The myth of job readiness? Written communication, employability, and the ‘skills gap’ in higher education

Abstract

Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such ability–professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews' were conducted with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current debates about the directi..