TY - JOUR
T1 - Employability beliefs of business students by gender and year of study: Implications for higher education
AU - Bennett, Dawn
AU - Ananthram, Subramaniam
AU - Lindsay, Sophie
AU - Benati, Kelly
AU - Jevons, Colin
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to acknowledge the Australian Business Deans Council for funding this research, which was undertaken as part of the Employ-ability Initiative. Our thanks go also to our project colleagues and the many institutional leaders, educators and students who helped us to create the dataset and support students in their employability development and career preparedness.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/7
Y1 - 2022/7
N2 - Grounded in social-cognitive theory, the study reported here explored undergraduate business students' perceptions of their employability and the impact of year of study and gender on these perceptions. 6,004 undergraduate business students enrolled with multiple Australian universities self-assessed their study and career-related confidence using an online, validated measure of perceived employability. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted and five predicted factors were obtained. Multivariate analysis of variance then identified gender and year-of-study differences across five employability factors. The findings highlight gender and year of study differences in students' understanding of how well their programs related to their future careers. The same differences were noted in students’ confidence that their learning tasks were career-relevant and also their confidence that they could apply their learning in a workplace setting. Student confidence that their degree programs were preparing them for graduate life and work lessened as they progressed through their programs. Implications include the need for business educators to be clear about the relevance of each learning and assessment task, and to take a data-driven approach to informing career development learning activities in higher education.
AB - Grounded in social-cognitive theory, the study reported here explored undergraduate business students' perceptions of their employability and the impact of year of study and gender on these perceptions. 6,004 undergraduate business students enrolled with multiple Australian universities self-assessed their study and career-related confidence using an online, validated measure of perceived employability. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted and five predicted factors were obtained. Multivariate analysis of variance then identified gender and year-of-study differences across five employability factors. The findings highlight gender and year of study differences in students' understanding of how well their programs related to their future careers. The same differences were noted in students’ confidence that their learning tasks were career-relevant and also their confidence that they could apply their learning in a workplace setting. Student confidence that their degree programs were preparing them for graduate life and work lessened as they progressed through their programs. Implications include the need for business educators to be clear about the relevance of each learning and assessment task, and to take a data-driven approach to informing career development learning activities in higher education.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129744120&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijme.2022.100654
DO - 10.1016/j.ijme.2022.100654
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85129744120
SN - 1472-8117
VL - 20
JO - International Journal of Management Education
JF - International Journal of Management Education
IS - 2
M1 - 100654
ER -