Careers services offer students a wealth of opportunities to develop employability, from awards and workshops to employer events and volunteering. But optional, extracurricular provision has an inherent limitation: students need the time and capacity to opt in.
For students combining university with substantial paid work, commutes or caring responsibilities, that can present a significant barrier. If employability provision sits outside the curriculum, we risk offering access mainly to students who already have the greatest capacity to participate.
At my university, we have been tackling this by embedding our employability skills award into existing modules. Between the 2022-23 and 2025-26 academic years, participation through the embedded route grew from 89 to 683 students, with completion reaching 95 per cent. By comparison, the completion rate through the extracurricular route was 37 per cent in 2025-26.
So, what have we learned about making employability development part of students’ everyday learning?
1. Don’t assume students need more experiences
Employability initiatives can inadvertently follow a deficit narrative: students need to undertake more activities, gain more experience or develop more skills.
But students arrive at university with experiences gained through many different aspects of their lives. They may have worked, been carers, volunteered or developed skills through previous education. The problem is that they often do not recognise these experiences as valuable or know how to articulate what they have learned from them.
Our award therefore focuses on structured reflection rather than requiring students to complete a prescribed set of activities. Students can draw on academic, professional and personal experiences from the previous two years and reflect on them using the simple context, action, result, learning (Carl) framework.
This matters for equity. Students should not have to seek out additional experiences simply to demonstrate capabilities they might have developed elsewhere already.
2. Take employability to them
If we want all students to engage with skills development, we need to stop relying on them to find careers provision themselves.
By embedding employability into scheduled learning, students don’t have to find an optional programme, recognise its value and make time for it alongside their studies and other commitments. We take the provision to them.
Our award activities are incorporated into the virtual learning environment using adaptable templates. They can be integrated into existing assessment, such as coursework or exams.
- Spotlight guide: Get your students workplace-ready
- How your graduates can beat AI in the job market of tomorrow
- Helping students to see the future career value of their work-integrated learning
3. Standardise the framework, not the experience
Embedding employability across a university does not have to mean asking every discipline to deliver identical activities.
Our model uses a common reflective framework and institutional graduate attributes, while allowing academics to adapt delivery to their subject and existing curriculum.
This has been crucial to scaling the approach. The award has grown from being embedded in two academic schools to six across three faculties, with further expansion under way.
Rather than careers professionals delivering everything themselves, academic colleagues co-design and lead delivery in their disciplinary contexts, while the careers team provides the framework, resources and coordination.
This gives students a consistent approach to recognising and articulating their skills without stripping employability of its disciplinary relevance.
4. Make it easy for academic colleagues to say yes
Even the best ideas do not scale if implementing them creates significant additional workload.
Our most successful approach has complemented existing learning outcomes, teaching activities and assessment rather than introducing new modules or additional marking. Ready-to-use templates mean colleagues do not have to create employability materials from scratch.
Starting small also helps. Working initially with a handful of willing academic partners allowed us to test and refine the approach before expanding it.
Those colleagues then became some of its most effective advocates. Academic-to-academic support can be considerably more persuasive than a careers team simply telling colleagues that they should do it.
5. Help students recognise the capital they already possess
Students repeatedly described structured reflection as helping them recognise strengths and experiences they had previously overlooked. They reported greater confidence and an improved ability to explain their skills to employers.
This suggests an important shift in how we think about employability and social mobility.
Universities undoubtedly have a role in expanding students’ access to opportunities, networks and experiences. But we should also avoid implying that students arrive without valuable skills and capabilities simply because these have been developed outside the kinds of activities traditionally associated with graduate employability.
Sometimes our job is not to give students more examples to add to their CV. It is to help them recognise, value and communicate what is already there.
For universities seeking to make employability provision more equitable, the practical question therefore extends beyond “what opportunities do we offer?”
We should also ask, “who has the time and capacity to access them, and what could we build into the curriculum to prevent them from having to seek them out?”
Natalie Freeman is employability skills award manager at the University of East Anglia.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
comment