Organisational responses to the employability agenda in English universities

This chapter aims to construct an overview of the ways in which English Universities have configured their resources to deal with strategic imperatives relating to student and graduate careers and employability. It describes two major in relation to organisational responses to employability. Firstly, a recognition of the shift in how careers and employability leadership is enacted. Secondly, outdated and evidence-light views of the role, scope and scale of modern higher education careers and employability organisations are quite common and frequently expressed. One of the implications of positional competition between institutions in an era of greater scrutiny and transparency in which employability features so strongly is that fundamental questions about the institutional approach to employability may be/should be raised. The notion of issue awareness helps to make it clear that action and resource allocation at the institutional level is often driven by the identification of issues, not simply by what is seen as important.