Enhancing Employability Skills in Marketing Graduates Through Teaching Philosophy and Curriculum Design: A Ghanaian Perspective

Introduction

Employability of graduates has become a big issue among employers, higher education providers and policy makers in recent years (Huang, Turner & Chen, 2014; Wickramasinghe & Perera, 2010). Many employers are much more interested in recruiting graduates with employable skills than just the possession of university qualifications (Yorke, 2006). The International Labour Organisation (ILO) (2013) argues that employability skills, knowledge and competencies enhances one’s ability to secure and retain a job, progress in the job and secure another job if he/she so desires. Perceived employability is a factor that influence students’ satisfaction with a university(Trulla, et al 2018). For instance, in Ghana, the National Accreditation Board (NAB), has directed that institutions seeking accreditation must provide the following in their course programs: objectives, content, competence-based training component, problem-based learning component and practical training, industrial attachment and internship. This has set the need to enhance higher learning education in the county. Another critical factor that the NAB considers before accreditation is tracer studies, which is the ability of the institution to know where its graduates are and what their employees say about their performance.

Researchers (Ahmad and Shah, 2018) have observed the increasingly desire of students to further their studies abroad and universities in Ghana have been receiving students from other countries who have or are obtaining their education in Ghana. A study conducted by Mahmoud et al (2020) posit that students population in both public and private universities in Ghana is well over 400,000, of which approximately 2% (15,185) are foreign students. Mahmoud et al (2020) observed that most of the students are from the West African sub region with Nigeria (84%) dominating the list of foreign students in Ghana. In a similar studies conducted by Adu-Gyamfi (n.d) the results of their findings shows that foreign students in Ghana was dominated by West African countries with Nigerians topping the list with (44%), followed by Togolese (20.2%), Liberians (16.1%) then Ivorians (13%). The remaining African countries and other advanced countries form less than 2% of the international student population in Ghana. These studies reveals that Ghana also attract students from other parts of the world which makes our students cultural diverse by learning from these foreign students.

The Government of Ghana and the National Accreditation Board (NAB) have realized the need for graduates to possess employability skills to enable them to thrive in their various field or career. The ex-deputy executive secretary and head of the accreditation department of NAB described employability skills as “those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job and enabling workers to get along with fellow workers and supervisors to make sound and critical decisions” (Adjei, 2018, p11; Accreditation News January-June 2018, Issue 001). The issue of graduate employability in the Ghanaian context is very often associated with how quickly a graduate can find employment after graduating from school. However, graduates complete their education and realise that either there are no jobs or limited jobs available competing for so many graduates who are churned out from our universities yearly. Also, not peculiar to Ghana is the issue of how scholars (e.g. Römgens, Scoupe, and Beausaert 2020; Peeters et al. 2019), employers and policymakers are concerned about how there is a mismatch between the skills required by the corporate world and the skills graduates acquire in the course of their studies. The situation puts pressure on higher education leaders from governments, educational advocates, etc to pay attention to graduate employability and make it a strategic issue at various universities in the country.