Building higher education curricula fit for the future: how higher education institutions are responding to the Industrial Strategy

The focus of the UK’s Industrial Strategy on supporting people to develop for jobs of the future, as well as how best to understand and articulate their employability development, speaks directly to effective learning and teaching in a Higher Education setting. If up to 70% of the anticipated 1.8 million new jobs in the UK that will be created between 2014 and 2024 will be in occupations most likely to employ graduates, then the career readiness and employability of students across all disciplines within HE will continue to grow in importance as an area of curriculum design and development. To better understand the relationship between the evolving economic terrain set out in the UK’s Industrial Strategy and the development of employability provision that will respond effectively to national needs, further research into the role HE plays in creating programmes of study that connect with this agenda was necessary. In commissioning this research, AdvanceHE set out to inform the sector’s understanding about how the vision detailed in the UK’s Industrial Strategy is articulated through approaches to learning and teaching in HE and to contribute to policy debates in this area around academic and technical qualifications. The research looks across discipline areas in order to provide deeper and richer insights into how employability and skills development are understood and developed within HE – identifying representative examples and case studies. The research focuses on the ways in which corresponding and connected terms function in this arena – such as competency, aptitude, proficiency and attribute – in order to scrutinise the language of employability. Through the project’s analysis of the employability landscape across discipline areas within HE, it also adds to the debates about a “national employability skills framework” and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.