While universities have always been concerned with producing graduates with the necessary skills and knowledge to enter the labour market, a discourse of employability now pervades the higher education sector of many Western nations (Bathmaker, 2021; Boden & Nedeva, 2010; Healy, Hammer, & McIlveen, 2022; Succi & Canovi, 2020; Tomlinson, 2012). As part of the neoliberalisation and globalisation of higher education, performance matters more than ever, and universities are expected to not only develop the next generation of future workers, but ensure they are employable subjects.

Such discourses are increasingly controlled by the state, evidenced in governments developing employability agendas, identifying what constitutes employability traits and attributes, and measuring institutional performance vis-à-vis ‘employability’ (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). As a case in point, in Australia, the federal government’s Job-ready Graduates Package released in 2020 explicitly embraced employability within its new performance-based funding model for universities, aiming to encourage participation in degrees based on perceived employer demand (Department of Education, 2021) and simultaneously fixating on graduate employment outcomes as the largest determinant of institutional funding. These changes are significant as they represent the first time the federal government has attempted to influence course choice (Norton, 2020), reducing the cost of degrees deemed to be of ‘national priority’ and increasing fees in areas believed to not directly benefit the labour market, particularly in the arts and humanities. In so doing, these changes reflect the ongoing transformation of universities from social institutions into businesses (Connell, 2019), similarly seen in policy narratives that primarily position students as ‘future workers’ (Brooks, 2018; Brooks, Gupta, & Jayadeva, 2021).

While what actually constitutes ‘employability’ remains a key area of debate, in this paper we join others in maintaining that employability can now be seen as a legitimising discourse (Allen, Quinn, Hollingworth, & Rose, 2013; Boden & Nedeva, 2010), constructing and reinforcing particular kinds of student identities, practices, and actions. That is, students must ‘better themselves’ in order to become ‘employable subjects’ and ‘ideal workers’ (Allen et al., 2013; Bathmaker, 2021), so much so that it “no longer enough just to be a graduate, but instead [one must now be] an employable graduate” (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 415; emphasis in original). In this way, employability agendas arguably involve a form of self-management, self-maximisation, and development of an enterprising self (Bathmaker, 2021; Korhonen, Siivonen, Isopahkala-Bouret, Mutanen, & Komulainen, 2023), with students needing to develop an identity formed around the ‘employable graduate’ – to be seen as a person who is worthy of being employed and who can succeed in the competitive and increasingly precarious labour market.

Framed within this context, this paper investigates how current university students construct themselves as employable subjects, with a particular focus on how the legitimising discourse of employability is negotiated, adopted, transformed or rejected. Given the recent introduction of the Job-ready Graduates reforms within Australian higher education, our aim was to examine the formation of student subjectivities against renewed efforts to both enforce and enable employability, with the reforms presenting a unique opportunity to understand how university students discursively construct their identity against a pervasive systemic culture which now aims to make students ‘job ready.’

In 2022, interviews were conducted with 44 students at one Australian public university which had implemented a new strategic policy of ‘Work-ready Students’ as part of the Job-ready Graduates reforms. Framed through a post-structuralist lens, this paper draws on Foucault’s (1970) theorisation of membership categorisation, normalisation and naturalisation to examine how students occupy particular ways of being in the academy against norms of the ‘employable student,’ analysing student’s talk about their post-university aspirations and their negotiation of the university’s employability agenda.

The interview data reported on in this paper were generated through a larger study which set out to investigate: (1) issues of employability; and, interrelatedly, (2) the future employment aspirations of Australian university students. Adopting a case-oriented approach (Yin, 2013), the larger study was centred on one Australian public university which had recently introduced a new strategic focus on ‘Work-ready Students’ in tandem with a new policy of ‘Work-integrated Learning For All’ – mandating that all students, regardless of their degree, must now complete a set number of hours of work-integrated learning before graduating. The university is located in a large city and has a strong commitment to equity. The larger study involved an online survey, held on the platform QuestionPro, in combination with in-depth interviews conducted with a sub-sample of survey participants. Given our sole use of the interview data in this paper, we focus our attention on detailing the methodology of the qualitative strand, with other details provided for context. After securing institutional ethics approval in early 2022, recruitment involved three concurrent processes. First, a link to the online survey, accompanied by a short overview of the study, was published regularly on social media. Second, posters about the study with a QR code linking to the survey were distributed around campus, such as in lecture theatres, libraries, and cafeterias/coffee hubs. Third, course coordinators were contacted directly by the research team and asked to place a survey link and/or QR code, accompanied by information on the study, on their course intranet channels. At the end of Semester 1, 2022, survey responses were received from 199 students, including both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and those enrolled as domestic and international students. As part of the survey, students were asked to indicate their willingness to be contacted to participate in a follow-up interview. All students who selected ‘yes’ were invited, resulting in a sub-sample of 44 interview participants. Interviews took place either via Zoom, phone, or face-to-face on-campus, with the mode of engagement determined by each participant, taking into account the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews were semi-structured in nature and lasted for 40-60 minutes. Each interview was transcribed verbatim and each participant was emailed a copy of their transcript for member checking. Prior to analysis, each participant was allocated a pseudonym to protect their identity. Interviews were coded using the NVivo 12 software program.

Our analysis demonstrates how dominant discourses of employability and notions of the employable subject conflict with particular kinds of student subjectivities, so much so that employability agendas can actually be held in tension with the formation and negotiation of many student identities. First and foremost, while employability is often grounded in instrumentalist and entrepreneurial ideals (Korhonen et al., 2023), we found that students often speak about personal meaning, societal worth and forms of morality as they imagine their future careers, cultivating a different version of success in complete opposition to the neoliberal versions of selfhood promoted within employability agendas. Our findings also show how the ‘employable student’ acts as a form of category maintenance that reinforces and legitimises a narrow view of the ‘universal student’ that discounts age, gender, race, discipline, and enrolment status. In this way, our interviews illustrate the ways in which students who don’t fit the mould of the ‘traditional entrant’ can actively reject the need to constrain to such limiting views, seeing employability as problematic and questioning its perpetuation of structural and systemic inequality. Alternatively, other students sought out ways to conform, striving to fit in within the institution in ways that were sometimes detrimental to their own wellbeing and identity development. We argue that employability discourses normalise a vision of the employable student that is not accessible to all, nor of interest to all, creating tropes that legitimise narrow ways of being and forms of exclusion in the academy. Given the ubiquitous nature of employability discourses internationally, our research offers important implications for research and practice, highlighting the discursive silences around who is deemed to be normal, natural or deviant within employability agendas as well as the deliberating effects of the pressure to become, and be seen as, employable.

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