There is a muted consensus that, by and large, higher education institutions (HEIs) struggle to appropriately develop employability in their graduates in terms of fulfilling employer expectations. In 2002, for example, Knight and Yorke suggested that “whereas the world of employment has by and large been satisfied with the disciplinary understanding and skills developed as a consequence of participation in higher education, it has been less happy with graduates ‘generic attainments’” (2002, p.263). The development of employability attributes amongst students has not traditionally been viewed as a natural talent of higher education, (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011) although the failings of higher education are not automatically compensated for by employer groups who may be reluctant to fund training and would instead expect graduates to hit the ground running (Rosenbaum 2002). In the USA, for example the development of students’ employability skills has become a necessary expectation of employers (Bok 2006) which places the pressure of preparation on HEIs. Additionally, the international markets have opened up so graduates are no longer just competing against home-grown talent, but against graduates from overseas (for example Blaxell and Moore 2012). Bearing this situation in mind, there is a vital impetus on HEIs to champion the products and services they offer and celebrate their successes. To present a slightly rosier picture, HEIs are beginning to recognise that there are concerns around catering effectively for the employability of their graduates and have taken up the challenge (Rosenberg, Heimler and Morote, 2012).

Web presence is no indicator of activity, but it provides a useful clue towards identifying what HEIs are doing to promote and acknowledge the employability agenda in accordance with the mission statement or strategic educational objectives of their own institutions. Using the World Wide Web, HEIs have advertised their wares effectively in-so-far as their academic accomplishments are concerned. However, the story is very different for the less academic, more employability focused aspects of a graduates’ all-round education. These successes are little known, at least through the internet which is the strongest marketing tool at the disposal of any HEI. Therefore and without elaborating on the technologies of the internet, it is perhaps useful to establish the nature in which employability is depicted by HEIs via their web-based presence.

This paper highlights research that was conducted to explore the web presence of the term ‘employability’ at a total of eighty HEIs, forty in the UK and forty in the USA. It attempts to answer the central research question ‘what is meant by employability in higher education?’ The internet is used as the tool through which this question is considered. The methodological approach used to conduct this research was that of discourse analysis – using the Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007) interpretation of Habermas’ work to define what is meant by this[1]. The term employability, as captured by the internet, was considered as part of the wider processes and activities that inform higher education employability cultures in the UK and the USA (Taylor, 2001). There is a need to look beyond the traditional discourse on employability - the internet provided a more current and meaningful discourse was sought. The internet, by its very nature is used as a platform to send out messages within a particular time and space that are framed by context.

[1] ‘Discourse researchers explore the organisation of ordinary talk and everyday explanations and the social actions performed in them…. Habermas argues that utterances are never simply sentences (Habermas 1970: 368) that are disembodied from context, but, rather, their meaning derives from the inter subjective contexts in which they are set.’

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