Higher education in the United Kingdom is increasingly expected to be further involved in the process of students' development beyond the requirement of the discipline in terms of knowledge and is demanded to be an active contributor to skills development to further meet the needs of the labour market. The purpose of the chapter is to provide understanding of ways to embedding employability skills in the curriculum of business, hospitality, sports, and events management degrees. This understanding would be generated through the literature and collection of data based on focus group including small number of students at the final year of their studies based in the UK. To further enhance this understanding, this study included several key themes in the literature review, data collected, and discussion of findings as the following: students' perception of the role educational institutions should play. The study identified several gaps exist based on students' perceptions.
TopLiterature Review
Higher education institutions face an increasing pressure to play a more active role in employability skills development to further meet the changing demands of the labour market. While the study conducted by Smith et al. (2016) argued that curriculum design within key fields such as business, hospitality, sports and events should embed six key factors to enhance employability of students; these factors can be summarised as the following: professional practice and standards, collaborations, informed decision making, lifelong learning, integration of theory and practice, and commencement readiness. Furthermore, Higher education institutions are increasingly expected to be able to provide further support and advice for students on the benefits attained through work placements during studies, and the way that would positively impact on their employability skills (Jackson and Wilton, 2016). Therefore, it is important to note that higher education institutions should actively work internally and externally to enhance this for further success (Alharahsheh and Pius, 2020b; Alharahsheh and Pius, 2019; Alharahsheh, 2019a). However, it was argued that universities should be play key role in terms of embedding extracurricular activities to enhance students’ employability through further understanding of key inhibitors for their engagement with the process such as students’ employment commitments, information availability about planned activities, students’ beliefs about the value of participation, management with the formal academic requirements as well as employability requirements to bring a balance, and overall organisation of associated activities (Nghia, 2017). What all of this means for higher education institutions, is that students’ development of employability skills can be largely dependent on the active engagement of higher education institutions internally and externally to enhance students’ awareness of employability and practice (Usmani and Alharahsheh, 2020; Helmi et al., 2018a;2018b;2018c).