known as the ‘discourse-based interview’ (Odell,
Goswami, and Herrington 1983). For this part of the interview, participants had been
asked to provide samples of documents graduates were typically required to produce
in their work. With reference to these documents, participants were then asked in the
interviews to elaborate on such matters as: the nature and purpose of the sample document; how the task of preparing the document would be typically assigned and
explained to the graduate; by what processes it would be produced; what challenges
there would be for the graduate in producing it; how the quality of the written
product would be ensured. As Odell, Goswami, and Herrington (1983) explain, the
bene?t of this type of approach – talk around a written artefact – is that it can bring
to an informant’s awareness certain practices and experiences that have otherwise
been ‘transformed silently into [unspoken] functional acts and routines’. All interviews
were digitally recorded and transcribed. A sample transcript of the discourse-based
segment from one of the interviews is provided in the appendix.
Data analysis followed the procedure outlined by Mason (2002). This involved
initial independent analysis of transcripts by the two researchers to generate provisional
themes and orientations around the issues outlined above (i.e. writing abilities of graduates, the nature of written communication, etc.). A consensual analysis was then arrived
at through processes of moderation. The main themes to emerge from the analysis are
described in the following section, with extensive use of interview extracts to illustrate
these themes. These extracts are generally verbatim transcriptions; however, extraneous
features, such as false starts, ?llers, and hesitations, have been removed in the interests
of readability (cf. Swales 2013).
4. Interview ?ndings
4.1. The writing abilities of graduates
The initial discussion in the interviews…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment