Dr Birgit den Outer

Graduate employment programmes offer university students the prospect of a reasonable salary and development opportunities. For employers, such programmes offer a talent pipeline and a means to identify future leaders. The psychological contract which develops during recruitment processes creates high expectations on both sides of the employment bargain. A corollary is that graduate programmes usually entail highly competitive, multi-stage selection processes, in which applicants must repeatedly demonstrate their employability in online psychometric tests and computerised activities before progressing to the final selection stage. Drawing on Foucauldian theories of governmentality, this study uses interviews (n = 17) and focus groups (n = 2) to explore how final-year students at a post-1992 English university navigate graduate recruitment processes, and learn to signal what they believe is employability. The article shows how students’ understanding of employability is formed not only through traditional channels such as university careers services or employer communications, but increasingly through third-party (and often commercial) ‘helper’ apps offering online test-practice sessions, templated careers advice, and other methods for gaming the recruitment process. These helper apps can have distorting effects, producing graduates focused on the performance rather than the substance of employability.

HE institutions persistently seek to increase student engagement and satisfaction with assessment feedback, but with limited success. This study identifies the attributes of good feedback from the perspective of recipients. In a distinctive participatory research design, student participants were invited to bring along actual examples of feedback that they perceived as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to 32 interviews with student researchers. Findings highlight the complex interdependency and contextual nature of key influences on students’ perspectives. The feedback artefact itself, its place in assessment and feedback design, relationships of the learner with peers and tutors, and students’ assessment literacy all affect students’ perspectives. We conclude that standardising the technical aspects of feedback, such as the feedback artefact or the timing or medium of its delivery is insufficient: a broader consideration of all key domains of influence is needed to genuinely increase student engagement and satisfaction with feedback.

This article examines the narratives of 24 knowledge workers aged 48-58 as they anticipate their future employment and employability. The term knowledge worker is used to indicate occupational roles such as software engineer, academic, architect, manager and lawyer, where work involves non-routine problem-solving using 'intellectual assets'. Four narrative patterns about future employment are presented - winding down; reorienting 'self' away from work; seeking progression; renewal. These patterns reveal contrasting self-evaluations of employability and potential.

We argue that employability is not a straightforward function of human capital, which usually refers to experience, knowledge and qualifications. We show through our data how judgements about a person’s employability – both self-evaluations as well as evaluations by others - are complicated by social norms and cultural understandings of 'potential'. Strategies to signal one's potential become more complex and sometimes less effective for older knowledge workers. We contend that a person's age influences others' evaluations of their employment potential, such that the relationship between attributed merit (based largely on past experience) and attributed potential (based on assumptions about a person's future) is inverted as workers become older.

The findings have implications for public policies such as Extending Working Lives. Policies that remove legal and institutional barriers to extended working lives may be only partially successful without changes to cultural attitudes about older workers' employment potential.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to determine if and how role models presented in entrepreneurship education can influence students’ entrepreneurial activity given that the lack of financial and material means render most role models unattainable. Design/methodology/approach.

Data were collected in three stages from an entrepreneurship workshop programme held in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigerian and European undergraduate and graduate business students worked together to develop sustainable business ideas for the European and African market. In this exploratory paper, the emphasis for analysis is on the Nigerian students. Findings. Based on the research results, the authors identified four types of role models and gained insight into how and why they could inspire students at different stages of entrepreneurship education. Research limitations/implications.

This research is highly contextual with an emphasis on Europe and Africa. Given the relatively small sample of the European students in this study, this paper only presents findings from the Nigerian students. In view of time and sample size constraints, it would be useful to do a  longitudinal international study to compare the approaches taken by European and African higher education institutions to develop an understanding of role models in entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial activity. Further study is needed to explore whether role models are the way forward to address the processes of student entrepreneurial learning in the context of entrepreneurship education in Nigeria. Further work could also uncover deeper convictions, the attitudes of students with regard to race and gender, and consider implications for practice between university and industry. Practical implications. The paper contributes to the development of entrepreneurship education in the context of Nigeria’s emerging economy and makes suggestions on how to stimulate entrepreneurial activity through the targeted use of role models. Social implications. In view of financial, material or societal constraints to attain role models, the result of this study can be applied in other African contexts or emerging economies to develop the understanding of the relationship between role models in the industry, higher education practices and government policy. The findings of this study show that the highest impact gained is from “real-life” exchanges between students and entrepreneurs. Originality/value. Traditional entrepreneurship education fails because the learner’s process of integrating and applying behaviours of entrepreneurial examples and programmes is opaque. Research on role models suggests that where they have a positive impact is where they are perceived as self-relevant and attainable. This idea is explored in the particular context of entrepreneurship education in Nigeria in West Africa, which is characterised by highly limited and fluctuating resources despite Nigeria’s relative wealth. The authors conclude with suggestions for the use of role models in entrepreneurship education, especially in the Nigerian higher education context. This paper, therefore, contributes to research on entrepreneurship role model education in emerging economies.

Since their introduction in the 1990s, explicit standards documents have pervaded higher education assessment – success likely linked to their compatibility with constructive alignment and quality assurance regimes. Researchers, however, criticise that such documents are based on a misconception of standards as explicit and absolute, when in fact standards have tacit and contextual qualities that make it impossible to codify them fully. This article considers how practitioners conceive of standards. It identifies the range of concepts of standards, and looks at which were dominant or marginal in 24 external examiners’ responses to interview questions about their examining practice. The article identifies a significant gap between the theoretical positions asserted in the research literature and the conceptions held by experienced academics tasked with guaranteeing national standards. It considers implications for quality assurance and reflects on whether the dominance of transparency and accountability discourses leads academics to contort the way they talk about standards.

There is growing international concern to regulate and assure comparable standards in

higher education. External peer review of assessment, often called external examining, is a

well-established approach to assuring standards. Australian higher education is one of

several systems without a history of external examining for undergraduate programmes that

is currently considering the approach. What can entrants to external examining at that level

learn from the UK higher education system's long history of external examining? To that end,

this paper reports on a mixed methods research project designed to investigate current

practices in how academic standards are conceived, constructed, and applied by external

examiners and debates the implications of the findings for the development of external

examining in other countries. The findings suggest that the potential of experienced peers in a subject discipline to provide the assurance of standards is limited. It concludes by presenting

various possible enhancements that might be considered.

Unreliability in marking is well documented yet we lack studies that have investigated assessors’ detailed use of assessment criteria. This project used a form of Kelly’s Repertory Grid method to examine the characteristics that 24 experienced, UK assessors notice in distinguishing between students’ performance in four contrasting subject disciplines: that is their implicit assessment criteria. Variation in the choice, ranking and scoring of criteria was evident. Inspection of the individual construct scores in a sub-sample of academic historians revealed five factors in the use of criteria that contribute to marking inconsistency. The results imply that whilst more effective and social marking processes that encourage sharing of standards in institutions and disciplinary communities may help align standards, assessment decisions at this level are so complex, intuitive and tacit that variability is inevitable. It concludes that universities should be more honest with themselves and with students and actively help students to understand that application of assessment criteria is a complex judgement and there is rarely an incontestable interpretation of their meaning.