The personal equipment and social ecologies needed for successful employability: an exploration of perceptions among undergraduate social sciences students

Abstract

Objectives

There is a range of factors that could affect an undergraduate students’ progress in being able to identify and capitalise on their employability prospects. These factors could be influenced by how the students see themselves and their capabilities and the value of undertaking certain employability activities. Our research sought to explore how students perceived their employability and the factors underpinning such perceptions.

Method

Undergraduate Social Sciences students took part. Perceptions of employability were obtained from two cohorts at the same university. Cohort 1 comprised 30 students across eight focus group interviews, which were conducted in 2013. Cohort 2 comprised 43 students across 11 focus groups with data collected in 2021.

Results

Reflexive Thematic Analysis was used to extract two major themes: (1) Having the right ‘equipment’ for successful employability and (2) Social ecological factors. The first theme included taking responsibility, having self-confidence and relevant skills, recognising that experience could be more important than knowledge, having a clear identity, being passionate about a field, and self-awareness. The second theme comprised three sub-themes: (1) Microsystem direct influences on a student’s employability, (2) Dysfunctional mesosystems when microsystems around student employability clash, and (3) Macrosystem indirect wider national social influences on employability.

Conclusions

Implications for bolstering employability support include recognising the social ecologies surrounding students and the need for consistent messaging across microsystems that students are likely to encounter; more harmonious mesosystems should be created to help students to obtain more personalised, time-sensitive knowledge and skills to use on their employability journeys.

Keywords:

• Employability perceptions
• work readiness
• undergraduate students
• social sciences
• personal attributes
• knowledge and skills
• social ecology
• meaningful work

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Daryl O’Connor, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

SUBJECTS:

• Employment & Unemployment
• Higher Education
• Work

Within the changing landscape of educational provision in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, supporting student employability and skill development has become increasingly important (Bridgstock & Tippett, 2019). This is a welcome development, as supporting employability in early adulthood can provide the foundations for meaningful and fulfilling employment throughout the life-course and even better health and well-being (Berntson & Marklund, 2007). Likewise, the introduction of £9000 per annum tuition fees for undergraduate students in England and Wales in 2012–2013 led to students scrutinising the worth and looking for the inherent value of their degree in enabling them to become more employable and provide the value for money from this investment in their studies, with future career prospects being one of these criteria (Tomlinson, 2017). These two forces may create a gap: the inherent value of employability, on the one hand, against students’ perceptions of employability, on the other.

Building employability and readiness for career choice and employment is an important developmental process (Phillips & Blustein, 1994), in which the essential role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is to help students progressively build their preparation for work/career readiness, but this may not always be an automatic consequence of engagement in Higher Education (HE). Research into employability has offered insights into HEI provider perspectives (Petruzziello et al., 2023), employers’ perspectives (Chhinzer & Russo, 2018), and students’ perspectives across a range of disciplines (O’Leary, 2016; Römgens et al., 2020). An accurate appreciation of students’ own perceptions of employability, in context, and their reasons that support their ability to engage with employability development, is an essential prerequisite for HEIs to better align provision and develop effective ways to support students’ employability and work-readiness (Williams et al., 2015). To achieve this, HEIs also ought to recognise the different ways in which employability has been defined and understood, the multivariate levels of influence on students’ perspectives of employability, and how students gauge their readiness for employability development.

Defining employability—conceptualisations and theoretical underpinnings

Employability could mean progression from merely finding work to building a career to finding one’s calling in life (Morgeson et al., 1999). Employability could go beyond the mere employer-employee relationship by recognising the capacity to be entrepreneurial and ability to create work (Kinash et al., 2016). A common definition of employability is: ‘the individual’s perception of his or her possibilities of obtaining and maintaining employment’ (Vanhercke et al., 2014, p. 594). Student perceptions of their employability will be pivotal in any employability-related activity as these perceptions will be what dictates how students see the worth of any work-like activities they might want to undertake and how they see their current employability levels. The move from competency-based approaches to consider ‘students’ representations of the world of work’ (Bonnard, 2020, p. 104) is more constructive and welcome. As such, the psychological approach to employability views individuals’ actions as defined by their perceptions and strength of persuasion, rather than by objective reality (Vanhercke et al., 2014). For many students, just being in employment may not be as invaluable as having meaningful work or in employment that makes the most of the knowledge and skills obtained from their degree. Consequently, despite efforts to convert the notion of employability into a reified entity of indirect but objective measures such as the number of students being in employment/graduate level employment/further study after graduation (Higher Education Statistics Agency [HESA], undated; Hinchliffe & Jolly, 2011), the concept of ‘employability’ is socially constructed and does not carry objective indicators or outcome measures despite the numerous efforts to define it (Yorke, 2006).

One theoretical framework of employability—the Employability Redefined model (Cole & Coulson, 2022)—recognises the dynamic and interrelated role of various influences on employability; in this model, ten influential factors are identified, including: self-efficacy, lifelong learning, life wide learning, knowledge, experience, reflective practice, identity, interpersonal and intrapersonal perspectives, and resilience. These factors could all be potentially important for someone’s actual and potential employability, but we would also suggest that some of the factors could weigh more heavily on students’ career choices and appraisals of their own abilities; for example, having high levels of self-efficacy in being successful with what one seeks to achieve, and the work one would wish to obtain, would impact a student’s confidence and perceptions of their employability. In essence, subjective employability perceptions could have more of a role to play with students’ and graduates’ abilities to be more employable when compared with objective indicators of employability. In a similar vein, Beaumont et al. (2016) generated a Springboard Model as an attempt to explain how undergraduate Marine Sports Science students would see a decline in their employability confidence as the students progressed into their later years of study and this would be in opposition to what was likely to be an increase in their objective employability at the same time. Clearly, the perceptions of university students about their own employability or the employability of their peers, and those who have graduated before them, are all likely to have a substantial influence on how such students see themselves and their potential to go into further training, or jobs and careers that best suit their employability potential. Even if those tasked with supporting and advising university students about employability can demonstrate that students’ employability capacities are greater than what the students might originally have perceived them as such, the task of getting perceived employability and actual employability to converge is not an easy feat. Räty et al. (2019) were able to show that 1819 Finnish University student perceptions of one’s strengths and abilities and of how outgoing one is are all manifestations of different possible selves that show one’s capability of being educated and employed; some of the facets of a perceived ability-self and of one’s levels of Extraversion were found to largely correlate positively with perceptions of current and expected employability. In essence, Räty et al. (2019) have shown that a range of skills will have a role in affecting students’ perceptions of their employability, but there are those (e.g. Cole & Donald, 2022) who have argued that skills are only a part of the employability equation, and that it certainly does not play a major role.

Studying the employability of students in the social sciences

Broad conceptualisations of employability are useful to some extent, but they do not capture more fully the multidimensional and multifaceted nature of employability (Jackson, 2013; Williams et al., 2015) and the unique perspectives of the specific groups concerned who are called to interpret, internalise, and enact employability-related skills (Bonnard, 2020). Despite commonalities across disciplines in the conceptualisation of employability (Williams et al., 2015) some ingredients (attributes, values, and competencies) may be valued differently as ‘each discipline cultivates slightly different skills’ (Lanz, 2011, p. 23). When the support from HEIs to students on boosting employability prospects is context- or discipline-free, there is also a risk of ineffective employability development, as students may find it difficult to align this support to target employment trajectories (Dacre Pool & Sewell, 2007). In addition, this knowledge may lack the context-specific and disciplinary-linked skills that are unique to studying in other areas such as in the Social Sciences (Römgens et al., 2020). Therefore, a focus on a specific overall area, such as the Social Sciences could be informative of the context into the challenges faced by students on such courses, as many of these degrees do not have a linear career path upon graduating but are rather generalist qualifications that could provide stepping stones towards undertaking a variety of careers. Students in the Social Sciences have had a mixed history with how they have fared relative to students from other disciplines. For example, in 2013, a greater proportion of Social Sciences graduates were in work when compared with graduates from Arts and STEM subjects (Burns, 2013; Leech-Wilkinson, 2013). However, Psychology graduates have been found, in a more recent survey, to be the lowest paid graduates and very few of them work in the Psychology field too (Smith, 2023). This challenge is not confined to Psychology graduates, as data from one of the largest survey of graduates in the UK (Prospects, 2023) found that only slightly over half of Social Sciences students were in full-time employment, which was below the all-subject average. Likewise, Social Sciences graduates were also shown to be more likely to be unemployed (rate of 5.5%) compared with the all-subject average (rate of 5%). These statistics on the employability situation of Social Sciences graduates should be a cause for concern when compared with how they were faring ten years previously. Clearly, there is a range of factors that could explain such trends, but it could be of benefit empirically to see what students in the Social Sciences perceive when they think about their employability and the influences on it.

Social influences on students’ perceptions of their employability

Understanding the multifaceted nature of employability can start with existing conceptualisations, as Römgens et al. (2020) and Williams et al. (2015) have usefully applied and, most importantly, by seeking the perspectives of the students themselves (Bonnard, 2020). We adopt the social ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), which understands people as being nested within various ecosystems that possess sets of norms, values, and accepted behaviours. Specifically, three of these ecosystems have been outlined by Williams and Zlotowitz (2013) in which a microsystem comprises an immediate social group that surrounds an individual, which is nested in a mesosystem that covers the extent to which two or more micro-systems overlap or conflict. The mesosystem has been relatively underexplored with theory and research into university student employability. The nearest approximation to it has been Forsythe’s (2017) articulation of social bridging, although this concept was investigated quantitatively rather than via qualitative detailed accounts. All of the social systems are, in turn, nested in a macrosystem that covers the broader societal context, such as the general economic conditions, the geographic area an individual is looking for work, the occupational field, employment supply and demand (Mallough & Kleiner, 2001), and how a university or subject of study is viewed in a specific job market (Mason et al., 2003; Murray & Robinson, 2001). Career Ecosystem theory (Donald et al., 2024) encapsulates many of these macrosystem influences by gauging the inputs and desirable or undesirable outcomes that come into play at a local, national, and global level. On a more local level, students will often engage in processes of social comparison (Suls & Wills, 2024) to see how they fare in relation to their peers or those who have graduated, although such a dynamic has been rarely explored in relation to student employability, although there are some exceptions (Ball et al., 2020; and study 2 in Dineen et al., 2017). Students may be affected by the social ecologies surrounding them and the messaging about employability that could emanate from each social system. If there are barriers to students for accessing appropriate and timely advice, this could significantly hinder their employability prospects. To assess how these social ecologies are perceived as operating, and to find out how students perceived their employability overall, we sought to answer two research questions:

1. How do students in the Social Sciences perceive their own employability and the concept of employability in general?

2. What factors influence these perceptions?

Method

Participants

For Study 1 (Cohort 1), all undergraduate students in Social Sciences in a University in England were invited in 2013 via email to participate in the study. Volunteers formed eight focus groups of 2–6 students with a total of 30 participants who studied Criminology, Health and Social Care, International Relations, Psychology, and Sociology. There were two focus groups with students at Level 4 (L4), four with those at Level 5 (L5), and two with students at Level 6 (L6). For Study 2 (Cohort 2), all Psychology undergraduate students at a School of Social Sciences in the same University were invited in 2021 via email to participate. Focus groups comprised 3-6 students with a total of 43 participants in 11 focus groups. There were four focus groups with L4, four with L5, and three with those studying at L6.

Reflexivity

Our positionality in relation to the subject area, our agendas for being interested in this area, and our experiences of employability in Higher Education, are outlined below:

Author 1 was a Principal Lecturer who was tasked as part of his portfolio of activities as having responsibility for employability-related activities in a Psychology Department with over 150 academic staff and over 2000 undergraduate and postgraduate students. He co-developed and delivered (with Author 2) a Level 6 elective module that focused on enhancing student employability via work placement experience, student reflexivity, and the assessment of a portfolio. Author 2 is an Occupational Health Psychologist by background and her research has mainly focused on well-being and performance in the workplace. At the time of when the second study was being conducted, she co-led a Work, Well-Being, and Performance Research Group with Author 1. She is a renowned expert in areas related to psychosocial hazards at work and presenteeism dynamics and outcomes. Author 3 is an Employability Manager for the School within which the data were collected for Studies 1 and 2. She has a background in Careers Guidance and has taught on a variety of guidance-related modules. She has a particular interest in equality and diversity issues as well as issues relating to advice and guidance interventions. She was also one of the interviewers in Study 1. Author 4 was employed on a yearlong work placement to support the curriculum developments for the undergraduate Psychology course provision. She was involved with an audit of employability skills with Author 1 and, prior to starting her work placement, she was part of a multidisciplinary, online, extra-curricular employability project that involved working with students from a range of courses and working for local organisations to solve organisationally set problems. Author 4 and Author 1 collected the data in Study 2.

Analysis

We utilised Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) to extract areas of agreement among each participant group and then across groups by Year of study. Following Braun and Clarke’s (2022) guidance, a systematic process was undertaken with six phases of (1) familiarisation, (2) coding, (3) generating initial themes, (4) developing and reviewing themes, (5) refining, defining, and naming themes, and (6) writing up. Although coding was informed by prior theory and research and with experiences of the researchers as being provisioners of education or the recipients of education in relation to employability, it was not wholly deductive as we were open to extracting any counter-intuitive and unexpected codes. In phase 3, we progressed through a process of looking for semantic, surface-level codes before transitioning to latent codes that represented deeper levels of meaning and perception. Multiple rounds of coding were carried out, which enabled us to create codes and code labels that could be finalised into a set of informative theme labels and illustrative extracts. Cohort 1 (Study 1) data were analysed first with Cohort 2 (Study 2) data used to confirm or contrast with these findings. Since most researchers use the group as the unit of analysis when analysing focus group data (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2009), we focused on what the students said in their groups and how they agreed or disagreed with each other’s contributions; in this way, we refer to only the cohort number and the focus group number with any quotes that follow. With any interaction noise from the focus group, this is signified with content in parentheses and content that is inferred or mentioned elsewhere is added in square brackets in the quotes.

Procedure

Both cohorts of students were asked about their perceptions and definitions of employability and how their perceived employability made them feel, so there was scope for comparison between them. Study 1 focus group interviews were carried out face-to-face by two researchers. Interviews were recorded, with the participants’ permission, and transcribed. The opening question ‘What does the word employability mean to you?’ was used to kick-start the unstructured interviews and stimulate discussion on participants’ employability experiences and the range of factors that can impact on employability. The timing of the Study 1 data collection was important as it allowed us to capture students’ concerns about the value for money of their courses (the £9000 per year tuition fees had just been introduced in England and Wales) and this was also a period in which graduate employment rates were at healthy levels after a steady increase in the previous decade (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2013). Study 2 focus group interviews were conducted online via Microsoft Teams, due to COVID-19 restrictions, by two researchers. Most of the students had their cameras on and all students used their microphones during the interviews. Focus groups were recorded with the students’ permission. The interviews were semi-structured and covered: understanding of employability, skill development, and confidence/attitude. Open-ended questions were used to prompt discussion such as ‘how do you feel when you hear the term employability?’. The timing of Study 2 captured student perceptions at a time when employment concerns and confidence were most delicate, given that COVID-19 was having an impact on the labour market in the UK at the time of the interviews. Participants from cohorts 1 and 2 were identified using alphabetical and numerical markers respectively. Ethical approval for the studies was granted by the University’s Research Ethics committee.

Findings and discussion

Students in both cohorts evaluated their own employability and the factors underpinning it. We have grouped these factors into two main themes: (1) having the right personal attribute equipment for successful employability and (2) social ecological factors influencing such perceptions of having the right employability equipment. The second theme was split into three sub-themes. The first sub-theme was microsystem direct influences on a student’s employability, which comprise immediate social circles surrounding the students, such as peers, family, employers, university tutors, or the university employability service. The second sub-theme was dysfunctional mesosystems when microsystems around student employability clash; a mesosystem need not only include the conflict between two microsystems and may entail a harmonising process in which the two microsystems transmit similar values and principles to the students about employability. However, what we found was primarily about conflict with how the messages from one microsystem (e.g. an Employability Service) and from another microsystem (e.g. a student’s peer group) was seen by some students as being out of synchrony with each other. The third of the sub-themes—the macrosystem indirect wider national social influences on employability—related to a student’s sense of awareness around labour markets being crowded and highly competitive. Additionally, in the case of Cohort 2, there were concerns about being part of a national generation of students and future graduates who would be affected negatively by changes to society, changes to learning in higher education, and new potential impacts on the job needed and the work available because of COVID-19.

Each of the themes and sub themes will be illustrated with selected excerpts from focus groups with either, or both, cohorts.

Theme 1: having the right ‘equipment’ for successful employability

This notion of having the right ‘equipment’ has been illustrated with several occasions when students defined employability as ‘how well equipped you are for a job, so in terms of, in terms of equipped I mean like a skill set that you have, um your preparedness for the role’ and ‘so it kind of comes with the whole, like, how equipped you are, if you’ve got experience you’re probably better for, like, future jobs or that job role’ (both quotes from Cohort 2, Focus Group 9). According to both cohorts of student, this right ‘equipment’ included having the following: taking responsibility for one’s employability, having self-confidence, skills, recognising that experience could be more important than knowledge, having a sense of identity, being passionate about a particular field, and being self-aware.

With Taking responsibility for one’s employability, the following quote illustrates this view:

Yeah because you get, sometimes we’ll get emails or you have to physically look on, like, your [virtual learning environment], like, page at the front and see if they got volunteering if you’ve got um, you know when they present certain things on that page, you know it’s up to you to actually go, like, search for it instead of it being told to you cause we’re adults at this point so I wouldn’t really expect our course to be, like, ‘oh yeah do this, do this, do this’. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 9].

This excerpt speaks to the student’s perspective on how different their employability experience is expected to be in Higher Education, when compared with pre-tertiary education, by recognising the value of being proactive (‘it’s up to you to actually go, like, search for it’) and recognising that this taking on responsibility is marking a transition to adulthood as the student recognises it’s an ‘adult’ thing to do. This insight is like an element of the Employability Redefined model in needing to be resilient, and it is evident also in the following quote, in which a Level 6 student repeated the notion of reaching a pivotal stage in one’s life (‘we’re seen as adults’), but also recognises the need to be self-motivated by seeking new career opportunities.

It’s interesting, though, because we’re seen as adults in the university, and you have to go out there and find that though. The university does supply the help, but if the actual students go and find it, if that’s what they want. […] it’s actually if you go and do it yourself, it’s a lot about yourself in University [Cohort 1, Focus Group 3].

For skills, there was mention of this as an important element among both cohorts. However, the role of skills was put in context with other elements of employability. Two participants weighed up its relative importance with the following:

I don’t know if it was like the skills themselves or just like my confidence and like I think confidence is the most important one because when you’re confident like you become better at everything I think, so yeah for me I would say that’s the biggest one probably. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 4].

Yeah, I’ll say I feel about 60% confident just based on 60% confident in my own skills and my own experience but the 40% is more like situation that is out of my hands and with the whole pandemic and also looking for roles in my area I don’t even live in a city - it’s a town - so I have less opportunities and I have to look elsewhere and commute and all those factors playing in, I. that plays up to 40% and it’s just outta my control plus competition so… yeah. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 8].

As can be seen from both quotes, skills were seen as less important for employability than self-confidence—a vital tool for further skill acquisition. The second quote showed how confidence in one’s employability levels could intersect with whether someone is affected by geographical limitations. This is in line with the argument that employability is more than just skills (Cole & Donald, 2022) so other elements, such as confidence and self-efficacy, could be more pivotal. The role of confidence and competence in the following quote could relate to the Springboard Model, which has these two elements at its core:

I was kind of going to relate to uh [name of other student in focus group]’s point about confidence, I think the course is giving me room to grow in confidence, I think it’s more of a two-way street, so the more effort I put into the course the more confidence I would have, but the more confidence I’d have the more effort I’d want to put into the course, so yeah I think it’s like a two-way street. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 4].

This insight shows how confidence and actual competence might interrelate so that it becomes a virtuous cycle for the student. Such a mechanism overlaps with the Employability Redefined model, which shows self-efficacy as being an integral part of it.

Another excerpt, focused more on recognising that experience could be more important than knowledge, which poses a challenge to the Employability Redefined model as some elements may have more value than others, at least from the student’s perspective:

Just uh just the research methods and statistics is useful, but at least in my case ‘cause I do want to go into research but the rest of the modules, errm you know, it’s just throwing content at you, it’s just throwing knowledge at you which I guess yeah it’s nice to have it’s useful to know but it’s not really preparing you. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 5].

In this quote, it’s clear that the student sees knowledge as only being as useful for how it will be applied in their career. Given that the student does see themselves as going into a research role, it is intriguing to see the student reflect on knowledge being thrown at them, which seems to connote knowledge for knowledge’s sake, without any perception of its long-term utility. The student appears to be emphasising other things—beyond knowledge—as more important, especially as knowledge is seen by them as an add-on (‘nice to have’). With experience being valued more, students said they want to have work-like experiences that would help them to ‘be able to see how that [psychological theory] can link to the real-world environment’. Another student commented also that practice of the process of getting relevant work-like experience was deemed more helpful than just being told the value of getting this experience:

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the messaging that we get from the employability team is just like you need to go get some experience, well that’s the part that I’m struggling with like you need experience to get experience, so I don’t know what I’m doing in that regard. So [I] feel like they could focus more on, like, OK ‘this is how you do this’ not just ‘you need to do this’. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 7]

Another facet of the ‘having the right equipment for employability’ theme included being able to have a strong sense of one’s identity; this is a component of the ‘Employability Redefined’ model too and illustrated here:

But, yeah, I feel like I have developed different skills than what I would have in a normal year in terms of employability skills, maybe as an indirect consequence of coming to uni I feel like I have found myself as a person which is obviously you need to know who you are as a person so you can portray that in a good way in an interview. Um so that’s obviously not been a direct result of studying Psychology um that just is a knock-on effect essentially, so I feel like directly from the course I’ve not necessarily gained that many employability skills but from the way that like uni has been as a whole this year there is different things that we’ve managed to learn. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 2]

Here, the student comments ‘I have found myself as a person’ and it is noteworthy for this student that they see this awareness of identity as a stepping stone to securing employment. It is also interesting to recognise, in the same quote, that the student views their employability as enhanced vicariously through the overall student experience rather than directly being obtained through the course or the employability service. This notion of acquiring vital elements of one’s employability-related brand/identity via other means also resonates with another segment of the Employability Redefined model, namely life wide learning, and this has been evidenced as follows:

I wouldn’t say I’ve been directly taught many good employability skills. But I’d say like, through volunteering, and like, especially the last few months, like going through interview processes, and trying to find placements is where I’ve gotten like most of my skills, but I wouldn’t say that as much to do with, like, the uni. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 6]

An example of life wide learning can be seen when the student sees indirectly picking up experiences via volunteering and undergoing searches for a placement as more invaluable for their employability than what they have been taught on their course. Another element of the ‘having the right equipment for employability’ theme can be seen from a quote linked to the notion of having a passion for a field or career:

I feel like, I’m one of them people, like I need a job that I’m interested in, like passionate about, and I think like I lost that with Clinical [Psychology]. So with children, I think I’m more confident because I know I like working with them already. I know, that’s something I’m interested in. So, I feel confident like, I will find a job that incorporates that sort of love and passion, into a job. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 6].

Although the notion of passion seems to be absent from the Employability Redefined model, we can see in this quote how passion for a career could wax and wane but also intersect with other elements in the Employability Redefined model, such as self-efficacy (‘I’m more confident’, ‘I feel confident’) and experience (‘because I know I like working with them already’).

A key element of the having the right ‘equipment’ for some students, was possession of satisfactory levels of self-awareness. Multiple students claimed that their course did not give them the right ‘equipment’ to engage in self-awareness, which would usually be elicited via reflective practice—another part of the ‘Employability Redefined’ model. One student (in the following excerpt) saw curriculum-based content and activities for self-awareness as being absent from their course with few opportunities for time-outs to engage in the ‘whole person development’ that has been espoused by Cole & Coulson, 2022). This is contrasted with another student, in the same excerpt, who sees cultivating self-awareness as being covered in one module as being sufficient and that to do more would be excessive:

1: I wish it was more incorporated into the course because I think self-awareness and just getting the time to reflect can really aid in just like personal development outside of your degree because I think sometimes I feel like, um I’m not getting as much time to develop as a person through my degree as I am getting to learn about my degree so it would be nice to have like the time allocated for me to look back on what I have done and what I can improve on.

2: Um I actually disagree, like for me I do like having a separate module for personal development which I think analytical thinking was because we had kind of the development of the critical thinking and self-awareness through the reflection, but I don’t think that I would like having maybe that im… I don’t know biology or like cognitive psychology, because then I would feel like I’m doing more self-reflection than I’m doing the actual learning of the module. I mean as I said like if we had more assignments then maybe like if one assignment was self-reflection, another was biological but since we do have only one assignment module I kind of I don’t really see the point of that so. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 4].

Another insight (with the following quote) illustrates how students may draw more from the feedback they get on their assessed work to become more self-aware:

I think for the most part like a lot of people do only see like their own weaknesses cause we are like very, very, like critical of ourselves naturally, and um it is, like, quite hard to see your strengths but then getting that, like, feedback on assignments, it’s really helpful to say like oh maybe I was, like, being a little bit too harsh on myself when it came to that, um you know my grade shows that I’ve done alright, so you know what maybe I do need to stop being so critical. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 3].

Clearly, the student used feedback to develop a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and, in turn enhance their self-efficacy levels, by getting more objective feedback to combat self-critical appraisals of their abilities (‘maybe I was like being a bit too harsh on myself’ and the blanket tendencies of ‘we are like very like critical of ourselves’ and it being ‘quite hard to see our strengths’). In a similar vein to the Johari window matrix (e.g. Oliver & Duncan, 2019) that covers the elements that are unknown to the self, but known to others, then feedback on their course could help to shrink this ‘unknown to self, known to others’ area on their Johari window.

As can be seen from this excerpt, the role of viewing how others see oneself via processes such as feedback can be core to getting a feel of how employable one is, or can be, and this dynamic of social perception (McArthur & Baron, 1983) is one that leads on to the next theme of influential social factors and how these factors can interrelate with the students’ employability perceptions on a range of levels.

Theme 2. Social ecological factors influencing such perceptions having the right employability ‘equipment’

Sub-theme 2.1. Microsystem direct influences on a student’s employability

Going through each level, in turn, we will examine quotes from the students on the sub-theme of the ‘microsystem direct influences on a student’s employability’. The microsystem was one of the most popular observations students made, although they did not call it as such, but it entailed their relationships with their peers on their course or friends from university when gauging one’s employability prospects. A typical quote by one student (below) used the metaphor of the marathon to understand their progress with their career prospects:

Yeah, I second that, like, completely, I completely agree, like, I honestly don’t have any idea and it should stress me out a lot of my friends are stressed about it but sometimes you know sometimes you don’t have to get to your goal within the first, like, year, two years of leaving University sometimes it’s more like a more like a marathon than a sprint, like, you’ve gotta do this and you gotta do more volunteering so you’ve gotta pace it out so you’ve gotta work it, like, as a bartender or, like, as a waitress or something just to pay bills but you know as so long as you are happy with where you are or so long as you’re happy with where you going then you know why stress about it sort of thing. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 10].

This notion of being in a race recurs in a range of focus groups, so there is clearly a social comparison dynamic that some students are using when evaluating their employability. Alongside the notion of running a race against peers, this quote also shows that the student viewed employability as something that should be approached at a steady pace and that there are likely to be other activities to be done (bar tendering/waitressing ‘just to pay bills’) before the ‘dream job’ can be obtained. In essence, this student, like others, (e.g. ‘it’s not helped me narrow down my search yet because I just don’t know what I’m doing yet, which is fine’) views employability as being something to focus on at the right time and place only. This idea of ‘doing employability’ at the right time also comes through in the excerpt below with comments like ‘you shouldn’t really be focused on developing those skills right now’ and with observing the university as having more of a role for employability support in the second or third year of the student’s course, but not just yet in the first year of study:

However long you pursue university I’m sure it will definitely prepare us at the right stages right now it’s. you shouldn’t really be focused on developing those skills right now as much as other skills I feel and upon entering second and third year when you, you know, you’re getting closer at breaking out into the working world I’m sure that’s when the university will have more of a prevalence at developing those skills so by the time of graduation I’ll definitely feel confident in my employability skills being developed but again at this stage it’s only natural to think that because you haven’t completed uni yet you’re not really in the best employable state. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 2].

This analogue of being on a staged, long-term journey, like a marathon, emerged in another quote in which the student commented on having ‘fallen behind a bit’ when compared with their course mates.

I know that one of my course mates is working in care support and I don’t have like umm… such like opportunity because I don’t even have a driver’s licence so I would say I’m a bit worried that others are ahead of me and with the pandemic that I have fallen behind a bit, so yeah. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 5].

Continuing with the focus of influential microsystems, fellow students (as well as being competitors for work) are also those that can help to clarify and explain modules designed to develop students’ employability. The following quote recounts a period when a student tried to make sense of an employability-focused module that seemed disconnected from the degree content:

…when we first started it, I remember talking to, like, my flat mates and my friends and being like ‘what is the point in this module this is not psychological at all?’ but urm, now it’s got a lot better and like it’s made me kind of realise you know this is actually quite helpful for like future employability and like reflection and stuff, um I’d say most of my confidence from about like employability that’s coming from my time at uni has been from the additional stuff that I’ve done though it hasn’t been directly from the course apart from that placement year but like yeah the majority’s been from like the additional stuff from employability online rather than the actual four year course I’ve done, I think. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 9].

It is evident that lifelong learning and life wide learning are both occurring as the student uses their peers to try to understand the objective of the employability module over time (‘now it’s got a lot better’ versus ‘when we first started’) and the student’s peers are those that could be used as a sounding board to verify insights and evaluate the worth of a module for one’s employability.

Other microsystems that students could encounter include family, teachers, and employers. Concerning family microsystems, these act as barometers for testing the inherent value of a degree:

And there is such a lot of stigma attached to that as well, my Dad is like ‘oh, so you are doing a Mickey Mouse degree’ (laughter, agreement) so I think it is the topic as well. You feel less employable because of what I did my degree in [Cohort 1, Focus Group 2].

Also, some students saw their siblings as setting a standard for needing to do a degree before getting a job (‘a good job’, which presumably requires a degree in the first place) alongside another quote showing that the family members, all of whom were graduates, were expecting the student to do a degree (‘because that is the way everybody does it’).

Both my brothers have been to university so [I] have this level I have to live up to but I think that’s where the pressure is… And I have to go and get a good job afterwards because I sort of have this level to live up to. [Cohort 1, Focus Group 7].

For other Cohort 1 L5s, university is an expected rite of passage, with the family microsystem crucially shaping a student’s work ethic and perceptions of the value of work:

I think a lot of it comes down to, for me, down to family as well, because the family I come from, everyone is educated at degree level, so it is like you need to be educated at that level because that is the way everybody does it. So you do it, and also it will help you to get a job. You are respected when you go out to get a job and it makes you think at a certain level. [Cohort 1, Focus Group 2].

Clearly, the family microsystem, in the case of these students, set up an anticipated standard of education as a prerequisite for having a sufficient level of thinking (‘and it makes you think at a certain level’) before a graduate job can be obtained. Gaining respect in that microsystem also seems to be integral too. With the microsystem that some students will have come into contact prior to university (e.g. A Level teachers), the messaging on appropriate preparation for employability is evident with one student mentioning pressure from teachers to secure a placement year at University:

I was always told like that was the way like, in during my A Levels my teachers were like if you don’t do a placement year, you start off behind people who have got that experience. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 6].

The notion of being behind in a marathon-like process is being used, as with other excerpts, in which a sandwich course with a yearlong placement is put on a pedestal by the A Level teacher and is likely to cause anxiety among students who heard such advice, if the students are unable to get on to such a course. The microsystem of the employer is also one that students may only vaguely know about if they have not had experience of working with their targeted employers. However, the following two quotes provide insights into how students are acquainted with how to achieve ‘fit’ with an employer by being able to use a specific computer program or in having knowledge about the employer.

Urm she mentioned that it’s, say if, if I went into a job interview, and someone, like, random [person] off the street, just went into the job interview, um then I’d have all these skills on R studio, and she was talking about how undergraduates don’t really mention their skills a lot, but we’ve actually got quite a lot because they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, well I only got a 2:2 in that’, but actually, it’s better than someone who’s got no skills and she said, a lot of companies use R studio as well now. Um I can’t remember which ones but yeah. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 11].

Um I’m I think for me it means how well equipped you are for a job, so in terms of in terms of equipped I mean like a skill set that you have, um your preparedness for the role like whether you, if you’re applying for like a specific job whether you’ve done like the research into what it is, into like the culture of the company, that kind of thing and how um suitable you are. for that specific job. That’s what I think. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 9].

From the first quote, it is evident that the student is recognising the value of specific skills needed in an organisation over academic performance at university when using such skills. We can see there is an advisor who is helping the student to realise the potential for meeting the cultural needs of an organisation and this is where a mesosystem might emerge in that the advisor could be part of a team that values certain beliefs and practices and these could harmonise with, or conflict with, those values held by people in another microsystem such as inside an employing organisation.

Sub-theme 2.2. Dysfunctional mesosystems—when microsystems around student employability clash

The following quotes will illustrate how the microsystems may mesh and complement each other or, potentially more damagingly, how they might conflict in relation to students’ perceptions of their employability. The concept of the mesosystem is not something that has been touched on explicitly in the literature into student employability in HEIs. Indirectly, Donald et al. (2018), by collecting data from 38 one-to-one interviews with students, elicited a recommendation by students for university careers services to work more effectively in partnership with lecturers but this was not identified as a mesosystem failing. By contrast, we have been able to extract a wide range of mesosystem issues in relation to employability.

In this quote, a Level 6 student comments on how their values, which appear shared with the rest of the group, were at odds with those of a Careers Advisor:

I don’t want to graduate and then go into volunteering I don’t want to. I need to get a paid job, (agreement, agreement) because at the talk… the man [Careers advisor] said, ‘basically, when you graduate, it is not likely that you will go into a paid job’, and I was thinking, that is not really, you know, the most positive [advice] (agreement, agreement). [Cohort 1, Focus Group 2].

This extract is striking because it aligns with Cole’s (2019) and Dacre Pool and Sewell (2007) ideas on how an erosion of trust between people advising students and the students themselves could adversely affect students’ self-efficacy and confidence. If students engage in self-reflection—a key element of the Employability Redefined model—then reflection on such an encounter could undermine students’ belief in being able to successfully obtain graduate-level employment. In a similar vein, we see another illustration in Cohort 2 with a Level 4 student who is concerned at how the microsystem of the employability team is not seen as gelling effectively with the employer microsystem:

It gets mentioned but it doesn’t get pushed enough, like it it’s a brief ‘oh yeah you know you might do some volunteering, you might need to do that’, but it seems that employers really focus on that bit and I don’t think they [the University Employability Team] necessarily push you enough to be like ‘look this is really important it’s almost as important as your degree’. I… I don’t feel like there’s enough information out there to say like this is what employers want and here’s where you can get it. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 3].

In this excerpt, there is conflict in messaging from both employees and the university’s employability service. The student appears to be getting lukewarm impressions about the value of volunteering from one stakeholder group and, yet, the student finds through messaging from employers, that volunteering is seen as giving the experience that is seen as an integral part of the Employability Redefined model. However, the student feels misled by the employability service, who is not seen as emphasising enough about the true value of volunteering. Again, the disconnect between microsystems are likely, in this case, to have a negative effect on a student’s employability perceptions. What is curious about both quotes on mesosystem conflict is that volunteering is seen as undesirable in the former instance, and yet it is portrayed as integral to a student’s employability prospects in the latter instance. Perhaps the difference can best be explained by the former quote showing a student’s dismissal of volunteering as important after doing their course because getting paid work would be something that could help the student to feel they have ‘arrived’ in the world of work and to pay back the debts incurred from being at university. By contrast, being a volunteer to get experience and to do it during the degree is seen, in the latter quote, as vital for getting into the world of graduate-level work, so it is evident that students may view employability-related activities as having a time and a place that is most appropriate, which links to earlier insights into the need to pace oneself in the employability marathon.

One example of where the mesosystem is not as harmonious as it could be, includes an excerpt where a student shares about being told by their employer, with whom they are working part-time, of an Employability Award being offered by the student’s university. The student expresses disappointment about the university employability service not being seen as doing enough to advertise it. The student commented that they would have preferred to learn about it earlier to feel less pressured to do it. Donald et al. (2018) have emphasised that university employability services need to do more to increase awareness of available opportunities and this situation was an example where the this was seen as not happening by the student. There seems to be a time and a place for valued employability activities, almost akin to pacing oneself in the employability marathon to have certain milestones to track progress, and the student did not see the messaging from the two microsystems of the employer and the university employability service as connecting this time to meet this milestone.

Another instance of mesosystem conflict can be seen in an excerpt when a student reports being told by staff in their Sixth Form College that a CV was needed for getting work and the student then found out subsequently this was not needed by employers. The student calls this advice by the labels of ‘scams’, ‘pointless’, and ‘lies’.

when I think of employability, yeah most of what you guys have said and also like kinda like scams where like in high school or secondary school or like sixth form they say ‘Oh yeah do this people love to see it on a CV’ and then no they like nobody, like you go to interview and they don’t ask about like, I don’t know, Duke of Edinburgh and stuff like that, like, they don’t care and I’m, like, that was, that was pointless, well maybe not pointless but, like, uh just yeah, lies (laughter). [Cohort 2, Focus Group 10]

Evidently, the student saw the Sixth Form College advisors and potential employers as clashing with their expectations of the student, although this conflict could also be attributed to the student seeing this advice as applying to any work (e.g. part-time work to be done during university studies) versus what Sixth Form College advisors may have focused on instead, namely graduate-type work.

Other types of mesosystem conflicts could be found from one excerpt focusing on three microsystems that a student encounters:

Um the only thing I would probably say is from what I hear a lot from people that graduated is that whenever you apply for jobs the big thing is experience and a degree is obviously very important but, they really home in on the experience and I do feel like it get, it gets mentioned but it doesn’t get pushed enough, like it it’s a brief ‘oh yeah you know you might do some volunteering you might need to do that’ but, it seems that employers really focus on that bit and I don’t think they necessarily push you enough to be like ‘look this is really important is almost as important as your degree’. I, I don’t feel like there’s enough information out there to say, like, this is what employers want and here’s where you can get it. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 3].

We see, here, the student encounters the values held by the graduate microsystem (‘I hear a lot from people that graduated… that the big thing is experienced’) versus those espoused by university advisors (‘Oh yeah, you know, you might do some volunteering’) and employers (‘look this is really important… Almost as important as your degree’) and the student views these systems as being disconnected. As with other excerpts for this theme, there is an air of distrust from the student who sees the University-based advisors as failing by not synchronising the messaging of what the student needs to do, and how to do it, to meet the requirements for graduate-level work. With this conflict at the mesosystem level across several excerpts, and for both cohorts of data, it is unsurprising that some students express concern at being able to cope with the next level of social system influences on their employability perceptions—the macrosystem, which included viewing the graduate jobs markets as saturated and highly competitive, and in the case of the Cohort 2 data, seeing oneself as part of a different generation of students—the ‘COVID generation’—with complex needs, strengths, and deficits in relation to employability.

Sub-theme 2.3. The macrosystem of indirect wider national social influences on employability

These macrosystem-level influences do not seem to be encompassed by the Employability Redefined model, although the microsystem and mesosystem-level influences could be extant, as the Employability Redefined model identifies interpersonal perspectives. Instead, Bronfenbrenner’s model and the Career Ecosystems Framework appear to capture more explicitly the role of the macrosystem and some of the excerpts that follow are in alignment with this concept. Macrosystem perspectives were gleaned by students from their absorption of messaging from media reports and what they have learned about events happening nationally. One of the aspects of this macrosystem perspective is the notion of standing out in a crowded and competitive jobs market.

Those in Cohort 1 noted that a degree was no longer adequate in the current job market at the time because of a perceived supply-and-demand imbalance between qualified people and available jobs in a certain sector:

The way that the job market is now, you can’t just have a degree. You need to be seen as someone who’s willing and enthusiastic really, I suppose as well as wanting to work ‘cause there’s going to be other people that have a degree, so if you can offer something else apart from that, it’s going to be beneficial. [Cohort 1, Focus Group 4].

This is echoed by a Cohort 2 L6 student who is also concerned about standing out in the job market due to the number of people with degrees:

Now I feel like so many people have degrees, uh you have to be more than everyone else, so I get scared cause I’m like I’m kind of lacking in that section of ‘what do you outside of your degree and your jobs?’, you have to do more, you have to show that you do more. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 9].

One Cohort 1 Level 5 student reflected that their degree was not a strong currency in the job market at that time, as the student saw the supply and demand being imbalanced so that there was a steady stream of graduates, and most graduates would be seen as more of the same unless they had something to make them more salient than others. Here, the salience part of what the student is viewing as integral for their employability can be detected with utterances of needing to ‘be more’, ‘do more’, and ‘show that you do more’. With using the lens of social comparison theory (Suls & Wills, 2024), we can see the student creates a social comparison dynamic for an employer to engage in seeing how that student has better qualities than the student’s peers. The need for salience in a nationally competitive jobs market can be seen through other quotes, such as with the following:

I would say that urm, I don’t know it’s a bit of a tough one because I feel like in some aspects I think there’s probably going to be more opportunities especially for like Psychology students than ever, there’s going to be a lot more new jobs and areas to go into, urm but I know there’s quite a lot of like Psychology areas that quite competitive and it’s just how do you make yourself stand out above everybody else that’s probably right my biggest concern like are you just going to become another graduate that wants a job you know or you know, is there something that’s gonna put you above the rest? [Cohort 2, Focus Group 3].

In this excerpt, we see the challenge for a student who is concerned about a crowded and competitive market for jobs that are in the professional psychological practice areas and this concern rides on being seen as ‘another graduate that wants a job’ versus one who can have these ‘stand out’ qualities that gives them a competitive edge. The student refers to there being ‘more opportunities, especially for psychology students’ and this is because the student views the job markets, post-COVID, as creating additional needs for those within society. This segues onto the next part of this theme, which was unique to Cohort 2 and involved being seen as part of the COVID generation of students and future graduates.

This social perception, of being part of a specific group and viewed by employers in a certain way, was perceived by those in Cohort 2 as conferring positive and negative impacts. Positively, some students saw being part of the COVID generation as beneficial with its timing because of perceptions of there being a greater need for psychology-based work, particularly in the mental health field, as can be seen by in the following two excerpts:

Excerpt 1

Um like obviously right now as well I’m looking for a job and I’m just looking for any opportunity to get any work experience because obviously with uni as well it’s quite bad with finance too because it just, so obviously you want to find work experience but obviously with COVID um it has affected my employability in the sense too and, like [name of student] said, it’s, it’s affected my mental health as well because it’s quite, it’s quite, you can’t really interact that well with that many people and get out much and stuff like that so it’s kind of affected my employability skills too as well as like with communication and just team working and like just working in a team with people alongside people. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 11].

Excerpt 2

1: I think it’s, it’s possibly given… in a bad way is it made a lot more people um struggle with their mental health so it is giving us a lot more to look at with Psychology I think and um, I’ve realised how much a pandemic can impact people’s lives and so obviously it is bad but it’s giving us a lot more to look at and research.

2: I think it’s shown how important psychology actually is like how, ‘cos there’s gonna be massive demand after all of this with things like therapy and counselling and like it’s going to be massive it is going to be a massive industry I think, but because people still haven’t been able to experience it’s going to be is there enough people to supply that demand? I don’t know.

3: Yeah I agree. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 1].

In the first excerpt, the student was referring to intrapersonal elements of the Employability Redefined model by sharing how they were being affected by the pandemic lockdown restrictions and disruptions to their learning at university and in obtaining work-like experiences. In the second excerpt, all students were able to see the knock-on effects brought about by the pandemic by seeing this as opening new possibilities for working in the mental health field. However, the uncertainty of its knock-on effects, and whether supply of new workers will be available to meet the national population’s mental health needs, is something that has created uncertainty for the second student. In another excerpt below, a student saw their ability to learn at a time of abnormal living as meaning that the student could see they were acquiring so-called ‘COVID skills’ by adapting to a new way of working that might be needed by employers as some employers may continue to require IT skills and online working habits that were not commonly used pre-COVID.

we’ve all adapted in very similar ways, we’ve all converted to online ways of working, we’ve all developed similar ‘COVID skills’ let’s call them, like skills that yes we can still develop in a normal way of working but they’ve been, there’s a heavy prevalence of working online IT skills so yeah I don’t think we’ve been negatively it’ll have negatively impacted us whatsoever, but the only bit I can see it negatively impacting us is again perhaps on these early opportunity fronts but again it’s not just us individuals it’s everyone, many opportunities have had to be rescheduled or pushed back and yeah it’s just something that we’ve all had to deal with. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 2].

In this instance, students in this cohort saw themselves as being more resilient by being part of the COVID generation (see below), which shows downward social comparison by being better than an average graduate.

I think personally for me it’s been a positive thing because going forward uh once you’ve graduated and stuff, future employers will know that we sat our degree during Corona, during the lockdown, during the pandemic and I think that comes with it a set of skills needed and like a level of resilience that would be higher than the average graduate normally. So I think for me it’s been a plus but I can see how it has hindered someone like people that wanted to do placements this year or wanted to go abroad next year and stuff but I think in the long run is actually more of a benefit because it’s, it’s just come with like, we’re just a tougher breed basically for this couple of years.

I just, I mean I don’t think we’re as bad as the people that graduated last year because none of them found a job I mean some people did but like it was really hard for them to find a job or anything really so so just a little better. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 5]

Students may then see themselves as having better salience to stick out in a crowded job market compared with graduates of a different era, although some students were able to see negative effects of being part of the COVID generation. Likewise, the comment from the second student in that excerpt shows a process of downward social comparison with those who are part of the COVID generation, with graduates who have finished their course at the height of the pandemic restrictions being portrayed as less fortunate. Another interaction between two students, which follows, also shows how badly they believed they had been affected:

1: Um yeah definitely negative, it’s just for the fact that I’ve heard a lot of people even a few articles just saying that our generation, the generation that’s in the uni now like are the most disadvantaged ones like we’re going to be the most behind like when it comes to jobs and employers are not going to really, they’re gonna look at us and they’re gonna just see the COVID generation as we’ve been labelled apparently so urm yeah so obviously that puts your spirits down a little (laughter).

2: Yeah no I agree, it’s just if you look at certain Master’s [degrees] sometimes you actually need, like, a year of experience in something and we just couldn’t do that so, like, that means we have to, like, spend another year just doing, I don’t know what, like, maybe doing a job we don’t want to do or just so we can get into something later so we’re just losing time really. [Cohort 2, Focus Group 5].

The first student sees a stigmatising impact of being labelled as part of the COVID generation (‘that puts your spirits down’) and the perceived stigma is coupled with attributing this status as being less fortunate than other cohorts of students or prospective graduates (‘the most disadvantaged’ and ‘losing time’ and ‘the most behind’); this links to an earlier insight of being part of an employability marathon and having a lagging behind experience coupled with the messaging that the student was receiving of needing to have work-like experience as a prerequisite for entry to postgraduate study. Alongside this situation of having such a requirement, the second student in the quote is bemoaning not being able to access this work-like experience, owing to restrictions put in place by governments and HEIs to limit face-to-face placements; the student views this as creating a gap in the timing needed for their employability marathon journey.

Strengths, limitations, and implications

In this research, we have been able to glean insights into the students’ perspectives of their employability within context, particularly with Cohort 2 whom many of them saw as being part of a COVID generation that was scarred and challenged, but also resilient with a specific set of skills compared to previous generations of students. However, we were also able to show timeless themes that students perceived and one of the unique contributions of our research has been to show the difficulties for students in having mesosystems around them that were feeding the students with mixed messages or communications that were out of synchrony with the students’ employability journeys. Despite the study’s strengths, one potential limitation could be that our two samples were only from students in one School of Social Sciences in one University in England. It may be argued that the focus on undergraduate students in the social sciences may limit the generalisability of the findings, although this is not an issue with qualitative approaches aimed at reflecting what is true and social constructed for that group. Nevertheless, the two student cohorts showed good agreement in their understandings and narratives around employability. The other important perspective around the lack of generalisability non-issue is that we have been able to demonstrate how microsystems and mesosystems have such a pivotal role when planning employability interventions. An implication for practice is that those stakeholders working within HE would need to understand that a one-size-fits-all model would not work, and that personalisation of learning and acquisition of employability capabilities would be needed via personalised services (see Cole & Coulson, 2022). This personalisation needs to happen so that stakeholders from HE and employers can understand how students are working within, and influenced by, the microsystems around each student and how some of these microsystems might be affected by a mesosystem disharmony, which would then mean mixed messages being given to students or messages being communicated in an untimely manner.

There is also the potential for a self-selecting bias; only those students who would have been familiar with employability might have been more interested to put themselves forward to take part. This may then mean that only extreme views, particularly those from people who are well-informed about the topic, are likely to be represented. However, from careful analysis of the focus group data, it was evident that some of the students who took part were not that conversant with what employability entailed; with the utilisation of the focus group approach, at least students were able to use other students as sounding boards with their knowledge and perceptions about employability and to admit to feeling anxious and uncomfortable with the mention of such a concept. We were fortunate to obtain a cross-section of different experiences and perceptions about employability from our participants.

Conclusions

This research provides insights into how university students, in a School of Social Sciences, view employability generally, and their own employability, along with what influences it. Students perceived quite a range of equipment that they saw as central to their employability, which included taking responsibility for one’s employability and other aspects including finding one’s passion, which has not been addressed much in other theoretical approaches to employability in HE. Students saw themselves as engaging in a marathon-like experience that needed to be undertaken at a steady pace and in a timely manner. They were also concerned about being able to have salience in what they saw as a crowded and highly competitive jobs market. One major issue that has emerged from this research, which other theoretical approaches have not fully acknowledged, is the role of the mesosystem as being core to students’ understanding about the things that employers need as opposed to what the students are told that the employers might require. Conflicts between microsystems have meant that students have reported finding out about employability opportunities later than they would have wished or that students receive messaging from some sources that are out of kilter with the values held by themselves and their peers. To maximise the impact of employability provision in HE settings, a collaborative approach that involves students, provisioners, and employers is needed to capitalise on the social ecological factors that exist and to ensure that the range of microsystems circulating around students are ones that harmonise and do not conflict or provide mixed messages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glenn A. Williams

Dr. Glenn A. Williams is a Principal Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. For 3 years, he was the Employability Lead for the Psychology Department at NTU. He specialises in community psychology and psychological well-being and mental health.

Maria Karanika-Murray

Maria Karanika-Murray is Professor of Work and Organisational Psychology at the University of Leicester, UK. She obtained her PhD at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on well-being and performance at work.

Helen Reed

Helen Reed is the School of Social Sciences School Employability Manager at Nottingham Trent University with responsibility for Psychology, Criminology, Politics, International Relations and Sociology. She has a particular passion for working with academics to support the development of assessed work like experience in the curriculum. She has recently supported this process in Psychology transforming the work experience offer in the Department. Her research interests lie in students perceptions of employability, transition and women in the workplace. She is also enthusiastic about embedding enterprise education into the curriculum and developed enterprise challenges to support this aim.

Hannah Wiseman

Hannah Wiseman is a BSc (Hons.) Psychology (SW) graduate from Nottingham Trent University, who worked alongside the Nottingham Trent Psychology department in 2020/21 as a curriculum projects assistant on a yearlong work placement which involved, among other activities, the researching and auditing of employability in the Psychology curriculum. She is now completing a Master’s degree in Speech and Language Therapy.