Policy discourse on graduate internships rests on the assumption that, paid or unpaid, they improve the employability of interns. Employing data from a survey of UK creative and mass communications graduates, surveyed two to six years after graduation, this article examines the impact of graduate internships on subsequent job prospects. While paid…

This paper considers the potential significance of a concept of lifelong learning in the context of digital disruption. Having noted some contemporary contrasts in the visibility of lifelong learning policy, it revisits the earlier more widespread dominance of the concept, identifying not only variety but also tensions that are inherent and…

Increased public investment in PhD education to drive innovation has led to a recent rapid growth in the number of PhD graduates. Academic labour markets have not developed at the same pace. An ever-larger share of the graduates is finding employment in industry. The transition from academia to industry is not always easy. The present study aims…

Increasing emphasis is being placed upon employer expectations in research on graduate employability, in response to the widely claimed gap between employer expectations and graduates' understanding of these expectations. For graduates, being uncertain of their employer's expectations may threaten the ease of their transition into the workplace…

This article examines reflections on work placement experiences generated for the Creative Contexts website by higher education students. The article outlines the aims of Creative Contexts to generate and share placement experiences and stories. The article analyses the reflections films available on the website, and reveals a continuum of agency…

The article deals with individual aspects in professional training of tourism specialists in the UK. It has been specified that alongside with the global development of tourism education, the UK revealed the potential of its tourism industry with the introduction of the Development of Tourism Act in 1969. Consequently, the tourism education in the…

An important driver of change in work, employment and skills is European Union policy aims of sustainable economic growth and the cultivation of a green economy. Part of the latter--which is supported by increasing environmental regulation--focuses on the development of a "green skills agenda," which involves the "greening" of…

The remarkable economic success of the Cayman Islands is primarily driven by its large expatriate population. Expatriates make up over one-third of the total population of the Islands and half of the labor force. This has led some Caymanians to demand more opportunities for local individuals. However in April 2014, one of the two local newspapers…

The loss of jobs in the automotive manufacturing industry, together with a more general decline of the manufacturing industry in Australia, has implications for the types of skills needed in the labour market. Both of these scenarios affect particular groups of people, such as displaced car workers, but within that category other groups such as…

This research paper is one in a series produced as part of the Cedefop project The changing nature and role of VET (2016-18). The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of how CVET is conceptualised in various international level policy documents and how it is referred to across countries. It discusses national conceptions of CVET, the…

In this article, we ask what role both digital and artistic human capital play in the creative economy by examining employment patterns of digital technology (DT) and creative arts and design (CAD) graduates. Using student micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) in the United Kingdom, we investigate the…

A competence management system (CMS) was devised to assist the registration of competencies in the textile and clothing sector, starting in the four EU countries of Portugal, Slovenia, the UK and Denmark, further leading to the European network. This paper presents the design and development framework assisting international multicultural…

The paper questions the link that policy-makers assume exists between qualifications and access to employment in the creative and cultural (C&C) sector. It identifies how labour market conditions in the C&C sector undermine this assumption and how the UK's policy formation process inhibits education and training (E&T) actors from…

The shipping industry worldwide is experiencing a shortage of trained and qualified officers to operate a rapidly expanding global merchant fleet. High cadet wastage in Maritime Education and Training (MET) institutions is an obstacle to skills replenishment in the UK. This paper examines the specificity of MET programmes with regard to the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of "employability" in industry and career context-specific ways. The paper further seeks to explore potential critical reflections on emerging professional practice and future…