Embedding employability context through assessment design

Abstract

There are increasing pressures on higher education institutions to ensure that graduates are ‘employment-ready’ when they leave university. The successful achievement of this meets with many challenges, including growing pressure on staff resources and ensuring that students appreciate the ‘employability relevance’ of the skills and content covered during their course. Increasing the ‘employability context’ of a course can be efficiently achieved by focussing on assessment design, which also provides additional benefits. This article outlines and evaluates a number of strategies for embedding employability context through assessment design. By adopting similar assessment strategies into existing course material, employment expectations of graduates and employers can be met without the need for major revisions. In addition, as assessment is often the major focus of students’ activities, a focus on assessment design ensures that the ‘real worldness’ of the exercises, content and/or skills of a course is appreciated by all students.