Employability skills: Maintaining relevance in marketing education.

Abstract

Employability is an important outcome of education, particularly with vocationally orientated degrees such as marketing. Supporting this, a wide range of literature discusses the skills that should be developed within students in general, and those on business and marketing courses in particular (Bennett, Dunne, & Carré, 1999; Hillage & Pollard, 1998; Zinser, 2003). However, with increasing competition for graduate placements and jobs, do the skills under discussion remain relevant to the conditions of the job market and still give students an ’edge’? This study was undertaken to explore the meaning, purpose and relevance of employability skills, using qualitative and quantitative research amongst employers of marketing and business graduates to examine how they rated the importance of the ’employability skills’ that universities strive to develop in students and to identify other factors that are looked for in ’would be successful’ candidates.