A Career Ecosystem Approach to Developing Student Agency Through Digital Storymaking

Introduction

There have been significant changes to the contemporary world of work. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to volatility, uncertainty, and complexity. This has contributed to changes in patterns of employability, from traditional to boundaryless, and a reconsideration of how students achieve career agency as they transition from Higher Education (HE) to employment. Within this dynamic environment, the employers of graduates are looking for specific skills and knowledge requirements (see, for example, World Economic Forum 2018; 2020) but are hampered in being able to interpret the experiences of graduates by a dislimn between their own industry experiences and the somewhat narrow presentation of attributes and outputs often presented by recent graduates as their skills.

Student agency is developed when students can communicate the skills and knowledge gained from a specific course. They may indicate the range of HE learning opportunities they have participated in and align these experiences to a professional career opportunity, maximizing their employment opportunities. The focus is on transitioning from HE learning, skills and knowledge, to curating and narrating these for potential employers. Kelly and Le Rossignol (2022) provide a detailed discussion of ePortfolio curation/narration as a professional transition process. This chapter extends curatorial digital storymaking into a career ecosystem framework.

Student graduate employability may result in a match of a graduate with the contemporary or future employment opportunity and is demonstrated by the graduate’s capacity to adapt and manage a ‘portfolio career’ (Gee, 2014). The portfolio career suggests a capacity to take skills and attributes from one project or employment position to another, constantly learning and adapting this skills portfolio (elaborated in Le Rossignol & Kelly, 2021). This career attitude is identified within this chapter as moving from Bennett’s (2009) protean career perspective through to Clarke’s (2018) model of student agency for employability with a focus on human capital, social capital and individual attributes and behaviors.

This chapter explores the opportunity presented by an ePortfolio storytelling approach to student agency; to synthesize Clarke’s (2018) four key areas of (i) human capital, (ii) social capital, (iii) individual behaviors, and (iv) attributes into a narrated and ongoing career story. The objectives of this chapter are to interrogate a particular model, Clarke’s 2018 Graduate Employability – a Higher Education Model, with a particular focus on the role of HE in developing the above attributes through ePortfolio curation and career narration. The interconnected career ecosystem, as particularly applied to the WIL micro-business enterprise examined in this chapter, provides a potential framework for those graduates required in a future world of work to create employment opportunities. The ePortfolio requires an extension from its current positioning as an assessment and demonstration tool (see, for example, Kennelly et al., 2016; Melles et al., 2018) into a model for sustainable career narration and ongoing storytelling. This enables employers (and project-based contractors) to comprehend the graduate’s attributes and motivations more fully. This chapter will highlight the need for a digital storymaking approach for a graduate’s demonstration of employment readiness and an employer’s need to be educated on how they may utilize the ePortfolio to ascertain the suitability of a graduate to be a good fit for their workforce.