Graduate employability as a professional proto-jurisdiction in higher education

Much research into how universities seek to support their students’ graduate employability has focused on academic strategies such as graduate attributes and work-integrated learning, or the employability benefits of part-time work, volunteering, and extracurricular activities. However, the work of the professional staff who support these strategies is seldom addressed. In this article, we report findings from our documentary analysis of 376 Australian university job advertisements for professional roles directly responsible for graduate employability programs and services. We characterise employability as a proto-jurisdiction: an ecology of distinct forms of professional expertise and responsibility with ambiguous, elastic, and porous boundaries. We argue that despite the importance of graduate employability to institutions’ strategic and students’ individual goals, it is as yet an inchoate field of professional practice, consisting of a diverse range of work tasks, functions, and projects. We discuss implications in relation to quality, coherence, and the strategic resourcing of employability support in higher education.