Letter from the guest editors

Welcome to this Special Issue, the fifth issue for 2019, which focuses on employability and employment outcomes as drivers of higher education practice. Your guest editors are Associate Professor Denise Jackson from Edith Cowan University, and Professor Ruth Bridgstock from Griffith University. The return on investment of higher education is attracting increasing scrutiny in the context of rising fees, mass student participation, and a perceived oversupply of nonemployment ready graduates. Some have argued that the strategic directive of developing student employability in a bid to improve (often short-term and narrowly-focused) employment outcomes devalues higher education learning. For others, it may provide some assurance that the higher education sector is committed to developing future-capable graduates with skills of relevance to the workforce. Either way, preparedness for work is a critical issue, as graduates transition to an uncertain world of work characterised by digital disruption, intense competition for roles, and precarious working arrangements. To accommodate these trends, the notion of graduate employability has broadened to encompass constructs such as career self-management, professional identity, a collaborativemindset, enterprise and entrepreneurship, cultural capital and social networking capabilities. Developing these dimensions is intended to empower students to achieve their career goals while developing future workers and leaders that can drive innovation and prosperity, as well as make meaningful contributions to community and society. The special issue includes eight articles which consider the impact of an employability agenda that is largely driven by graduate employment outcomes. Jackson and Bridgstock highlight the limitations of current, narrow measures of student employability and explore the career outcomes of more than 500 Business and Creative Industries graduates using traditional measures (full-time employment outcomes), along with a suite of broader measures that examine career satisfaction, perceived employability, perceived career success, underemployment, and graduate motivations for seeking new roles. Their second paper considers how higher education institutions might productively approach student employability at a strategic level, given the three concurrent and contrasting aims of enhancing short-term graduate outcomes, developing professional readiness, and enabling graduates to live and work productively and meaningfully across the lifespan. Their actionable principles to enhance employability serve to inform institutional strategy and address the tensions and challenges between the three employability aims. Divan and colleagues then explore how eight institutions in Canada, the UK and Australia conceptualise employability and the extent to which these conceptualisations are reflected in their websites’ marketing narratives. Their consideration of tensions JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY AND MANAGEMENT 2019, VOL. 41, NO. 5, 449–450 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2019.1652403