Employability after completing a college education has been an unwritten goal of most higher education programs for many years. Colleges should consider focusing more closely on student needs. Higher education institutions have traditionally responded by providing internship opportunities, which offer limited exposure to real-world jobs based on preset parameters and have assumed that students possess the necessary soft skills. A college has implemented such a program with documented positive results regarding student feedback on-campus employer feedback and post-graduation employment. The use of artificial intelligence offers students the opportunity to practice elevator pitches and mock interviews in highly realistic simulations. When paired with a career services department, the combination of postsecondary training, explicit soft-skill preparation, cutting-edge technology, and a robust career development center can make a difference in student employability.
TopEmployability And Higher Education: Past And Present
In the context of the United States, training in competencies has been integrated into higher education programs throughout three phases, starting with innovative teacher training programs (1960), vocational education programs (1970), and hybrid or online programs (last decade) (Nodine, 2016). In the European context, the Tuning project emerges, classifying competencies into generic, transversal (i.e., related to the integral formation of individuals), and specific (González & Wagenaar, 2003). This academic proposal is configured under the guidelines of a competence model that responds to training and professional, technical, and human needs, which adjusts to the vast and changing social and labor demands of today's society to improve the employability of graduate students.
In this context, the OECD (2002), in collaboration with UNESCO, developed the Definition and Selection of Competences (DeSeCo) project. This approach establishes the development of a series of essential competencies within the framework of higher education, which places the student at the center of the teaching-learning process (Nuñez Flores et al., 2021) to offer an education that allows students to develop professional competencies that will enable them to change and transform the world.
In the same way, the World Economic Forum (2016) proposes 35 competencies divided into skills, core competencies, and cross-cutting competencies. The United States Department of Education (2017) sets out nine employability competencies, which are divided into a) applied knowledge, b) workplace skills, and c) effective relationships.
Employability competencies are linked to developing skills and capabilities that enable effective responses to real occupational needs (Hanneman & Gardner, 2010). For this reason, many universities consider employability a significant dimension of students' education. Therefore, recognizing that during their education, students should acquire knowledge and develop skills and behaviors that enable them to get a job, stay in a job, perform their duties, find another job if necessary, and progress professionally (Romgens et al., 2020; Van Harten et al., 2022).
Such is the importance of employability in higher education, and many universities have incorporated employability as one of the dimensions that should be promoted with teaching, research, and community service (Pereira et al., 2020). In this sense, and as Cranmer (2006) points out, universities approach employability from three approaches: (1) an integrated approach, in which content, knowledge, and skills that facilitate employability are addressed in all subjects and throughout the training; (2) a complementary approach in which students take specific subjects to improve their employability skills; and (3) a parallel approach in which these knowledge and skills are not addressed throughout official training.
Universities, and in particular some faculties, have to promote methodological, organizational, didactic, and pedagogical transformations to ensure that the different training actions have a practical sense and are applied to reality, and therefore, that they contribute to and improve the employability of future graduates. In this sense, employability competencies are linked to developing skills and abilities that enable effective responses to the needs of the labor market (Hanneman & Gardner, 2010) to train flexible, autonomous, and enterprising professionals (Jiménez, 2009) with the ability to work in teams.