Graduate Employability Inventory

Employers recruiting HLST graduates want to be sure that candidates have the skills necessary to cope with the type of work envisaged for them. During the selection process, and particularly at interview, applicants will be asked to describe the skills – referred to by some employers as abilities, competencies or attributes - they claim to possess. Employers will seek evidence, drawn from the student’s recent experiences including their studies, work experience and extracurricular achievements, that demonstrates successful use of those skills. Many students and graduates have not reflected on the skills they have developed during their time in HE. They are not used to speaking the language of skills and articulating their achievements. But once they start to market themselves to employers this needs to be second nature to them.

Students need, therefore, to acquire the words to describe their skills clearly and confidently and they may require help to do this. There are various ways in which students can be given the necessary vocabulary. Their tutors or other advisers can help and there are many sources of information they can use. Here is a selection of resources that focus on skills and attributes. A more extensive range of resources can be seen in the Employability Resources pages of this website.

Generic skills that all graduates can claim to possess.

Skills specific to the subject areas of hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism.

 Skills valued by employers.

Generic skills that all graduates can claim to possess.

The Skills plus project.

As part of this project Knight and Yorke identified 39 aspects of employability that academic departments might consider when tuning the curriculum to develop employability. These are in addition to discipline-specific knowledge and skills.

Introducing Key Skills in Higher Education: Some Issues for Departments.

The Centre for Developing and Evaluating Lifelong Learning (University of Nottingham) has facilitated a discussion for departments of key skills and how they might be developed through programs of study.

Graduate Employability: The Graduate Identity Approach.

The Graduate Identity Approach aims to presents a viable alternative to the conventional, currently-dominant 'skills and attributes' approach to graduate employability. It is “based on a ‘Relational Perspective on Learning and Skill’     which emphasises the need to attend to the social processes by which what is taken to be learning and competent performance are construed.

The Student Skills Guide, 2001, Drew, S. and Bingham, R., Gower Publishing. (Available from academic booksellers).

 This book is a detailed learning aid for students wishing to develop and improve the skills necessary for successful study and future work. With the emphasis mainly on course work it covers, at starter and more advanced levels, self-evaluation, action planning and reflection, and ways of developing the many other skills that can be transferred into graduate employment.

Graduates Work.

his report considers the range of attributes that employers find desirable in their graduates and how higher education can help their students to acquire them.

Skills specific to the subject areas of hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism.

Student Employability Profiles.

The Higher Education Academy in association with CIHE, has identified the subject-specific skills as well as the intellectual and transferable skills that can be developed by students through study of each of the HLST subjects.

Subject Benchmark Statement for hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA).subject benchmark statement, as well as providing an outline of the knowledge and understanding of the particular subjects, describes the transferable intellectual and personal skills which a typical honours graduate is expected to possess.

Options with your subject.

Graduate Prosects has produced a summary of the skills developed by the study of each of 76 disciplines and the other activities typical students can be expected to have engaged in. The HLST subjects are represented.

Events Management Skills.

This paper identifies the main areas of skills that events management graduates might be expected to possess and relates these to the skills that events organisers value.

Oven-ready and self-basting? Taking stock of employability skills.

Based on a survey of the views of hospitality graduates, this article focuses on the personal qualities, core skills and process skills deemed  necessary for career success and the extent to which they were perceived to have been developed by students through their degree programmes.

Skills valued by employers.

Institute of Directors skills briefing: graduates’ employability skills.

An October 2007 survey of the views of members of the institute of Directors identified the skills (to be more specific, the skills, attributes and abilities other than technical) particularly valued in graduate employees and how prevalent they are in recent graduate recruits. A ranked list of 28 skills is given.

Employability and graduate identity.

This article is based on research findings from a Higher Education Academy funded project entitled ‘Employer concepts of Graduate Employability’. Employers from various sectors were asked about their perceptions of graduates and the importance they place on almost 50 specific skills, competencies, attributes and personal qualities. The authors propose an understanding of graduate employability that builds on the ‘graduate identity’ approach (see above).

Employability and myths uncovered.

Based on a number of national employer surveys, this article takes a look at the skills that employers would like their graduates to have and considers the activities that students might participate in to develop them.

Explore types of jobs.

These web pages include many hundreds of job descriptions including many related to the HLST subjects. Each job description contains a comprehensive list of “Typical work activities” from which it is very easy to deduce the skills and other attributes required.

Best of both worlds: an exploration of key skills required for graduate work in the leisure and sport industry and links to Personal Development Planning,
 
In this article Gloucestershire employers' expectations of Leisure Management (LM) graduates and the perceptions of recent LM graduates about the skills developed through their degree programmes are discussed.

(The job descriptions produced by graduate employers, usually to be seen in their recruitment websites, are a valuable source of information about the skills needed for particular types of work. The skills are either given directly or by inference through the work activities.)