Developing the ‘Oven-Ready’ Postgraduate: Squeezing a Quart into a Pint Pot to Meet the Employability Agenda

Abstract

Nationally and internationally Higher Education is increasingly competitive, with students ever more discerning and insistent on value for money. Value still resides in programme content and experiences, but the anticipated effects of programmes on progress towards a rewarding business career increasingly shape choice of what is studied and where. It is with this context that institutions must evolve a differentiated proposition. This can best be achieved via twin-track programmes delivering specialist, discipline-based knowledge overlaid with competency and capability development most conducive to ‘employment preparedness’—in other words via experiential learning. Experiential learning squeezes a quart into a pint pot by incorporating in one programme both the academic rigour of subject expertise and the ‘softer’ skills of practical organisational deftness so valued by employers and so enriching to graduates alike. This chapter describes how one Business School, drawing from the literature and addressing stakeholder demands, addressed the employability agenda within its programme provision. It includes a practical showcasing of the development and implementation of a suite of programmes designed to enable students to make a rapid and frictionless transition from academic life to real life business achievement. It concludes with highlighting the various successes and challenges experienced in particular, academic and student buy-into aspects of the employability agenda.