About a new vocationalism

This website is about graduate employment, unemployment and under-employment. It looks at the development of employability skills in university education as a response to evidence of the unemployment and underemployment of new graduates and assesses the impact of that response. We offer another approach to graduate employability based on the behaviour of graduate employers as reflected in data on graduate employment. The approach focuses on the development of students’ willingness and ability to learn in employment. The web site shows that this approach can reconcile the development of graduate employability with the traditional concerns of university education and with the preparation of students for lifelong learning.

New vocationalism is explained in this paper:

Bourner, T., Greener, S. and Rospigliosi, A., 2011. Graduate employability and the propensity to learn in employment: a new vocationalismHigher Education Review43(3), pp.5-30.

New vocationalism in relation to economic theories of signalling and human capital is explained in this paper:

Rospigliosi, A.P., Greener, S., Bourner, T. and Sheehan, M., 2014. Human capital or signalling, unpacking the graduate premiumInternational Journal of Social Economics.