mySkills – A Curriculum Integrated Employability Framework

In today's higher education landscape, governments expect higher education institutions to offer learners ‘value’ in ensuring they successfully complete their degree programmes and secure graduate employment. However, a significant challenge is that learners often fail to see the connections between what they learn and what prospective employers require. In addition, learners can struggle to self-reflect on their skills, leading to underselling themselves in job applications. In response, the work in this paper presents the ‘mySkills’ framework, which not only enables learners to see connections between core skills and prospective employment opportunities but can also equip them with a professional identity and a record of accomplishments and experiences that they can showcase to potential employers. One of the aims of ‘mySkills' is to support learners in establishing their personal brand and taking ownership of their career development. In this paper, we report our findings of the second year (2022/23) of this framework, where the ‘mySkills’ tasks are now summative assessments in anchor modules. We compare the engagement levels of two cohorts who have been enrolled in the programmes at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. Our findings show that this framework can incentivise learners towards active engagement in employability initiatives. There is certainly potential for institutions to leverage the ‘mySkills’ framework as a mechanism to promote career readiness among their learners.