The Employability Problem

Universities know what students need. So why is it still so difficult to make it happen?

Higher education has spent years identifying what students need to succeed in the world of work.

We know that students benefit from work-integrated learning, meaningful employer engagement, professional networks, transferable capabilities, and opportunities to apply what they learn.

The harder question is whether universities can build the systems to make those things happen consistently.

That was one of the recurring themes from my time at PIE Live Asia Pacific. Much of the conversation was framed through international education: how institutions can better support international students to transition from study into meaningful careers; how countries can maintain their attractiveness as study destinations; and how education systems can demonstrate value beyond the qualification itself.

But the issue is much broader than international education. Do universities have the capability, confidence, and accountability to build genuine pathways between learning and employment?

I increasingly think this is becoming one of higher education’s defining challenges. Not because we lack ideas. But because knowing what needs to change and actually changing it are very different things.

The ownership problem

When everyone is responsible, no one necessarily owns the outcome.

Students are increasingly asking a straightforward question: Will this education help me build a future?

That does not mean universities should become vocational training providers. Higher education has purposes that extend well beyond immediate employment. Universities should develop knowledge, critical thinking, curiosity, civic participation, judgement, and the capacity to engage with ideas that challenge assumptions.

But those purposes do not remove the responsibility to help students understand how their learning translates into the world beyond university.

For many students, employability is no longer an optional extra. It is part of the value proposition.

Most universities understand this. They have careers services, employer partnerships, work-integrated learning, employability frameworks, and programs designed to develop transferable capabilities.

Yet implementation remains remarkably uneven. Why? Because employability sits awkwardly across institutional boundaries.

Careers teams can provide excellent advice but cannot redesign curricula. Academic programs can create authentic learning experiences but may lack access to employers or labour market intelligence. Industry engagement teams can build partnerships but cannot determine how those relationships become part of students’ learning. Senior executives can establish strategic priorities but cannot implement them alone.

The result is a familiar institutional pattern: Everyone agrees that employability matters. Everyone has a piece of the solution. And nobody quite owns the whole thing.

That is not primarily a motivation problem. It is a systems problem.

The tension universities cannot avoid

Employability should not replace the purposes of higher education. It should make their value more visible.

There are legitimate concerns about an excessive focus on employment.

Higher education should not become a transactional exercise in which students acquire a prescribed set of skills simply to secure a job. Nor should employability be reduced to a generic list of capabilities bolted onto existing curricula.

The better challenge is to connect the intellectual purposes of higher education with students’ ability to participate confidently in the world beyond it.

A history student, for example, should be able to recognise and demonstrate the analytical and interpretive capabilities developed through their discipline. An engineering student should have opportunities to apply technical knowledge to authentic problems. An international student should have meaningful opportunities to understand the labour market, develop professional networks, and demonstrate their capabilities in a new context.

In each case, the issue is not adding employability. It is making the relationship between learning, capability, and opportunity visible and real.

That requires more than another careers workshop or employer event. It requires institutions to understand how curriculum, assessment, teaching practice, industry engagement, student experience, and labour market intelligence fit together. And it requires clarity about who is responsible for making those connections work.

That is why I increasingly see employability as an institutional change challenge, rather than a careers-service challenge.

From programs to systems

The question is no longer whether employability matters. It is whether the institution is designed to deliver it.

The next step for universities is to ask harder questions about implementation. Where does responsibility actually sit? How do we know what capabilities students are developing? Where are the gaps between what we teach, what students experience, and what employers expect? How much meaningful interaction with employers and communities does a student encounter during their degree? And which institutional incentives support this work, while others quietly work against it?

These questions are more uncomfortable than simply agreeing that employability is important.

They are also much more useful.

The strongest approach is unlikely to be another standalone employability initiative. It will be a system in which the connections between learning and opportunity are deliberately built into the student experience.

Students should have repeated opportunities to apply what they are learning, encounter authentic problems, engage with people and organisations beyond the university, understand the capabilities they are developing, and learn how to articulate those capabilities to others.

None of this requires universities to abandon what makes higher education distinctive. In fact, it should do the opposite.

Critical thinking, research skills, communication, disciplinary expertise, creativity, judgement, and the ability to work with complexity all matter enormously in contemporary workplaces.

But students cannot always see those connections for themselves. The institutional challenge is to make them visible.

The real employability challenge

We have spent years identifying what matters. Now we need to build the conditions that make it possible.

My takeaway from PIE Live Asia Pacific was therefore not that higher education needs more ideas about employability.

It needs better implementation.

The question is not whether universities care about employability. Most clearly do. The question is whether their structures, incentives, relationships, curriculum, leadership, and accountability are aligned well enough to deliver it.

That is a much harder question. And perhaps that is where the conversation needs to go next.

We know what matters. The real challenge is making it happen.