For young people about to enter the workforce, COVID-19 has fast-tracked a host of changes: all-digital and remote work are now standard for many workers, on top of the rising tide of automation and globalisation. And universities, too, are grappling with how to prepare students for the future.
A strong driver for students in choosing a degree is whether it will land them a job, says Professor Martina Möllering, Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, which is why employability was a priority when redesigning the Bachelor of Arts program.
“Employability can no longer be an afterthought in designing university courses. It needs to be explicit, holistic and embedded throughout the degree,” she says.
“When we went about refreshing Macquarie University’s Bachelor of Arts program for 2020, we rebuilt it from the ground up, with a focus on employability at its core.
Humanities and Social Sciences students are well-equipped to face challenges with a critical mindset and a well-developed ethical compass.
“We started with employers: what skills did they want and need in a graduate? The response was clear and consistent regardless of the industry: the true skill gap was in transferable skills.”
The Faculty worked with major employers, including the NSW Government, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, Adobe and CBA, to redesign the degree, ensuring students were provided with in-demand transferable skills – along with the disciplinary knowledge which fuels their passion – to be successful throughout their careers.
Using real-time jobs data that analyses more than 280,000 job ads to identify in-demand skills, a transferable skills framework was developed for the Bachelor of Arts, which guides teaching and assessment, and helps students consider the skills they need for the career path they aim to follow.
Shachi's first choice pays off
Although the course was only redesigned a few years ago, Martina says students have already responded very positively to the new foundation and capstone units that focus on employability skills.
Global vision: Recent graduate Shachi Mehta says working for the UN would be her dream role.
Shachi Mehta recently graduated from Macquarie with a Bachelor of Arts with a Major in International Relations. She made the switch to Arts from Engineering and says it opened up a wide range of options to her, both in terms of her course and career opportunities.
“Through my Engineering course I took a few electives in subjects such as Global Affairs and Trade, and found it much more interesting than Engineering. I decided to switch courses, and was lucky enough to be accepted to four universities, but the Bachelor of Arts at Macquarie was my first choice,” she says.
As part of her degree, Shachi undertook an internship through the PACE (Professional and Community Engagement program), which was a highlight of her experience at Macquarie and helped her decide on her future career path.
“I was placed with Action on Poverty, an international aid organisation, which has partnerships with countries in the Asia-Pacific region. I helped develop new guidelines as part of my internship, which really opened up a pathway into a career I didn’t think was possible.”
Shachi is now seeking a role in policy development or reform, and says working for the United Nations would be her dream role.
Says Möllering: “In reimagining our Bachelor of Arts, we built it from the premise that Humanities and Social Sciences degrees uniquely lend themselves to equipping students with these transferable skills.
New era: Professor Martina Möllering, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, which has rebuilt its Bachelor of Arts from the ground up.
“Through their study of ideas, movements and theories in culture, society, history, language and reasoning, students form a broad understanding of the world around them and the ways in which humans connect and interact. Students can explore what genuinely interests them, while gaining the skills that will make them highly employable.”
In 2020, the reimagined Bachelor of Arts won the Employability Award at the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Awards, for preparing students for the workforce.
“Humanities and Social Sciences students are well-equipped to face challenges with a critical mindset and a well-developed ethical compass that enable them to make a contribution in a wide range of national as well as global professional settings,” Möllering says.
“In these times of rapid change in the way we think about the future of work and with a government focus on employability agendas that strongly impact the higher education sector, we can build degrees that hand back the power to students to make smart choices about the skills they need to create the careers that they desire.”
