A critical review of graduates "employability". Theoretical perspectives and pedagogical issues

Graduates’ employability is a wide concept entailing different representations, embedded in discourses, policies and practices aimed at sustaining students’ transitions from university to work. These transitions, we claim, are not linear and involve a complex system of relationships, agents and institutions. So, they deserve a critical and systemic approach. This paper presents a critical literature review on employability to lay the groundwork for empirical pedagogical research. Through an exploratory analysis of the storylines emerging from twelve critical papers on employability, the study highlights four features that characterize employability as a sociorelational, dynamic, multi-agent, and contextbased process. This contrasts the dominant view of graduates’ employability as a configuration of skills possessed by the individual student and developed under the sole responsibility of universities..