ABSTRACT
Graduate employment has become an important performance indicator for UK higher education institutions: career clarity, employability skills and employment outcomes are seen as key indicators of teaching quality by the government and various regulatory bodies. Understanding how ‘future-ready’ students feel by their final year of study and how curriculum and extracurricular activities may be improved to better facilitate this, is important for every university. This chapter demonstrates how the semantic analysis software Leximancer was used to extract institutional career preparedness and employability discourse from final year student comments provided via the National Student Survey. A key driver for this was to understand student perceptions of existing provision: where students situate employability in relation to other elements of their university experience, what sentiments are attached to the feedback, and where the university needs to focus its efforts to ensure the best possible head start for graduates. The chapter also outlines how the institutional Student Employability, Enterprise and Employment Strategy was informed by outcomes of the analysis.
