Positioning employability as a core objective in quality assurance Theresa Okafor PhD. ICQAHEA, ABUJA. 2015

Are we relying on an outdated model? 1. Personalised view of employability – Classical 1. Personalised view of employability – Classicalmodel 2. Role of Education institutions – Reshaping curriculum and pedagogy 2. Role of Education institutions – Reshaping curriculum and pedagogyOutcome? Employability in quality assurance - Employer’s rating - Graduate employment

Employability 1. Personalised view /Classical definition Gaining, maintaining, switching employment and finding fulfilment –Pollard and Hillage 1998 Predicated on individual trait, ones personal circumstance and external environment, age, gender, ethnicity and personal traits – Mcquaid, Green and Dawson

3. Skill based – acquiring metacognitive skills that enables one to operate in situations of complexity. Transfering skills i.e higher order skills such as selectivity, adaptability, application of skills in varying situations, contexts and across cognitive domain. – York 2004

Okafor (2015) argues that employability is all that is done by an institution in response to enhancing its curriculum, pedagogy, brokerage to create social capital networks and simulation of work place habits that would garner benefits for the students.

Reflections  Mass youth employment  Increasing global competitiveness  How important are employment skills in the context of certain limiting factors: - gender : defined as male and female - gender : defined as male and female - race - race - poverty - poverty  Job availability and environment where there are no job prospects limits and moderates the effects of empoyability

EXTERNAL QUALITY ASSURANCE : Evidence Brokerage Facilitating access to social capital institutions in such as way that the university becomes a kind of proxy social capital Diffusion Entrepreneurial skills and relational skills - facilitates access to social capital networks). Influence Formation of Character (Newman) which raises the intellectual tone and brings refinement to public life. Holistic curriculum (Speight and Cooker 2013) and pedagogy

QA mechanism. OKAFOR, 2015