Graduate Employability Across Contexts: Perspectives, Initiatives and Outcomes

This book explores stakeholders’ perspectives, their practices, and engagement with enacting the employability agenda in the context of a rapidly changing world. It explains the need for developing graduate employability under socioeconomic, cultural, and political pressure exposed to the higher education sector. Largely framed within Bourdieu’s concepts of social field, habitus, and capital, it explores international stakeholders’ perspectives and experiences with graduate employability agenda in different contexts, which serves as a point of reference for the adoption of such initiatives. Based on empirical evidence, the authors develop a new graduate employability framework seeing it as a lifelong process, denote the relationships between types of employability capital, and shed light on the consequences of different strategies to translate employability capital to employment and career outcomes. Overall, this book generates both theoretical and practical insights which help to advance employability programs, better prepare the future workforce, and anticipate turbulence in the labour markets.

Dr. Tran Le Huu Nghia is an academic, teaching and doing research in work-integrated learning and graduate employability at the Australian National University’s College of Business and Economics. He received the Erasmus Mundus scholarship to complete the Master of Lifelong Learning: Policy and Management (2007–2009) provided by Aarhus University (Denmark), Bilbao University (Spain), and Institute of Education (the United Kingdom). Then, as Endeavor Postgraduate Awardee (2012-2016), he completed his Ph.D. with a focus on higher education studies, at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has produced more than 30 research outputs, including three books and articles in journals such as Higher Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Teaching in Higher Education. His research interests include teaching and learning for employability, work-integrated learning, teacher education, international education, and teaching English as a second language.

Binh Chi Bui is a PhD candidate in Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies, the University of Houston’s College of Education, the United States. He serves as a co-managing editor of The Journal of Research on Leadership Education. He completed a Bachelor of Education degree at Can Tho University, Vietnam, and a Master of Educational Studies degree at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is the recipient of the Belgian Technical Cooperation Postgraduate Scholarship (2008), the University of Findlay’s Exchange Scholar Award (2013), a full funding package for his PhD studies from the University of Houston’s College of Education (2019), and the Doctoral Student Mentoring Scholarship from the University of Houston’s Asian American Studies Center (2020). He has presented many papers at The Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). His research interests include student loans, STEM education, student success, and employment success with a focus on underrepresented groups.

Dr Jasvir Kaur Nachatar Singh is an award-winning Senior Lecturer at the Department of Management and Marketing, La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University, Australia. In 2020, Dr Singh received an international teaching recognition from Advance HE, United Kingdom, as a Fellow (FHEA). In 2018, Dr Singh received two La Trobe University Teaching Awards and Best Presenter Award at the Global Higher Education Forum, Malaysia. Dr Singh’s research expertise is in higher education with a particular interest exploring international students’ lived experiences of academic success, employability, career aspirations and learning experiences. Dr Singh also explores lived experiences of skilled migrants and international academics. Dr Singh has published numerous articles in high impact journals and has presented at various national and international higher education conferences. In 2021, Dr Singh was appointed as a Research Fellow at the Malaysian National Higher Education Research Institute.

Professor Vinh Lu is Associate Dean (Advancement & Engagement) and Professor in Marketing in the Australian National University College of Business and Economics (CBE). Vinh conducts research in the areas of services delivery, relationship management, and career development. Vinh has written widely on these topics and has published several refereed articles in publication outlets, including Academy of Management Journal, Tourism Management, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Higher Education Research & Development, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Management, Health Psychology, Health Promotion International, among others. He is an award-winning academic whose sustained commitment to student learning, especially in the work-integrated learning and employability sphere, has been recognized with several prestigious awards at the university, national, and international levels.